ABSTRACT
The first, and frequently used version of the phrase, suggests that it is an opportunity that provides an excuse to do some un-related housecleaning of an organisation or structure. This is crisis as political opportunism. Regardless of the rights or wrongs of the fact of, or lack of, regional integration, the current crisis presents those with a predisposition to more or less integration with the opportunity to argue for their preferred state of nature. Thus to those philosophically opposed to regional integration in general and regional currency unions in particular, the euro crisis is a convenient proof positive that this is a failed experiment, and it is simply a matter of time before this or the next crisis will result in its collapse. The crisis is therefore an opportunity to emphasise the negative and call for the abandonment of the project. The converse position, but no less passionately
argued, is one that holds that the problem is that Europe remains a half-way house, and that the only sensible solution is the creation of a federal state with a strong central government. There is little doubt that some of the stances being taken by critics of both hues reflect political opportunism rather than an analytically informed argument.
