In this chapter I show how scholarship that relies on assumptions of either peripheral immaturity or German ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ policies cannot adequately explain the asymmetry of the eurozone crisis. While the ‘immaturity thesis’ reduces the eurozone crisis to the political and economic irresponsibility of the periphery, narratives of German dominance are shown to lack empirical support for their positing of a beggar-thy-neighbour relationship between the core and periphery. To show this, I focus on two influential accounts of the asymmetry of the eurozone crisis: the ‘official narrative’ and ‘core–periphery analysis’. Due to its excessive focus on the dysfunctions of the countries of the European periphery, the official narrative can perhaps explain why the periphery failed to converge with the core, but tells us little about the three distinctive forms of divergence encountered by Greece, Portugal, and Ireland. Core–periphery scholarship is unable to adequately challenge the immaturity thesis due to its preoccupation with German ‘domination’ of the European periphery. By exploring country-specific direction of trade and capital lending statistics, I show that there is little basis for the argument that Germany is to blame for the origins of the eurozone crisis in the individual countries of the European periphery. Drawing out these limitations makes it possible to argue in the subsequent chapter that a revised competitiveness hypothesis, drawing on CPE and Europeanisation, can indeed explain the asymmetry of the eurozone crisis.