These obligations place real limits on the Italian authorities’ macroeconomic policy choices. In particular, the absence of a domestic currency means Italians cannot choose their own inflation target or devalue their currency vis-à-vis foreign currencies. They also have to keep their fiscal deficits below certain ceilings.

Such external restraints need not conflict with democracy. Sometimes it makes sense for the electorate to tie its hands when doing so helps it achieve better outcomes. Hence the principle of “democratic delegation”: democracies can enhance their performance by delegating aspects of decision-making to independent agencies.

The canonical case for democratic delegation arises when there is a paramount need for credible commitment to a particular course of action. Monetary policy is perhaps the clearest instance of this. Many economists subscribe to the view that central banks can generate output and employment gains through expansionary monetary policy only if they are able to produce surprise inflation in the short term.

But, because expectations adjust to central bank behaviour, discretionary monetary policy is futile: it yields higher inflation but no output or employment increases. Accordingly, it is far better to insulate monetary policy from political pressures by delegating it to technocratic, independent central banks that are charged with the singular objective of price stability.

Superficially, the euro and the ECB can be seen as the solution to this inflationary conundrum in Europe. They protect the Italian electorate from their politicians’ counterproductive inflationary tendencies. But there are peculiarities to the European situation that make the democratic delegation argument more suspect.

For one thing, the ECB bears responsibility for monetary policy for the euro zone as a whole rather than Italy alone. As a result, it will be generally less responsive to Italian economic circumstances than a purely Italian, but equally independent, central bank would have been.

As Paul Tucker, a former deputy governor of the Bank of England, discusses in his masterful recent book Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Administrative State, the argument for democratic delegation is a subtle one. The distinction between policy goals and how they are implemented needs to be clear. Insofar as they entail distributional consequences or trade-offs between contending goals (employment versus price stability, for example), policy objectives have to be determined through politics.

Delegation is warranted at best in the conduct of policy that serves politically determined objectives. Tucker argues, correctly, that few independent agencies are based on a careful application of principles that would pass the test of democratic legitimacy.

This shortcoming is far worse in the case of delegation to international agencies or treaties. Too often, international economic commitments serve not to fix democratic failures at home, but to privilege corporate or financial interests and undermine domestic social bargains.

If the euro – and indeed the EU itself – is to remain viable and democratic at the same time, policymakers will have to pay closer attention to the demanding requirements of delegating decisions to unelected bodies. This does not mean they should resist surrendering sovereignty to supranational agencies. But they should recognise that economists’ and other technocrats’ policy preferences rarely endow policies with sufficient democratic legitimacy on their own.

They should promote such a delegation of sovereignty only when it truly enhances the long-term performance of their democracies, not when it merely advances the interests of globalist elites.

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the author of Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy. Copyright: Project Syndicate