The euro and its threat to the future of Europe

Abstract

The printing presses have not been still in recent years, for there was always a ‘new’, definitive, book on the euro and the euro crisis to be published. Not that anything substantially ‘new’ has actually happened at the policy level in the eurozone since the outbreak of the great recession—save changes to the stance of the European Central Bank (ECB) under the stewardship of Mario Draghi. The banking union is, at best, incomplete; the effects of an investment plan by Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president, are barely visible; fiscal policy is frozen; and the unemployment rate is still too high. We are, therefore, experiencing an endless ‘euro drift’, even risking ‘euro death’. In his most recent book, Nobel Prize-winner Joseph E. Stiglitz dares the impossible and attempts to inject fresh blood into a debate that has so far disappointed. In doing so, Stiglitz leads readers right to the deathbed of the euro—and back: ‘Many within Europe will be saddened by the death of the euro. This is not the end of the world: currencies come and go … if the reforms to the Eurozone are beyond the reach … it is better to abandon the euro to save Europe and the European project’ (p. 294). Simply put, ‘the European project is too important to be destroyed by the euro’ (p. xxi).

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