The Euro Crisis

Taking its cue from the euro affair, this book discusses above all the complex institutional systems in the economic field, typically formed in the context of international economic relations. The EU in general, and Euroland in particular, constitute an area manifesting the issues debated by those institutionalist economists who deal with international economic relations. As never before, economic analyses require the support of other disciplines, starting from the political sciences to evolutionary and cognitivist approaches. After a brief analysis of the evolution of the European economic integration process and how this integration has been strongly influenced by political factors, a significant difficulty that scholars encounter lies in the intertwining of economic and political strategies. Since Euroland represents a coalition formed by a group of European countries that have attempted to transform a potentially conflictual political situation into a cooperative situation, due importance is given to the lessons in Thomas Schelling’s (1960) The Strategy of Conflict. However, the core of this volume is an analysis of the institutionalist approach to the economic integration process experienced by the EU and Euroland. At the heart of this process is a controversial relationship, at least in the European reality, between national institutions on the one hand, and supranational institutions on the other. Thus, complementarity between institutions at different hierarchical levels within the framework of the varieties of international capitalism has been given ample space. A sensitive point of the analysis relates to the fact that in complex institutional systems, there may be situations in which certain institutions, especially supranational ones, can foster asymmetries, with the result of generating conflicts between member countries. This occurs when national preferences, defined on the economic and financial policy action space, collide, and so in this sense, we can speak of a “euro crisis”.