Europe’s Way Out

France will most likely play a critical role as well. France is big enough that if it threw its support fully behind the peripheral countries, Germany would be isolated and would need to respond. But, so far, France remains eager to separate itself from the southern countries, in order to avoid being dragged down with them in financial markets.

Ultimately, a workable European economic union does require greater structural homogeneity and institutional convergence (especially in labor markets) among its members. So the German argument contains a kernel of validity: In the long run, EU countries need to look more like one another if they want to inhabit the same house.

But the eurozone faces a short-term problem that is much more Keynesian in nature, and for which longer-term structural remedies are ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Too much focus on structural problems, at the expense of Keynesian policies, will make the long run unachievable – and hence irrelevant.

Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2013.

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