Next Generation EU, specifically its Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), has been a groundbreaking new experiment for the EU. From the speed of the reaction at the EU level with an agreement between leaders a few weeks after the COVID-19 crisis erupted, the size of the instrument (being the largest EU fund ever created), to the RRF's design features (including the performance nature of the instrument, its leverage on reforms, and its method of financing), it is a fundamentally novel EU instrument. Aimed at both recovery and resilience, it first led to a firm common response to a simultaneous economic downturn across the EU, ensuring rapid macroeconomic stabilization and preservation of public investment levels, in contrast with previous crises. It has also planted the seeds of a significant increase in the resilience of the EU economy by fostering the implementation of major structural reforms in line with the common priorities of the EU. Lessons about absorption capacity, incentives, flexibility, and governance will all advance future program design in the EU and beyond.

In April 2020, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen called for a “Marshall Plan for Europe.”1 Almost a year after her appeal, the European Union implemented the recovery and resilience program Next Generation EU (NGEU). NGEU, we show, shares several features with the Marshall Plan, including size, redistributive allocation, conditional grantmaking, and the pursuit of a distinct political agenda. But the new Marshall Plan also differs from the old. NGEU is financed through common EU debt rather than an infusion of funds from the United States. Marshall aid was disbursed almost entirely as grants, while NGEU funds consist of a mix of grants and loans. Further, NGEU is unprecedented in distributing grants in exchange for post-austerity and climate-friendly reforms and investments, rather than budget cuts. This alternative model, we argue, can serve as a template for international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

This contribution will analyze the significance and legacy of Next Generation EU (NGEU). It will start by providing a snapshot of the state of the EU's Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) before the pandemic struck in 2020. It will then map out NGEU's likely legacy, arguing that NGEU may change the way the EU raises and spends revenues in the future. The essay will finish by reflecting on how NGEU may change our interpretation of important elements of EMU and affect the ongoing debate about the future of fiscal integration within the EU.

Since 2009, the European Union has undergone a succession of crises. It is even said to be in a sort of permacrisis: the financial crisis; the debt and euro crisis; the migration crisis; the rule of law crisis afflicting some of its member states; the process of withdrawal of the UK from the Union; the pandemic crisis; and the war in Ukraine.

This essay argues that the Court of Justice of the European Union's (CJEU) insertion of a federal homogeneity clause into the EU's primary law is an (ahistorical) and dysfunctional “legal transplant” that does not correspond to the state of European integration. It has its place in specific state constitutional systems, which needed or need an axiological backing of their foundational order, but cannot adequately organize the interaction between the EU and member states. In post-war Germany, value constitutionalism had an important stabilizing effect on society. It contributed to the symbolic reproduction of a society that needed new patterns of orientation after the horror of National Socialism. The insertion of such a clause into the basic order of the EU is taken out of context and brings with it dysfunctional and opportunistic results.

Public revenues, who decides on them, and their justification and legitimation are among the oldest constitutional issues of all. In the EU, member states ultimately control the scope of European policy and the independence of the European level via the EU's budget. This can be interpreted either as a bug or as a feature. The European Parliament reflects representation without taxation, as it has no taxation powers, and the EU does not have budgetary autonomy.

As the European Union (EU) was slowly re-emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, it faced another unprecedented shock: Russia's large-scale military invasion of Ukraine. In responding to Russia's invasion, however, the EU was able to build on the legal and policy measures that it had developed to address the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, NextGenerationEU (NGEU) and the use of common debt provided a template that the EU could use to mobilize financial resources to support Ukraine against Russia's aggression.

One significant dimension of the Next Generation EU program (NGEU) is its role in the broader context of the transition toward a low-carbon and environmentally sustainable economy and, specifically, in the global competition among major jurisdictions to become leaders in the key green industrial sectors.