"Over ten years ago, at the end of 2009, Greece entered one of the most tumultuous periods in its contemporary history, and the entire Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) founded in 1992 threatened to collapse under the effects of the global financial crisis and the poor capacity of European governing elites to find rapid appropriate responses. After an initial Keynesian moment, ‘austeritarianism' emerged from intergovernmental summits, with the Eurogroup, the informal gathering of the finance ministers of member states, with no legal existence in the EU's treaties, having the upper hand on decisionmaking. The strategy then embraced was one of internal devaluation in indebted countries, limited financial support by creditor members of the EMU conditional upon social retrenchment, and a collective commitment to stringent fiscal discipline. More than the financial crisis itself, it was the political response to it, guided by a questionable belief in expansionary fiscal consolidation (Blyth, 2013, pp. 212–16), which left EU countries struggling with a long recession. Ten years on, have Europeans recovered from the crisis? And where has the strategy of muddling through left the EU? ..."

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