The ECB’s government bond-buying programmes have redistributive effects that potentially constituted economic policy-making, over which the Member States retain competence. Even when ostensibly pursued in the name of price stability, the political ramifications of monetary policy became clearer and fuelled political and legal backlash against central banks in general and the ECB in particular. While the ECB took pains to restrain its policies a decade ago, it has gradually allowed itself increasing discretion with little pushback from its political principals. The minimal accountability scheme should be updated to account for the ECB’s growing role.

The series of crises after 2007 exposed shortcomings in the design of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) in Europe and the difficulty of arriving at solutions. This chapter traces the evolving policy responses to these crises and asks whether they go far enough to underpin the future sustainability and resilience of the eurozone. It examines the background to the problems EMU encountered, then contrasts the policy responses to the sovereign debt crisis of the early 2010s with those enacted to deal with the economic consequences of COVID-19. Although the extent of governance reform in the EU and, specifically, the eurozone is prone to be under-estimated, more needs to be done. The chapter identifies and analyses several remaining gaps in the governance framework, focusing on three areas: the future of EU fiscal rules, the need for and likely nature of a supranational fiscal capacity, and the consequences of economic divergence among eurozone members. It concludes that despite some consensus on what needs to be done, decisive action is needed to strengthen the governance of the eurozone, failing which, the future resilience of the euro cannot be taken for granted. The challenges are as much political as technical.

This chapter offers an inquiry into how EMU has been conceptualized in the European Union by analysing the path taken over the past five decades. The definition of what is on the agenda, and considered part of the scope of EMU, has had a major impact on what EMU actually covers. In the early years, the focus was on exchange rates, policy coordination, and central banking. In the second part, macroeconomic policy coordination with limits on budgetary deficits and public debt took centre stage. The third period added the importance of banking regulation. The most recent period is branching out into the early steps of fiscal federalism. These topics had been considered when conceptualizing early plans, but had not been developed, as there was insufficient consensus for actionable points, leading to asymmetries. Revisions to EMU followed the various crises, for example the financial crisis and sovereign debt crisis, and most recently the COVID-19 crisis. Theories of European economic and political integration impacted the creation of EMU at the time of its design, but the pragmatic understanding of what was feasible was at least as important for determining what became part of the institutional design of EMU.

This chapter discusses the concept of distribution in historical handwritten and printed compositions understood in its widest sense, considering the text not only as a mere arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs on the pages, but also as the contribution of other elements associated with spacing in Late Middle English and Early Modern English. The first part of the chapter describes the rationale behind the composition of early English handwritten documents, reconsidering the formatting and the layout of the folios in the preparation of the writing surface, and assessing the use of columns, margins, ruling, number of lines and line justification. The main notions of the concept of spacing are then discussed, describing the different types of word division. Finally, two case studies are offered reconsidering the emerging of spacing in the Middle Ages and its development throughout Early Modern English, both in the middle and at the end of lines. The data used as source of evidence come from the Late Middle English and the Early Modern English components of The Málaga Corpus of Early English Scientific Prose and the scientific material of the Early English Books Online corpus together with other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scientific compositions.

This chapter focuses on the relationship between writing systems and language, which is never perfect, with the result that irregularities and idiosyncrasies arise even in writing systems that ostensibly have a one-to-one correspondence between grapheme and speech sound (or other unit of language). On the basis of a diverse assortment of examples drawn from around the world, this chapter outlines the ways in which writing systems are and are not systematic and discusses various avenues by which idiosyncrasies arise. The survey begins with a consideration of systematicity at the level of individual graphemes, where both aesthetic and functional aspects are discussed, and follows this with an exploration of the various degrees to which phonetic writing systems cover a language’s phonemic and subphonemic distinctions and where irregularities can arise. Issues of spelling and orthography, already interspersed in the first two parts, are the dedicated topic of the last section. At various points the chapter showcases the tension between desire for economy and efficiency and desire for regularity.

Europe’s economic and monetary union is a work in progress. This chapter sketches the direction that further progress should take. Key steps include building on the precedent of the Recovery Plan for Europe by further enlarging the EU’s borrowing capacity, developing revenue sources adequate for servicing and repaying EU debt, reforming and simplifying the EU’s fiscal rules, and creating a fully funded union-wide deposit insurance scheme. In addition, progress will require supplementing the numerical rules and reference values of the Stability and Growth Pact with independent policy-making institutions at the national level. This will provide a superior basis for the operation of the euro area’s policy process.

This chapter outlines some of the difficulties of studying orthography in fragmentary languages from Ancient Italy in the first millennium BC. The authors advocate for a multilevel approach to get the most information from short, challenging and (sometimes) poorly understood texts. The chapter includes a number of case studies from Republican Latin, Oscan, Umbrian and Venetic, highlighting the problems posed by different kinds of texts. For Latin, some grammarians provide relevant information about the perceived ‘standard’ language, but their points of view may not always reflect the usage of their contemporaries. Oscan is written using three main alphabets, which allows a comparison of orthographies and of the execution of spelling rules across different regions. The Iguvine Tables, written in Umbrian, are a long and detailed religious document, written by different individuals in a small group of priests, in two main phases, and show a number of orthographic practices specific to these documents. Finally, Venetic furnishes an example of how punctuation can be as important as spelling to a community’s orthographic practices.

Over the recent two decades, monetary policy has increasingly become the art of managing expectations. As a consequence, central bank communication has become an important instrument in central banks’ toolkits. Central bank communication was initially primarily focused on financial markets. Recently, however, central banks started paying increasing attention to communication with the general public. The European Central Bank (ECB) is no exception. Although communicating with the general public is important, it is not clear whether non-experts are within reach of the ECB. Even if they receive the communications, it cannot be taken for granted that they process them, and do so appropriately, as non-experts might lack the relevant background or because the communication by the central banks is too complex. However, even if central bank communication with the general public may have limited impact on inflation expectations, central bank accountability simply requires that central banks talk (and listen) to the general public. Clear and easy to understand communication to the general public is essential for the ECB’s legitimacy. The ECB should therefore primarily focus on explaining its price stability mandate in communicating to the general public, and do so in a relatable manner.

This chapter traces how the European Semester – its policy goals, institutions, and legitimacy – have changed over the decade 2011–21. Drawing on the most recent political science scholarship, the chapter makes a three-fold argument. First, it argues that the Commission has travelled a long way from pushing fiscal consolidation and structural reforms through enforced fiscal and macroeconomic policy surveillance to emphasizing social investment. Second, the chapter challenges the widely held notion that the Semester suffers from limited effectiveness and argues that its country-specific recommendations can have indirect effects in the longer term, such as putting new issues on the agenda and shaping national policy debate. However, the chapter expects that the Commission’s influence over national policy processes will rise in the post-pandemic period through the conditionality of the Recovery and Resilience Facility. Third, the chapter argues that representation of broad social interests changes over time. Social partners, civil society, and national parliaments may be excluded from EU economic governance processes but tend to adapt to EU institutional changes over time.

This chapter reviews what we know about scribal practices of orthography (focusing on spelling), how their orthographies have been studied and interpreted, and where avenues of future research lie. It covers fundamental aspects of studying scribes, showing the multidisciplinary interest in scribes and providing a broad background for thinking about scribal variation in orthography. It discusses issues such as the term and concept of a scribe, the contexts in which scribes worked, and how the role of the scribe has changed over time. The chapter focuses on research concerning scribal orthographies within three broad contexts: studies focusing on phonology and phonetics but using scribal orthography as the source of information; research that concentrates on the intersection of phonology/phonetics and orthography; and studies that are interested in orthography as an exclusively or primarily written phenomenon. It also addresses the issue of orthographic standardization specifically, as scribes have been seen as central in this process, and touches on the various frameworks and approaches adopted for the study and interpretation of spelling regularization and standardization. Finally, the chapter points to some of the avenues open for new discoveries in the future.

This chapter discusses the relationship between spelling and writers’ social background, identifying how access to literacy and literacy practices in the history of English contributes to the spelling forms and conventions used in historical texts. It provides an overview of spelling and literacy in Old and Middle Englishes. Gender and social status inflect the spelling evidence from these periods, with the historical manuscripts largely representing the orthographic preferences of elite men, typically linked to religious houses or royal administration. More recent periods provide a broadening picture as access to literacy increases; nevertheless, when analyzing and interpreting historical spelling practices, it is important to recognize the potential skewing of any dataset. The chapter then surveys studies that have attempted to identify authorship on the basis of orthographic evidence. Citing examples from Shakespeare studies, it identifies the potential of this approach, and the need for caution when making pronouncements without an empirical baseline of spelling norms for a period. Finally, the chapter considers the relationship between gender and spelling in the history of English, highlighting negative social attitudes toward women’s spelling in a range of publications, and showing that claims made about women’s practices are not always borne out by empirical analysis.

This chapter draws on extensive confidential elite interviews to examine the nature and uses of German power in EMU over time and to test the explanatory power of a distinctive German ordo-liberalism in the design and operation of the euro area. Its significance derives from the role of Germany as the biggest, systematically most significant net creditor power in the European Union. The chapter argues that, in using their power in EMU negotiations, German policymakers have sought to precariously balance two intertwined sets of interests and ideas in which they are differentially embedded. On the one hand, they face an inheritance of a striking cross-party consensus on Germany’s geo-political and foreign and security policy interests and of foreign policy ideas. On the other, they are embedded in a powerful structure of German economic interests and of economic policy ideas that are believed to best serve these interests. Within these strategic parameters, federal chancellors have characteristically sought to pursue tactical flexibility. The outcome has been a dynamic equilibrium in Germany’s role in EMU that has led to a euro area whose character is far removed from the kind of ‘economic constitution’ that had been sought by German ordo-liberals.

This chapter presents current research demonstrating that orthographic variation does not only occur naturally in historical texts, but also shows systematic patterns and functional uses. Premodern orthographic systems are flexible and offer room for innovation. This is a decisive characteristic and an important precondition for orthographic variation and change. This chapter includes an overview of types and functions of historical orthographic variation and different processes of orthographic change on the basis of examples from the history of German and from runic writing. It aims, on the one hand, to give a general introduction to the topic, and, on the other hand, to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in the study of variation and change in historical orthography that provide a background against which a research question and design for the study of variation and change in historical orthographies can be defined.

This chapter examines the origins of European Monetary Union in a debate that started in the 1960s about the dangers posed by German current account surpluses. Solving the question of the German current account in the European setting at first appeared to require some sophisticated and ingenious political mechanism that would force French politicians to pursue more austerity than they would have liked, and Germans less price orthodoxy than they thought they needed. A political mechanism, however, requires continual negotiation and public deliberation, which would have been painful given the policy preferences in the two countries (and in those countries that lined up with either of the Big Two). The increased attraction of monetary union was that it required no such drawn-out political process. The operation of an entirely automatic device would constrain political debate, initiative, and policy choice. But this process raised two questions that were not adequately solved in the sober and meticulous arguments for monetary union, and the monetary union was thus left incomplete. The first concerned the fiscal discipline needed for currency union; the second and even more serious related to the need for a central bank to exercise general financial sector supervision and regulation.

The European Banking Union (EBU) has been a major breakthrough in the European integration process, with the introduction of a single supervisory mechanism, single resolution mechanism, and revision of the deposit guarantee schemes. The EBU has undoubtedly contributed to the strengthening of the supervisory framework, but there remain important legal, economic, political, and operational challenges. This chapter focuses on two serious flaws in the current EBU and potential solutions. First, the lack of a jointly backed deposit guarantee scheme. Second, the inability to effectively use and finance the resolution fund and the absence of an effective liquidity facility.