Towards a full harmonization of the European banking regulation: Dilemmas in a legal discourse between regulation and enforcement

Abstract

With the birth of the Single Supervisory Mechanism came the emergence of a new regime of supervision of the banking industry in the Eurozone. The allocation of enforcement powers between the European Central Bank and the National Competent Authorities is the corollary of the unified supervision, which reverberates from the Single Supervisory Mechanism, and it is ultimately the main theme of this contribution. More specifically, the architecture of the enforcement, principally shaped by the SSM and its principles and rules, is assessed and analysed in this paper against the background of the general theory of enforcement, as developed in the legal literature. The enforcement discourse in the European Union banking sector is debated alongside its interaction with the related aspects of the regulation and supervision and the way these three notions have been integrated and codified in the European Union after the 2011 sovereign debt crisis.