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Résumé Avec un recul de plusieurs décennies, la mise en place rapide et soudaine du Système monétaire européen, dans le contexte morose et eurosclérosé des années soixante-dix, demeure une réussite assez impressionnante. Cet article démontre que ce bond en avant inespéré dans le domaine économique et monétaire européen fut rendu possible par une rencontre des idées entre le chancelier Schmidt et le président Giscard d'Estaing. Cependant leur succès, dans une période d'eurosclérose et d'économie en berne, dépendait largement des contraintes et opportunités issues du contexte politique et économique européen.

AbstractThis paper explores how a joint belief shift among policy actors in the Eurozone crisis led to a deep institutional change in Eurozone governance: the banking union. Based on Rinscheid's framework of institutional change, we apply discourse network analysis (DNA) of actor statements in European newsmedia to show how banking union ideas emerged and gained ground between 2000 and 2012. We complement the DNA with analysis of secondary sources to provide explanations of how the rise and dissemination of banking union ideas came about. Our findings show that potential junctures in a crisis provide opportunities for policy actors to exploit and instigate a joint belief shift, but only if certain critical antecedents allow for this. Our study complements EU policy analysis studies by offering a fine‐grained theory and methodology to assess and understand the role of (coalitions of) key policy actors and their ideas in processes of EU institutional change.

This article analyses whether the European Union's (EU) Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) has been underpinned by a policy paradigm. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to the debate on the existence and importance of paradigms in policy-making. It uses a causal mapping technique to reconstruct the beliefs behind three key policy documents in the SGP's development, assessing to what extent these beliefs conform to two dominant economic policy paradigms. The analysis shows that the policy beliefs behind the SGP have been a mixture of economic policy paradigms, in which the emphasis placed on each paradigm has changed over time. This implies that internally coherent mixtures of policy paradigms are possible. This is likely also to be the case in many other areas of (EU) policy-making. Our findings have important implications for the debate on policy-change, as they suggest that paradigmatic change is likely to proceed more through gradual changes within mixes of paradigms than through radical paradigm shifts.