The history of the European Union is a history of crises and the leaps of integration they triggered. As the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and global power competition cloud the prospects of European economies, they find their options constrained by seminal path-dependencies of the euro crisis.

In my dissertation project A Finance Ministers’ Europe. The Eurogroup’s Role in Restructuring the Economic and Monetary Union, I examined why a political project of European austerity emerged from the Eurogroup and side-lined alternative policies, with repercussions still felt today. It fused a critical political economy perspective on structural relations in the Economic and Monetary Union with a power-based approach to its institutions.

The core output of the project is found in my book The Politics of the Eurogroup. Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union, published with Routledge’s RIPE Series in Global Political Economy. The book introduces a series of interviews with key decision-makers – ministers, central bankers, and EU officials – as well as leaked audio recordings from Eurogroup meetings to give an authentic report of the power struggles between finance ministers. It retraces how the Eurogroup rose to prominence in the crisis and how a few northern countries – led by the German and Dutch finance ministries – were able to exploit the group’s informal processes to shape the Economic and Monetary Union to their advantage.

Further publication that emerged from this project include Does the current crisis mark the end of the EU’s austerity era? Competing political projects in European fiscal governance, published in Comparative European Politics, as well as Failing forward in European economic governance. The cyclicality of European integration and institutional competition in the COVID-19 crisis, published with Journal of Common Market Studies.