Article 119 [Principles of Economic and Monetary Policy]

Article 119 TFEU, right at the beginning of Title VIII of the third part of the TFEU, is a provision on the very essence of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and its guiding principles. It corresponds at its core to Article 4 TEC, which was introduced by the Treaty of Maastricht (1993). After the euro became the Union’s single currency on 1 January 1999, the successor provision to Article 4 TEC was placed at the beginning of Title VIII in the Treaty of Lisbon and cleared of those formulations that had become obsolete. Similar but not nearly as far-reaching rules were previously spelt out in Article 102a TEEC (introduced by the Single European Act) and Article 103 TEEC on cooperation in economic and monetary policy and on short-term economic policy. With the Treaty of Lisbon, Article 119 TFEU was systematically placed at the beginning of Title VIII on economic and monetary policy as a basic norm and adapted merely terminologically to the level of integration already achieved (existence of the euro, completion of the Stages Two and Three of EMU). This provision puts the objective enunciated in Article 3.4 TEU into more concrete terms, in particular, despite the lack of a substantial degree of economic union, with regard to “the parallel advancement in monetary and economic integration” (paragraphs 1 and 2), the creation of a single currency in pursuance of the objective of price stability (paragraph 2) and the alignment of the economic and monetary policies of the Union and the MS to further economic and financial principles (paragraph 3).