Interests

Abstract

At the height of the global financial crisis, an internationally coordinated crisis response was in every EU member state’s best interest. By March 2009 the global economy had entered the deepest and most widespread recession since World War II. Economic growth in the EU was expected to contract by 4 percent in 2009, and unemployment rates hit a postwar record high (European Commission, 2009c). Central and Eastern European Countries were particularly hard hit by the crisis as a result of their large degree of openness and high share of manufactured products in their export structure (Cardo & Martin, 2010: 22). And given that many European banks had invested hundreds of billions of dollars in Central and Eastern European economies, a possible collapse of the European periphery posed an additional existential threat to the EU’s banking sector (Gros, 2009: 2). Hence, all EU23 countries had a key interest in averting the global economic downturn.