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Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’? : on the political uses and explanatory usefulness of a recurrent historical comparison
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0308-5147; 1469-5766
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Economy and society, 2022, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 138-159
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GEORGIOU, Christakis, Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’? : on the political uses and explanatory usefulness of a recurrent historical comparison, Economy and society, 2022, Vol. 51, No. 1, pp. 138-159 - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/73647
Abstract
The EU’s decision to allow the European Commission to emit some 850 billion euros in debt backed by the EU budget in order to fund transfers and cheap loans to member states has been hailed by some, most notably the German finance minister Olaf Scholz, as Europe’s ‘Hamiltonian moment’, in reference to the first Treasury secretary of the United States. This historical comparison has been widely used over the last decade when discussing the historical meaning of the EU’s attempts to deal with the eurozone crisis and its aftermath. However, commentators pick and choose those aspects of the original ‘moment’ that suit their own analysis of the historical import of EU developments. The original ‘moment’ is, however, best described as a wholesale ‘financial revolution’ involving a series of reforms that transformed financial and fiscal conditions in America. In this paper, I show the relevance but also the limits of this historical comparison by ‘unbundling’ the original Hamiltonian moment and comparing each of its fiscal components to the contemporary EU experience. I conclude by arguing that the Eurozone’s development is best compared with the period beginning with the New Deal in American political history.
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Published online: 04 November 2021