As the Euro crisis deepened, the German government’s crisis management became the object of increasingly intense criticism. Being perceived to have “fallen out of love with Europe,” the country seemed to be “making a huge profit at the expense of the other Europeans, while simultaneously, at the political level, relinquishing its European responsibility.” 1 Many of the individual charges directed at Germany were right on the mark, particularly those about the one-sidedness and self-serving nature of German discourse about the country’s economic renaissance, which largely failed to acknowledge the strongly positive impact of the Euro on the economy. But other accusations were remarkable for their own biases. With the often clearly defined drawbacks of German actions, it has been relatively easy to criticize them. However, given the complexity of the challenges facing the Euroarea, it is far harder to say what German positions should actually be.
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