Mark Blyth: The Euro – an assessment in the midst of a European war | Q&A with Yanis Varoufakis

Here you may watch Mark Blyth’s lecture ‘The Euro – an assessment in the midst of a European war’ with a Q&A with Yanis Varoufakis and the audience, in the context of mέta’s colloquium “20 Years of Euro: An Assessment in the Shadow of a European War” (full video here).

The introduction of the euro (exactly twenty years ago as Greece’s currency) was presented as a big promise of economic convergence and well-being, in the spirit of the even bigger promise of permanent peace in the European continent. However, as is all too evident by now, the euro was instrumental in dividing rather than uniting Europe, and it put in action centrifugal forces that undermined unification – a prerequisite for a common European foreign policy and defense policy. Today, in the context of the biggest military conflict on European soil since decades, a critical re-evaluation of the twenty-year-long history of the common currency is more urgent than ever. In the colloquium organised by mέta on the 16th of April at Athens’ Technopolis’ we analyse the introduction of the common currency, its impact during the last two decades, its geopolitical, ideological, and cultural dimensions while contemplating alternatives in the era of digital money.

Mark Blyth, a member of mέta’s Advisory Board, is the William R. Rhodes ’57 Professor of International Economics at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Mark researches the political power of economic ideas as seen in his books Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002) and Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Oxford University Press 2015). He also researches the political economy of Europe and the US as seen in his 2015 book The Future of the Euro (New York: Oxford University Press 2015), Angrynomics (New York: Columbia University Press 2020) and in his forthcoming book on the politics of economic growth (with Lucio Bacarro and Jonas Pontusson) The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation (Oxford University Press 2022).