A gentle criticism of the metamorphosis thesis

This chapter criticizes the metamorphosis thesis, i.e. the widely held view in the scholarly literature that the EU'’s economic constitution has been radically transformed during the time of the euro crisis. The criticism is based on a distinction between the EMU part of the economic constitution and the older, and equally important, internal market part. Whereas the latter has hardly changed at all in the past 10 years of economic crisis, the EMU part has certainly seen the adoption of many new rules and institutional mechanisms, although one may doubt whether this has radically modified either the institutional arrangements or the core substantive rules of EMU.