The economic roots of the Eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis are fairly well understood by scholars and analysts, but the political forces behind the crisis less so, despite the fact that the Eurozone predicament derives fundamentally from an intersection of mostly political factors, which led to the recent breakdown in European Union relations between northern and southern states. This paper fills in many of the gaps, by examining both the historical and the political forces behind the current Eurozone debt crisis with reference to Greece’s continuing debt problems.

In October 2012, the Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the EU with the 2012 peace prize for creating a peaceful and stable Europe after the destructive wars and economic crises of the twentieth century. However, it would have been more appropriate to bestow the prize on the ‘Troika’: the European Commission (EC), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with special acknowledgement to ‘Super’ Mario Draghi, the president of the ECB who has done more than anyone to ease the Eurozone’s ongoing and existential economic crisis and keep the union still intact.