Rethinking EU Integration Through Money, Crisis, and Governance – A Conversation with Päivi Leino-Sandberg

Recorded at the European Law Unbound conference, this episode features Päivi Leino-Sandberg discussing her new book on how Europe’s “Next Generation EU” recovery instrument is reshaping the trajectory of European integration. We trace the political and legal choices behind the Union’s turn to large-scale market borrowing, the blurry boundary between emergency measures and long-term governance, and the quiet transformation of the Commission into a far more powerful economic actor. The conversation also explores what happens when crisis-driven financial tools become permanent, how national parliaments lose influence in this new model, and why democratic accountability struggles to keep pace with the EU’s expanding fiscal architecture.