New Books In Eastern European Studies

Before this century's first global financial crisis struck Europe in 2007-2012, only people in the Brussels bubble had heard of the Eurogroup. By then, finance ministers from countries using the euro had been meeting in this format every month for ten years but – as Joscha Abels writes in The Politics of the Eurogroup: Governing Crisis and Conflict in the European Union (Routledge, 2023) - “the group had been almost invisible to the public". Over the next decade – and especially during the most acute phase of the Greek debt crisis in 2015 – that all changed. Devised in the 1990s as an informal body without decision-making powers, from 2010 onwards the Eurogroup assumed political authority for negotiating and approving bailout loans and making sure the conditions for those loans were met. Many memoirs have been written about these fraught years – including duelling books by former Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem and short-lived Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis – but Abels has written the first b