Germany has a long history of institutionalized ordoliberalism. While these ideas may be implemented almost unreflexively within Germany, its status of 'reluctant hegemon' within the European Union has led to purposive uploading of many of these ideas to other Member States. In this article, we first define what these ordoliberal actions consist of, before tracing their evolution within Germany and the EU. Our intention is to detail how acting within ordoliberal tenets has led to some rather messy and unpredictable results for Germany and other EU Member States alike -a state particularly emphasized by the crisis. In so doing, we (re)invoke Robert Merton's treatment of unintended consequences. In particular, we are concerned with Germany's increased role in enforcing fiscal order in the EU, counter to our interviewees' (drawn from the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) express intentions to retain Germany's political distance.

Economic theory has tried to explain the characteristics of the Common Agricultural Policy on the basis of certain economic peculiarities of agriculture. However, by overlooking the so-called government failures of the political system as an independent variable in explaining the Common Agricultural Policy it is impossible to explain, for example, the strong agricultural lobbyism. The theoretical model of this article integrates economic as well as political actors in order to explain the characteristics of the Common Agricultural Policy.The proposed theoretical model is not "tested", but the criteria for such a test are presented.

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