Failing Forward? The Euro Crisis and the Incomplete Nature of European Integration

The European Union (EU) project of combining a single market with a common currency was incomplete from its inception. This article shows that the incompleteness of the governance architecture of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) was both a cause of the euro crisis and a characteristic pattern of the policy responses to the crisis. We develop a “failing forward” argument to explain the dynamics of European integration using recent experience in the eurozone as an illustration: Intergovernmental bargaining leads to incompleteness because it forces states with diverse preferences to settle on lowest common denominator solutions. Incompleteness then unleashes forces that lead to crisis. Member states…