Keeping the euro limping along

By Dr Dana Allin, Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy and Transatlantic Affairs; Editor of Survival

Survival, in my arguably biased view, has offered excellent coverage of the eurozone crisis. Two mainstays of that coverage joined me today for a panel at the IISS London headquarters. The first was Erik Jones, Professor of European Studies at the SAIS Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University, founding director of the new Bologna Institute for Policy Research, and a Contributing editor of Survival, whose latest piece on the subject, ‘Italy’s Sovereign Debt Crisis‘, is in the current issue. The second was Alexander Nicoll, IISS Director of Editorial, and a former Financial Times journalist, wrote a piece in the previous issue called ‘Fiscal Union by Force‘. Both speakers argued that Europe’s leaders, while hardly solving the underlying crisis, have done enough to keep the euro limping along. In providing massive liquidity to European banks in particular, the European Central Bank under Mario Draghi has accomplished by the back door at least part of what the eurozone needs in the way of a lender of last resort. None of this is sufficient to restore EU self-confidence and dispel the spectre of a Japanese-style lost decade. But it may head off a kind of sovereign-debt apocalypse. The full discussion is well worth watching.

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