The banking union is widely seen as the product of the Four Presidents Framework. Due to an effective interplay and division of labour, the European Council presidency, the Commission, the ECB and the Eurogroup presidency were able to arrange one of the most significant transfers of competences since Maastricht in record time. What makes this an even more remarkable achievement was that the SSM, SRM and Single Rule Book were agreed to in a time of growing Euroscepticism in many member states and in spite of German hesitance, if not reluctance. Practically all of this was done after Draghi’s famous ‘what-ever it takes’ statement, so the crisis as such also does not provide an explanation.
This paper departs from a simple question: how did they do it? What is the secret behind the success of the banking union? The answer lies in the type of leadership that the institutions were able to provide throughout this process. This paper focuses on the institutional innovation of the four presidents framework (FPF), which came to provide an unprecedented form of group institutional leadership in the negotiations about EMU deepening in general, and the banking union in particular. This paper seeks to identify the particularities of this institutional innovation and explain its effectiveness.
