The ‘British plan’ as a pace-setter: the Europeanisation of banking rescue plans in the EU?

This article examines to what extent the British banking rescue plan announced in late 2008 set the pace for the adoption of similar banking rescue plans across the European Union. This case study can be seen a ‘horizontal’ type of Europeanization, whereby a (perceived successful) policy template adopted in one country is subsequently implicitly endorsed (hence, ‘uploaded’) at the EU level and then adopted (hence, ‘downloaded’) in other countries, albeit with considerable national variations. The two main caveats are that the British plan was not particularly innovative – it provided a functional solution to the problem at hand – and the adoption of similar measures across Europe was politically feasible because this did not envisage any substantial EU-level intervention as it proposed parallel national solutions to a common problem.