Adam Tooze

If Europe preferred not to highlight its role in the “American” financial crisis of 2008, covering its tracks was made easier by the fact that from 2010 Europe was consumed by its own “authentically” European crisis.

It would pit Greeks against Germans and reawaken memories of World War II. Both crisis narratives play to type: mercenary Americans, squabbling European nationalisms. But was it merely bad luck that the two crises followed so closely upon each other? Was it merely bad luck that the same banks were involved in both?

After a series of messy devaluations between 1981 and 1983, Paris abandoned its effort at social democracy in one country and adopted instead a hard-currency policy of “franc fort.”

The EU employs fewer people than most medium-sized cities.

Germany’s terrible history forbids strategies of domination or even overly assertive leadership. But the success of the Federal Republic gives it the right to insist that European solutions meet its standards, and Berlin will apply those standards as it sees fit

Left-wing hostility to the promarket character of the EU and nationalist hostility to Brussels united to deliver solid majorities against it. It was a profound shock. The permissive consensus was dead. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the constitution, popular democracy had asserted itself

European integration and NATO were born together in the cold war. Their joint eastward expansion since 1989 was the result of the defeat of the Soviet Union

Habermas and Derrida’s 2003 vision of a distinct “European identity” was directed as much against the East Europeans as it was against the Anglo-Americans. It was core Western Europe that counted.

All the indicators looked good. But the entire constellation—the booming domestic economy, the appreciating exchange rate, the rising reserves—could all be traced back to a common factor: the huge inward surge of foreign capital. What if that surge reversed? What if there was a sudden stop?

Furthermore, whatever the differences over Iraq, Europe’s pose of geopolitical innocence is a historically recent phenomenon. Though it balked at Iraq, France remains a hardened postcolonial war fighter. Nor does Europe only do “small wars.”