The European Periphery and the Eurozone Crisis

This book provides a new understanding of the eurozone crisis across three of the worst hit cases: Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. In contrast to accounts which stress the ‘immaturity’ of the European ‘periphery’, as well as more critical narratives that understand these countries as victims of German and core ‘economic domination’, this book recognises that individual peripheral countries have followed dramatically different paths to crisis, making it difficult to speak of the eurozone crisis as a single phenomenon. Bringing literature from Comparative Political Economy into dialogue with scholarship on Europeanisation, this book contributes the concept of ‘divergence via Europeanisation’. It explores the much-overlooked ways in which the negotiation of a ‘one size fits all’ project of European financial integration has been generative of precarious patterns of economic growth across Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. The book shows that far from their failure or inability to do so, it has been the European periphery’s attempt to ‘follow the rules’ of European integration that explains their current difficulties. This novel understanding of the eurozone crisis should appeal to students and scholars in International Political Economy, European and European Union Studies, Comparative Political Economy, Irish Politics, Greek Politics, and Portuguese Politics.