In the years 2010 and 2011, the Eurocrisis was among the dominant topics in Germany’s political debates. A number of points remained highly contested: What dangers does the Eurocrisis imply for the European Monetary Union and its member states? What are the causes of the Eurocrisis? And what kind of phenomenon is the Eurocrisis in an ontological sense? To disentagle the competing narratives, this paper presents a meta-analysis of the discourse among practitioners and think tanks in Germany. The paper demonstrates that, depending on the logical and systematic construction of its causes, the Eurocrisis is either constructed as a problem of individual states, as a systemic problem due to deficits in the European economic governance, or as a fundamental crisis of the European monetary architecture. By adopting the perspective of constructivist institutionalism, the paper assumes that economic play a pivotal role in interpreting the economic reality. Hence, different perspectives on the Eurocrisis as a phenomenon derive from diverging causal narratives that are either located on a non-systemic, the institutional or the ideational level of the European economic governance architecture.
Presented at Nachwuchstagung Internationale Politische Ökonomie, Heidelberg (03/2013)
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