Of Accountants, Europeanists and Monetary Guardians – Troika Institutions as International Bureaucracies

The cooperation of the IMF, the European Commission and the ECB in providing financial assistance to Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus has been shaped by substantial conflicts concerning the main policy areas of a lending program. In our view these conflicts indicate underlying organizational differences to approach financial assistance. While the IMF pursues the purpose of securing the repayment of its loans by playing the role of an ‘Accountant’, the EC acts as a ‘Europeanist’ by interpreting the compatibility of conditionalities with European rules as way to regain the debtor country’s competitiveness. The ECB as the ‘Monetary Guardian’ is focused on securing financial and monetary stability in the Eurozone. Drawing on empirical evidence on IMF-EU interaction in four Eurozone programs, we argue that an understanding of the troika institutions as ‘international bureaucracies’, following different mandates, internal bureaucratic rules and legacies sheds light on the reasons behind these differing approaches. The paper is based on a larger research project which studies Troika-debtor government interaction in European credit lending in response to the latest financial crisis.