To conclude, we consider a new parable of Job, from our own historical experience of welfare reform. Like a series of Russian nesting dolls, reform has many layers, from states to the individual. Here we return to the Financial Crisis of 2008 – a potent intimation that Fukuyama's ‘end of history’ was a false dawn.

After two years of deep economic decline across the West, in the summer of 2010 the European project almost collapsed; particularly because the bottomless pit of the Greek economic crisis became an existential threat for the ECB. The slow metabolism of European politics had crystallized the problem: the PIIGS countries – Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain – were the weakest economies in the eurozone and those most likely to default on their debts. The Achilles heel of the European project is that it is forged through compromised solutions between countries with a deep enmity towards each other; each solution is the basis for the next crisis.

The practical meaning of a ‘vulnerable economy’ is that speculators bet against the economy in a test of strength. In the summer of 2010, the inflation-averse ECB, led by Jean-Claude Trichet, entered cycle after cycle of extending loans and imposing reforms on Greece. Greece entered a cascade of reforming intervention and escalation, twelve cycles in all; governments fell under the strain, and protest and poverty spilled onto the streets of Athens. In European meetings, old grudges were recalled, and ultimatums came and went. The argument coalesced around the disapproving and moralizing German Lutheranordoliberal tradition and the supposed irresponsibility of Catholic and Orthodox Greece.

Ireland fell next. This perennially poor country walked into the global financial crisis in unusually rude health, buoyed not least by a private building boom. Once this bubble burst, a cascade of bank rescues and a declining tax take led to large government deficits. As private capital evaporated in 2010, the ECB stepped in as lender to the Irish sovereign, which in turn held up the Irish banks as lender of last resort and guaranteed repayment of bank losses. Uncomfortable with rolling over the ever-increasing loans, the ECB foresaw threats to the sovereign's solvency.