Kathleen R. McNamara lays out the reasons to be skeptical that the euro can survive in anything like it’s current form.

McNamara’s brand of political economics begins from the right presumption: that in political economy, politics comes first. Models that fail to account for the role of institutions, of beliefs, or of power will fail to capture any of features that matter most when systems begin to fail.

Politics is an autonomous part of social life. It has its own logic and its own explanations. Although political science is a discipline of magpies forever borrowing from other fields’ shinier epistemologies and methodologies, work such as McNamara’s essay (echoed in comments such as Dan Drezner’s) should remind us that paying attention to the core of our own discipline can lead us to novel and powerful insights.