From Washington to Berlin via Brussels and Back: The IMF as Challenger of Discursive Framing Strategies in the European Debt Crisis

The paper investigates the role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a discursive challenger of the efforts of Eurozone Member States – and the German Federal Government in particular – to resolve the European debt crisis. The IMF is an essential point of reference to elucidate the emergence of discursive alliances and controversies across the national, regional and global levels, for two reasons. First, while the involvement of the IMF in bail-out programs has been a core element of the German Federal Government’s approach towards crisis management, the IMF clashed with both the European Commission and the Federal Government over the question of debt forgiveness. From a German and European perspective, the IMF therefore moves into the ambiguous role of partner and challenger in the conduct of crisis management. Second, the demands made by the IMF about debt relief programs cut deep into debates about the boundaries of political action as prescribed in both European primary and German constitutional law, and point to deeply divisive questions about solidarity and subsidiarity between Eurozone members in the party political debate. Against this background, the question asked in the paper is how the IMF emerges as a discursive challenger of the public justification of crisis management policies both within and outside the Eurozone. This question involves two aspects. First, declarations by the Federal Government in parliamentary discourse and in public statements by leading EU and IMF officials are compared with regard to the justification and discursive framing of crisis resolution strategies. Second, coverage in the quality press in Germany and the US is compared to assess how and to what extent the IMF is perceived as a critical challenger of Eurozone crisis management in the public view.