Two popular fallacies are thriving in a Europe of populism and diminished expectations. Many argue that Europe’s problem is a problem of leadership. Missing are statesmen with the stature of Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand or Jacques Delors. Historical distance tends to elevate and idealize leaders of the past. In their time, critics denounced Kohl’s provincialism, Mitterrand’s financial illiteracy and Delors’s…
Greece is finally growing again. But it has been arguably the eurozone’s greatest failure. Catapulted into a debt crisis with a 15 per cent government spending deficit in 2009, the country suffered eight years of economic contraction. Unemployment is still 23 per cent, youth unemployment 45 per cent. Greece’s “Great Depression” has been as deep as that of the US…
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Chris Marsh, Dominik Nagly, George Pagoulatos, Elias Papaioannou t is now seven years since the Greek crisis began. As well as reflecting the chronic deficiencies of its own institutions, the failings in Greece also reflect substantial shortcomings in international institutions. This column argues that it is time for all sides to move on, and proposes a simple debt operation for…
“There is nothing more unpredictable than the past,” experts on Soviet-era methods used to say. Government has the means to elevate its story into official history. It can create scapegoats to deflect attention from the real culprits. It can devise diversions and fictitious conspiracies. It can propagate hearsay, which with the help of unscrupulous media will become “news,” and with…