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Eurozone Governance: From the Greek Drama of 2015 to the Five Presidents’ Report
Author(s) -
Hodson Dermot
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
jcms: journal of common market studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.54
H-Index - 90
eISSN - 1468-5965
pISSN - 0021-9886
DOI - 10.1111/jcms.12408
Subject(s) - drama , citation , corporate governance , sociology , library science , art , computer science , literature , management , economics
Greece's membership of the eurozone has long been problematic but these problems came to a head in 2015 with an astonishing standoff between a newly-elected Greek government led by Alexis Tsipras and a coalition of fiscal hawks headed by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. This standoff escalated in July after Tsipras called a referendum on the terms of stalled negotiations with the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Schäuble tabled the idea of Greek exit from the eurozone. Grexit appeared to be a matter of hours away before the heads of state or government brokered a short-run solution of sorts. This deal, which paved the way for €85 billion in additional loans, had brutal conditions attached. It ended the Greek drama of 2015 but neither resolved the contradictions surrounding Greece's membership of the eurozone nor secured the fate of economic and monetary union (EMU) more generally. Over the course of the year, the eurozone also grappled with other challenges, including slow economic growth, deflationary pressures driven by low oil prices, the implementation of recent reforms to eurozone governance and the prospects for economic, fiscal, financial and political union set out in the Five Presidents’ Report. The overarching theme of 2015 was that eurozone governance faced profound problems of legitimacy that policy-makers appeared more adept at aggravating than alleviating.