ABSTRACT
The euro area crisis cannot be understood without combining insights from a variety of disciplines — economics and political science first and foremost. Nevertheless, most conversations about European integration, and monetary integration in particular, take place within disciplinary boundaries. This is true even when the participants hope to speak to a wider audience in the public and private sectors. A few academic outlets, like the Journal of European Integration, do their best to create a forum for scholars from
different disciplines to interact. Nevertheless, more often than not the contributors wind up having parallel conversations — citing the work of their disciplinary colleagues, using the same jargon, and ignoring the rest. This lack of engagement across disciplines is a problem insofar as the
different voices in the debate about the origins of and remedies for the European crisis have so much to offer one another. This is perhaps easiest to see when political scientists rely on economic analysis as in the recent debate about austerity (Blyth 2012). There are important examples that go in the other direction with economists drawing upon political science, as in the recent debates about democracy and development (Acemoglu and Robinson 2005) or income inequality (Piketty 2014). Nevertheless, it is a harsh reality that in a world indexed by Google and narrated by Twitter, the barriers to entry in any disciplinary conversation are large. There is simply too much material out there that is too accessible. Just keeping abreast with the pace of analysis and commentary within a given discipline is enough of a challenge to occupy the time of any academic, analyst or researcher. As a consequence, much value added is lost. The purpose of this special issue is help redress the balance. In doing so,
we hope to honour the memory of Max Watson, who was an academic, analyst and policymaker who showed the true value of interdisciplinary research and cross-disciplinary conversation. Organizing a series of seminars and a workshop on these very issues were among his last scholarly endeavours. We are privileged to be able to complete a project started with him and that he so generously supported. Our contribution with this collection is two-fold. First, we make avail-
able the insights of some of the most accomplished economists and policymakers working on the crisis in the euro area to a wider research community from cognate disciplines. With few exceptions that will be easy to spot from the notes on contributors, these are not ‘interdisciplinary’ scholars. They work within the economics discipline, where they have achieved the highest level of recognition. We have asked these contributors to write in accessible language and to focus on questions of broad significance. They have responded with a wealth of insight about opportunities missed, flaws uncovered, data misinterpreted, experience ignored and politics trumping economics. Each of these arguments sheds light on a different aspect of the European dilemma and each reveals an agenda for positive action. Some of this action is conceptual and shows how we can better understand the dynamics at work both in the current crisis and looking to the future; some is more practical and suggests how we can reshape European institutions to make them more resilient — and integration more sustainable — looking to the future. The abstracts to the different essays provide a quick survey of the material they contain, and so, we do not repeat that information here. The success of that contribution should be measured in terms of the
breadth of appeal — both for the individual papers and for the collection as a whole. Hence, the goal of these essays is not to push forward scientific knowledge in the ‘normal’ manner described by Kuhn (1970). Strict disciplinary journals would be more appropriate for such arguments. But
714 Erik Jones and Francisco Torres
then, our ambition to foster cross-disciplinary exchange would be thwarted. Hence, we encouraged our contributors to challenge fundamental assumptions and to look across disciplinary boundaries. In doing so, we asked them to work outside their comfort zones and to develop arguments that are more familiar to those working in other disciplines. This should create multiple avenues for engagement. This explains our second contribution, which is to show how the essays
in this collection map onto a number of important debates in political science. We use the introduction and conclusion to achieve that objective. This allows us to highlight areas we believe are of particular concern. It also makes it easy for us to show how this kind of cross-disciplinary engagement can take place. We offer a gateway not a finished product. There are other themes from political science that recur in these essays. We leave these for the reader to discover. Moreover, the value added to draw from this type of collection will always be a work in progress. If we can introduce these arguments to a new audience and show how they can be folded into existing debates with which that audience is likely to be familiar, we can begin the cross-disciplinary conversation. The introduction sets the stage by sketching four areas for attention that
are well known within the political science community: the framework for multilevel governance, the role of ideas in policymaking, the interaction between power politics and distributive bargaining, and the challenge of popular legitimation. These are critical themes in the current crisis and important areas of overlap in economic and political analysis. Hence, the aim of the introduction is to show how these themes emerge in the essays that follow. The goal of the conclusion is to suggest how both economists and politi-
cal scientists can use shared themes to foster a coherent and productive cross-disciplinary conversation. That conversation should help us move towards a two-fold objective: it should improve the quality of the answers we provide to important questions in the scholarly literature and should also help to shape recommendations for strengthening public policy. Clearly, the European Union needs to make progress on both dimensions. There is a wealth of insight and analysis out there to be exploited offering a variety of solutions to the wide array of pressing problems. At the moment, though, the interaction between economics and politics is working against effective public policymaking. The solutions that are acceptable are not effective, and many of the measures that could improve the situation are unpopular (if not simply unacceptable). It is times like these that we need to start thinking outside of disciplinary boxes.
