The European crisis has been a political crisis that questions our understanding of national democracies in the new global environment. Economists and political scientists have produced extensive analyses about the European crisis. However, scholars of both disciplines have refrained from studying the interaction between economics and politics. This brief analyzes the interaction between the euro and national politics and between the national narratives of the euro crisis and the economics of the crisis itself. At first sight, the implications of a political-economic analysis of the crisis seem very compelling: national democracy as we conceive it may not be compatible with a monetary union; our concept of a nation state needs to change since it runs against the logic of an interdependent world influenced by the dramatic historical experiences of the 20th century; national politics is struggling to abandon the ideological references of closed economies; the root causes of the European crisis may be traced to the stratagems national politics have resorted to in order to minimize the political costs from the adjustment in the 2000s to the globalization of the economies unable to adjust their exchange rates.
However, the actual political lesson of the crisis remains unheeded.

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