Un momento hamiltoniano? Riflessione interdisciplinare comparata tra Stati Uniti e Unione europea sul problema del debito

The Recovery and Resilience plan approved by the European Council of 17-21 July 2020, known as the Next Generation EU, introduced a decision of extraordinary importance in the recent history of European integration. The aforementioned importance is both quantitative, due to the total amount of money involved in the plan, and qualitative, since it gave the Commission the power to raise up to 750 billion euros on international markets through the issuance of European debt securities. It is precisely this last feature of the plan that has led many academics, opinion leaders and high-profile institutional figures to speak of a “Hamiltonian moment” for Europe, with reference to the process of financial and fiscal integration at the origin of the US federal experience. Building on a well-established comparative scholarship on federalism, with a particular focus on the literature that contrasts the US case with the European one, this essay offers a diachronic comparison between both the fiscal and financial instruments adopted by the American patriots to revive the fortunes of the Republic in the midst of the War of Independence and the European measures to counter the economic shock following the Covid-19 pandemic. By means of a diachronic comparison, this essay will test the validity of the historical analogy that ascribes the title “Hamiltonian moment” to the current European situation. To this end, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines the heuristic tools of institutional history with a detailed analysis of the European legal framework.