Consumers of Financial Services and Multi-Level Regulation in the European Union

This Article focuses on the changing role of consumers of financial services in the development of financial services policy in the European Union (“EU”), illustrating tensions between two models of supranational rule-making: the technical and the political. As the European mode of governance has developed by claiming legitimacy largely through functional participation, it is important to focus on the workings of functional participation, and whether it delivers the claimed legitimacy. The first section of the Article describes in outline four different phases of financial services related policy-making in Europe: the period before the Single European Act, the period leading up to the 1993 deadline for development of the single market, and the more recent periods between 1993 and the Financial Services Action Plan ("FSAP") and the Lamfalussy Report and the period since 2001. The second section then describes some of the changing features of the rule-making process throughout the same period.