Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Despite the exorbitant quality of the ECB’s demands, on November 21 Dublin had no option but to comply. The Irish Times responded with a remarkable editorial that captured the mood of national humiliation. It was emblazoned with a line from Yeats’s elegy to romantic Irish nationalism, “September 1913”—“Was it for this?” Was it for this, the paper asked, that Irish nationalists had fought their centuries-long struggle: “a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side. There is the shame of it all. Having obtained our political independence from Britain to be the masters of our own affairs, we have now surrendered our sovereignty to the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund.” But rather than lapsing into self-pity, the Irish Times went on: “The true ignominy of our current situation is not that our sovereignty has been taken away from us, it is that we ourselves have squandered it. Let us not seek to assuage our sense of shame in the comforting illusion that powerful nations in Europe are conspiring to become our masters. We are, after all, no great prize for any would-be overlord now. No rational European would willingly take on the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. It is the incompetence of the governments we ourselves elected that has so deeply compromised our capacity to make our own decisions.”68 For all its brilliance, not the least remarkable thing abou...