The Political Economy of the Euro Crisis Mark Copelovitch University of Wisconsin – Madison
[email protected] Jeffry Frieden Harvard University
[email protected] Stefanie Walter University of Zurich
[email protected] Lead article for the special issue “The Political Economy of the Euro Crisis,” forthcoming in Comparative Political Studies The euro crisis has developed into the most serious economic and political crisis in the history of the European Union (EU). By 2016, nine years after the outbreak of the global financial crisis in 2007, economic activity in the EU and the Eurozone was still below its pre- crisis level. At this point, the joint effects of the global financial crisis and the euro crisis have caused more lasting economic damage in Europe than the Great Depression of the 1930s (Crafts, 2013). The political consequences have also been severe. Conflict among EU member states has threatened the progress of European integration, while polarization and unrest have unsettled domestic politics in a host of European countries. The crisis has indeed brought into question the very nature and future of European integration generally, and of monetary integration specifically. To date, there has been substantial economic analysis of the crisis in the Eurozone, which has recently culminated in the emergence of a widely shared consensus on its causes (Baldwin et al., 2015). However, economists often fail to appreciate the large role that politics has played in the run-up, evolution, and attempts at resolution of the euro crisis. The typical economic approach has been to note that the Eurozone is not an optimal currency area 1 , and to subsequently conclude that the long-term survival of the Eurozone requires the creation of a set of institutions to act as substitutes – such as fiscal union, banking union, and/or the establishment of a larger, permanent transfer mechanism to replace the European Stability Mechanism (e.g., De Grauwe, 2013; Lane, 2012; Pisani-Ferry, 2012).