The paper aims at identifying the main competing visions of the new European system of banking regulation and oversight. Building on a historic overview of the key choices related to the previous reforms of the European banking policy framework – the scope of integrating banking supervision and the degree of pooling financial risk – it identifies four theoretical models of the European banking union: “full banking union”, “corrective union”, “preventive union”, and “delayed union”. The empirical analysis of the national preferences on the three initial building blocks of the banking union project – the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM), the Single Resolution Mechanism (SRM) and the single deposit insurance scheme – reveals that the majority of member states and the EU institutions strongly preferred the “full banking union” model, defined by full scope of supranational supervision and high degree of sharing bank risks. In this context, the results of the EU bargaining process raise a question why an isolated German vision of a “delayed” banking union proved to be superior to a “full” one.
