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'Tangled Governance' addresses the institutions that were deployed to fight the euro crisis, reestablish financial stability and prevent contagion beyond Europe.

ABSTRACTThe theory of regime complexity offers a useful lens through which to analyse the increasing density of international institutions and the patterns of conflict and cooperation among them. Scholarship on crisis and development finance would benefit from more fully employing this approach to explain the emergence of overlapping institutions and offer recommendations for designing regime complexes. The theory advanced here emphasizes the strategies of key states to use institutional overlap to limit agency 'drift' away from their preferences. Prioritizing control often comes at the cost of conflict among the institutions, however, and can thus impede the achievement of financial stability and development goals. The regime complexity approach is distinct from the rational design of institutions, institutional experimentalism and theoretical realism. Drawing on lessons from the euro crisis, this article offers informed conjectures on financial arrangements in the regions of Latin America and East Asia and their interaction with global multilateral institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund.

AbstractRegions of the world have developed an increasing number of financial arrangements to underpin the stability of capital markets and combat crises. But these arrangements vie for influence over international finance with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as has been dramatically illustrated during the euro crisis, and threatens to fragment global financial governance. This article reviews the regional financial arrangements (RFAs) and their relationships to the IMF, examines the sources of conflict between these institutions, draws lessons from the euro crisis for institutional cooperation, and proposes a set of guidelines and principles to avoid fragmentation of financial governance in the future.

This paper examines the extent to which economic crises facilitate the development of more effective regional institutions and whether such institutions can shield regions from crises. It compares six regional economic crises over the last four decades and the institution building—or decay—that followed. The analysis concludes that five conditions are especially important in generating a constructive regional response: (i) a significant degree of regional economic interdependence; (ii) an independent secretariat or intergovernmental body charged with cooperation; (iii) webs of interlocking economic agreements; and, as elements of the multilateral context, (iv) conflict with the relevant international organization (such as the International Monetary Fund [IMF]); and (v) the support of the United States. The paper then reviews three episodes of crises in Europe, concluding that the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) has deflected balance of payments and currency crises but not crises of other types, such as sovereign debt crises. Asian regionalism would be well served by heads of government taking the lead and delegating tasks to intergovernmental networks and secretariats, central banks and finance ministries retaining substantial collective autonomy in their fields of responsibility, and the use of concentric circles to accommodate countries with different levels of commitment to regionalism.

AbstractScholarship on European integration has debated the external character of the monetary union extensively. This article examines the establishment of the institutional arrangements for foreign exchange intervention and the policy‐making surrounding the market operations of autumn 2000 – the only case to date of euro area intervention in currency markets. Drawing on elite interviews of officials in European institutions and international organizations, among other sources, it specifies the division of labour between the European Central Bank, Eurogroup and other European actors. The article concludes that (1) the inter‐institutional understanding within the euro area gives substantial but not complete latitude to the ECB, (2) the understanding is susceptible to renegotiation over time and (3) economic divergence within the euro area could threaten the ability of the monetary union to act coherently externally.

Existing explanations of European monetary integration, emphasizing economic interdependence, issue linkage, institutions, and domestic politics, take a predominantly regional approach. In the international monetary thesis developed here, I argue that U.S. policy disturbances, transmitted through the international monetary system, created compelling incentives for European states to cooperate on exchange-rate and monetary policy. I develop a general theory of macroeconomic power, based on open economy macroeconomics, and show how the exercise of such influence can drive regional monetary integration. This article then tests the international thesis with reference to monetary integration within the European Union by examining four periods in which the United States acted to stabilize the international monetary system and seven episodes in which it disrupted the system. European governments and central banks reduced regional monetary cooperation when the United States supported system stability and strengthened it after each episode of disruption. The evidence thus strongly supports the inference that the link is causal.