Jan Kregel — Europe At The Crossroads – Financial Fragility And The Survival Of The Single Currency

To outside observers, Germany's insistence that the new Greek government continue to impose austerity policies in the presence of rising unemployment and mounting debt levels appears to defy economic logic. However, an acquaintance with the historical evolution of the path to the creation of the common currency in the European Union (EU) sheds some light on the logic of the German government's strategy in dealing with the eurozone sovereign debt crisis and its negative response to Greece's request for an alternative economic policy. Given the continuing divergence between progress in the monetary field and political integration in the euro area, the German interest in imposing austerity may be seen as representing an attempt to achieve, de facto, accelerated progress toward political union; progress that has long been regarded by Germany as a precondition for the success of monetary unification in the form of the common currency. 

Yet no matter how necessary these austerity policies may appear in the context of the slow and incomplete political integration in Europe, these policies are ultimately unsustainable. The survival and stability of the euro, in the absence of further progress in political unification, paradoxically require either sustained economic stagnation or the maintenance of what Hyman Minsky would have recognized as a Ponzi scheme. Neither of these alternatives is economically or politically sustainable.