The euro crisis started in earnest in early 2010 when Greece lost access to the markets and over the next two-and-a-half years it was the country that threatened the single currency the most. Trouble flared up again in 2015 as the new government, led by Tsipras, brought Greece even closer to the brink through its destructive policies and antagonistic negotiating tactics with creditors. This was part of a pattern. As the crisis in its most acute phase spread around the periphery of the euro area between 2010 and 2012, it kept on reverting in its most malign form to the nation where it had begun, shaping the actions of the European leaders trying to save it in ways that were often counter-productive. Since the Greek crisis was manifestly a sovereign debt crisis, it prompted policies not just for Greece but also for other peripheral countries that focused on tackling fiscal weaknesses, even though the sources of the euro crisis ran much deeper than budgetary misdemeanours.

For the single-currency club as a whole, the actions taken by European leaders involved the hasty erection of common defences to provide help in the form of official financing for members shut out from the markets. Although the new bail-out funds were an important addition to the euro area's institutions, they were an inadequate response. It was as if European leaders were erecting a rickety extension to the original defective building rather than carrying out the comprehensive reconstruction that was needed. What emerged from the reforms was essentially a revised version of Maastricht rather than a genuine move towards sharing debt burdens and fiscal resources through for example the introduction of jointly guaranteed eurobonds. The half-hearted measures were insufficient to overcome market fears, which meant that the ECB was forced to stave off panic through bond purchases. However, until Draghi's ‘whatever it takes’ pledge of July 2012, the central bank intervened in a reluctant and unconvincing way that also failed to restore confidence.

Just as important as these responses at the euro-zone level was a drive to tackle at the national level the fiscal failures that the German government in particular blamed for what had gone wrong.