This paper argues that the current euro crisis should be interpreted as a crisis of memory. Indeed the new Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union marks a sharp departure from the traditional “community method,” which institutionalized somewhat egalitarian decision-making processes among European Union (EU) member states. Because this method has become rather like a cliché with little resonance in the larger public, this paper offers another way to discuss the ethical and political dilemmas raised by the EMU crisis: the heated debates over institutional, fiscal and economic reforms should be reinterpreted as a contest around different notions of political power, some of which seem now forgotten. The paper examines the original promise to transform hegemonic intra-European relations into a “community” through the lens of Hannah Arendt’s notion of power as action in concert (rather than force and domination). And it compares and contrasts narratives of power among the European Economic Community (EEC)’s founders (found in memoirs, essays and long interviews) with those of the EMU architects, and of grassroots actors in Greece. Thus it constitutes an attempt to look both backward and downward at practices of power and promising within the EU and the EMU, with special attention to the case of Greece.
In order to define the concepts of memory, power and promise and justify their relevance to a discussion of the EMU crisis and the case of Greece, this paper’s Part I draws from the work of two political thinkers rarely cited in EU studies, Paul Ricoeur and Hannah Arendt. It benefits also from scholarly discussions of “stories” (Eder, Lacroix, Nicolaïdis, Pélabay) and elite rhetoric (Gaffney, Schmidt).
Part II discusses narratives of the Rome Treaties’ negotiators in order to access the intents behind the EEC’s original institutions. It detects in these stories, and also in the concrete EEC policies and institutions, “traces” of power as action in concert. Part III reviews the creation of the EMU, and the setting aside of the institutions of power as action in concert, which constituted a kind of political promising. It contrasts the new “fiscal” treaty with the EU “six pack legislation” and ponders the consequences of abandoning the community method in the midst of a major economic crisis. Part IV discusses certain political initiatives and popular discourses on the Eurozone crisis, in Greece especially, that demonstrate that EU citizens are making new promises to each other, and that power as action in concert remains a political preference, at least for some European actors. Academic discussions of stories tend to offer theory-laden and factually thin narratives. This essay departs from this approach by offering “thick” narratives of power as action in concert gathered through long interviews and quasi-anthropological observations during a two months stay in Athens, April-May 2012.
