Podcast: Politics of the Eurogroup
New book interview with Joscha Abels
Listen to my interview with Joscha Abels for the New Books Network about The Politics of the Eurogroup: Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2023) on Apple or Spotify.
Before a rolling financial crisis swept through Europe from 2007 onwards, only the Brussels bubble knew about the Eurogroup. By then, finance ministers from countries using the euro had been meeting in this club format every month for ten years but – as Joscha Abels says in his new study – “the group had been almost invisible to the public".
Over the next decade – and especially during the most acute phase of the Greek debt crisis in 2015 – that all changed. Devised in the 1990s as an “informal” body without decision-making powers, the Eurogroup had power thrust upon it by the crisis - the power to negotiate, approve and condition huge sovereign bailout loans.
Many memoirs1 have been written about these fraught years – including duelling remembrances from former Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem and short-lived Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – but Abels has written the first book-length theoretical and institutional assessment of the group itself.
Joscha Abels is a research associate and lecturer in political economy at the University of Tübingen. Educated at Mannheim and Oslo, he completed his PhD at Tübingen with a dissertation on the role of the Eurogroup. His most recent research work is on infrastructure policy and geoeconomics.
For my Writers’ Writers tip sheet, he chose The Political Economy of Geoeconomics: Europe in a Changing World edited by Milan Babić, Adam Dixon, and Imogen Liu (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) and Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams (first published 1960 – Vintage Classics, 2013).
As you might expect, I'm a sucker for in-the-room accounts. Pending Jean-Claude Juncker's memoirs, Dijsselbloem's is the best insider account of the 2013-2015 leg of the crisis. In my opinion, the best retellings of the early stages are Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis by George Papaconstantinou (CreateSpace, 2016), Une présidence de crises by Jean-Pierre Jouyet (Albin Michel, 2013), Inside The Euro Crisis: An Eyewitness Account by Simeon Djankov (PIIE, 2014), and Austerity: European democracies against the wall by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi (CEPS, 2013). A Diary of the Euro Crisis in Cyprus: Lessons for Bank Recovery and Resolution by Panicos Demetriades (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) is compelling. Of them all, my favourite is a journalistic history of the whole Greek crisis citing insiders on and off the record - The Last Bluff: How Greece came face-to-face with financial catastrophe and the secret plan for its euro exit by Viktoria Dendrinou and Eleni Varvitsioti (Papadopoulos, 2019).