Foreign Affairs Anthology Series
Europe’s Monetary (Dis)union
Europe’s Monetary (Dis)Union
Introduction
Europe's Progress Toward Economic Integration
New Opportunities and New Challenges
Euro Fantasies: Common Currency as Panacea
The Case for EMU: More than Money
EMU and International Conflict
The Dollar and the Euro
The Degeneration of EMU
The Future of the Euro
Why the Greek Crisis Will Not Ruin Europe’s Monetary Union
The Failure of the Euro
The Little Currency That Couldn’t
The Crisis of Europe
How the Union Came Together and Why It’s Falling Apart
Can Europe’s Divided House Stand?
Separating Fiscal and Monetary Union
Saving the Euro Will Mean Worse Trouble for Europe
Charting the Disastrous Choices Ahead
Can the Eurozone Be Saved?
Yes, but the EU Summit Was Too Little, Too Late
How to Save the Euro -- and the EU
Reading Keynes in Brussels
Why Only Germany Can Fix the Euro
Reading Kindleberger in Berlin
The Myth of German Hegemony
Why Berlin Can't Save Europe Alone
Europe's Optional Catastrophe
The Fate of the Monetary Union Lies in Germany’s Hands
Why the Euro Will Survive
Completing the Continent’s Half-Built House
Avoiding the Next Eurozone Crisis
How to Build an EU that Works
Europe After the Crisis
How to Sustain a Common Currency
Europe's New Normal
It's Here, It's Unclear, Get Used to It
So Long, Austerity?
Syriza's Victory and the Future of the Eurozone
Austerity vs. Democracy in Greece
Europe Crosses the Rubicon
Why Greece Will Cave—and How
Alexis Tsipras and the Debt Negotiations
No Exit
Why Greece and Europe Will Still Stay Attached
G(reece)2K
How to Contain Athens' Economic Problems
A Pain in the Athens
Why Greece Isn't to Blame for the Crisis
The Agreekment That Could Break Europe
Euroskeptics, Eurocritics, and Life After the Bailout
G(reece)2K
How to Contain Athens' Economic Problems
In the late 1990s, the Western world became concerned with a phenomenon known as Y2K (Year 2000), or the Millennium Bug—that is, a mass collapse of all computer systems in the seconds after the clock struck 12:00 on New Year’s Eve 2000. Most early computer programmers had entered dates only according to their last digits, rendering 1976, for example, as “76.” They did so mainly to save memory space, which was very expensive in those days, and also because they assumed that their programs would have a limited shelf life. Now it was feared that some computers would not recognize the new date in 2000 and assume instead that they were back in 1900. Some worst-case scenarios envisaged hospital machines breaking down, banking chaos, and even airplanes falling out of the sky.
All this calls to mind the long Greek agony over the euro. When the crisis first blew in 2010, there were widespread fears that if Greece defaulted on its public debts, contagion would bring down banks across the eurozone and destroy the market for government bonds in the next-in-line states, such as Italy, Spain, Portugal, and perhaps even Ireland. The fears seemed somewhat justified: nobody quite knew how markets would react, and the complex interconnections between Greek debt and bank solvency elsewhere were not clear to even seasoned experts. It was precisely this sense of uncertainty on which Greek governments traded from the start of the crisis and upon which Syriza’s “game theorists” based their ultraconfrontational stance starting in
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