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WCED Lecture. “It’s the Politics, Stupid: Explaining the Eurocrisis.”

Monday, November 5, 2012
12:00 AM
1636 International Institute/SSWB, 1080 S. University

As the eurozone crisis drags on, its severity has raised questions about the viability of the entire European Union. What are the roots of the crisis? Disarray within the eurozone is not fundamentally about debts, deficits, or banking crises. Instead, it is a political crisis. Investigating the history of single currencies helps illuminate the obstacles ahead, and the transformations needed to secure Europe’s future.

Kathleen R. McNamara is an associate professor of government and foreign service and director of the Mortara Center for International Studies at Georgetown University. She is an expert on the politics of international economic relations, specializing in the European Union, the euro, and the European Central Bank. She is the author of The Currency of Ideas: Monetary Politics in the European Union (Cornell University Press, 1998), co-editor of Making History: European Integration and Institution Change at Fifty (Oxford University Press, 2007), and has published numerous essays on globalization, economic institutions, and the role of norms and culture in policymaking. Her current book project, entitled “Imagining Europe,” investigates the social construction of political authority in the European Union, through the use of culture, symbols, and practice. Dr. McNamara has taught at Princeton University and Sciences Po (Paris), and has been a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, a German Marshall Fund Fellow, and a Fulbright Fellow. She is a participant in a variety of government and NGO policy groups, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and an executive board member of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. She received her PhD from Columbia University and her BA from McGill University.

Part of the European Economic Crisis and its Political Dimensions, a lecture series jointly sponsored by CES and WCED, and made possible by a generous donation from Michael Kojaian. Invited speakers will focus on the economic underpinnings of the crisis and its implications for governance, democracy, and civil society.

Sponsors: WCED, CES.

Speaker: