Financial Crisis and European Union

Gregory Xanthos

Date of search: 11/1/09

Topic: How has the global financial crisis affected the European Union's internal politics? The basic thesis of depression economics is that government must intervene in the economy in order to temporarily create the demand that the populace no longer is willing to. My question is: Which government became the locus of power in the EU during the crisis? Has the center of gravity moved towards the supranational EU institutions or towards national ones? To what extent have member states differed in their attitudes towards the EU during the crisis?


I tried three different databases-
1) Ebsco
2) Academic onefile
3) Web of Science

The search term I used for all three databases was : " european union financial crisis"

A) With Ebsco everything I found was a journalistic source. A lot was from the Wall Street Journal and the Economist. While these articles addressed my topic, I was looking for works more scholarly and authoritative.

B)Academic OneFile provided me with the scholarly sources I sought. However, I am less inclined to use it in the future because it often either does not provide an abstract or the abstacts are often only a sentence or two.

Academic OneFile sources I chose: Soros, George. "The Euro's Deficiencies: Out of Crisis can Come a Change in the European Union's Balance of Power." The International Economy 23.1 ( 2009): 60-61.

The Soros article I decided to use because it discusses the weaknesses inherent in the current economic arrangement of the EU and how this led to individual member states acting on their own without regard for other EU states. It is clearly very relevant to my topic, and has optimal currency because it was written for the most-recent Winter 2009 publication. I also selected it because Soros is a recognized expert on international economics and, even though this may be the case, the writing in the article is very clear and relatively jargon-free for an economics piece.

The second Academic OneFile source I chose was : Tsuo, Kurt. "Unity Under Siege: the European Single Market after the Financial Crisis." Harvard International Review. 31.1 (2009) : 32-35.

This article is similar to the Soros one, but has more in-depth, substantiated analysis. The author also argues for remedies to the protectionism that surfaced in the EU recently. Kurt Tsao is a professor at Harvard, and the article is published in the time-frame of interest for my research.

C) I then used the Web of Science database. This is an excellent source and I recommend it to everyone. The drawback is that because it is so broad , hits on searches often are not relevant or are very loosely-related. However, the big plus is that all articles have lengthy abstracts that obviate the researcher having to delve into the full-text to see if the article is useful. Web of Science also wonderfully lists other articles that cited the article you're looking at, along with allowing you to look at the bibliography without reading the article. It's a very helpful tool if you need a clutch of articles on a similar topic.

1st Web of Science Source: Quaglia, Lucia. " The Financial Turmoil and EU Policy Coordination." Journal of Common Market Studies 47 (2009): 63-87.

This article investigates the actions of the EU during the financial crisis. The article argues that member-states intitially focused on national responses to the crisis, and only later realized that it required supra-national capabilities. It then describes which of the EU institutional arrangements were simply not capable of conducting responses that mimicked the national-level ones.

The Journal of Common Market Studies, is the oldest and most venerable journal focused on scholarship of the EU as it relates to economics. The author is a professor at the University of Sussex in England and, she has written extensively on issues related to the economics of the European Union in the past. I particularly liked this article because it addresses which EU- power centers were helpful in stemming the crisis and which were not.