Since the crisis hit, Europe’s heads of state and their finance ministers have been cobbling together various ad hoc bail-out responses. Indeed, the European Union has seen an unprecedented amount of political innovation and activity with a new permanent bail-out mechanism (the ESM), a new Fiscal Pact, a nascent banking union, and a broader role for the European Central Bank all being heralded. Yet does all this frenetic activity actually add up to meaningful reform or is this more a proverbial ‘rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic?’

The Euro crisis has seriously questioned the long-term viability of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union. But if the cost of saving the Euro may be the broader political union of Europe, is the game really worth the candle?

In order to better understand what has gone wrong, how the Euro zone could potentially be fixed, and what the future(s) of the Euro might be, including its possible failure, this panel brings together the insights of two scholars from Europe and two from the United States.

The papers all deal with various aspects of “the Euro problem” and will address currency unions from a historical perspective, the lessons from previous fixed exchange rate regimes (the gold standard), the specific economic and political dynamics of Europe’s monetary union, the particular role of European institutions during the crisis, and the place of democracy and the limits of European solidarity.