Break away from Groundhog Day

In the contemporary saga of the Greek/Eurozone (=Eurozone) crisis, there are basically four sorts of policy propositions. There are the ones that say that Greece is helpless, that the Eurozone is a poor design and, thus, that Greece should default and the Eurozone should dissolve. There are those that say that Greece is at a deadlock and thus it should indeed default – but inside the Eurozone, which should improve its governance and complete its integration (towards fiscal union). Then, there are those that say that Greece is a sinner in an otherwise catholic Eurozone and should thus suffer (aka undergo an internal devaluation of as much as it takes) until it redeems itself (i.e., until it becomes competitive – whatever that means outside the virtual reality of economics textbooks). And then there are those discredited ones that say that Greece has been in the wrong end of things and it needs to be supported within a programme of socio-institutional modernisation, capital deepening, economic restructuring and technological upgrading in order to increase its productivity in line with the (imaginary) “Eurozone average”.