Putting the blame of Europe's economic woes on sinister forces operating behind the scenes has always had its charm and its advocates. Suffice it to recall General de Gaulle's invectives against what he used to name the "gnomes of Zürich," i.e. the financial markets, guilty in his view of the travails of the French franc in the 1960s.
The crisis that the Eurozone is currently going through has provided a unique terrain for conspiracy theories to blossom one more time. A race is on among politicians and economists who try to identify which sly interests have created or prolonged the current economic turmoil in the southern countries of the Eurozone.
For conspiracy mongers, the crisis owes little, or even nothing, to the fact that the sovereign debt of southern European countries had taken them to the point of near-insolvency. Plot theorists brush aside the fact that markets had reasons to be afraid of never seeing their money back and, as a result, raised significantly the interests on those countries' sovereign bonds.
The true mover of the markets, according to conspiracy designers, was a perverse desire to subdue European countries of the Mediterranean bank, and for that matter the Eurozone altogether.
Thus, at the beginning of the Greek crisis, the Prime Minister of the time, George Papandreou, was loath to recognize the responsibility of the State, and that of his own party, in his country's predicament. He chose instead to accuse external forces of maliciously attacking Greece's government bonds and banks.
In the same fashion, when markets became distrustful of Spain's solvency, the intelligence services of that country reportedly initiated an enquiry aimed at identifying the foreign forces that had engineered the rise in interest rates charged on government bonds.
A convenient culprit was swiftly found. Conspirators had their headquarters, not in Zurich as in de Gaulle's time, but in the Anglo-Saxon financial and media establishment. The ulterior motive, we were told, was to sink the euro. Proof of the plot: markets had engaged in massive short-selling of the single currency, bringing down the value of the euro vis-à-vis other world currencies, notably the dollar.
