CJE Special Issue – Perspectives on the Eurozone Crisis: Introduction

For Wim Duisenberg, the Euro’s perceived independence from the nation-state was a pathbreaking achievement, to be proud of and to cherish. Little more than a decade later – and three years into the deepest economic crisis Europe has known since the Great Depression – Duisenberg’s elation rings strangely anachronistic, since what the ‘nation-less’ Euro seems to have achieved, above all, is to undermine whatever ‘mutual confidence at the heart of our community’ there may have been at the start.