That's not to say oil isn't a factor in how hard the crisis hits, but it's hard for me to see it as the cause.

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

1. The most oil-exposed economies (Greece, Portugal, Spain...) have been hard hit in both trade balance and competitivity since 2008 by increased oil prices. This is part of what pushed them into crisis, and is a major part of what will keep them there. Getting free of oil dependence is capital intensive.

2. Economic downturn, unemployment, and wage deflation will decrease oil use. Greater energy efficiency will also do this. Even at constant or moderately increasing economic output, the EU's oil consumption declines.

Given that oil prices peaked in 2008, can it be argued that demand in Europe is dropping now because of oil prices?

Then again, the 2008 oil price peak is in dollars. Apparently the price of oil in Euros is again at historical maximums. The Euro has indeed depreciated maybe 30% with respect to the US Dollar since mid-2008.

tens of millions of people stand to see their lives ruined because the bureaucrats at the ECB don't understand introductory economics -- Dean Baker

Perhaps we could use some states as proxy, that is the trade deficit of Spain or Ireland with Saudi-Arabia or Libya. Or just imports from Saudi-Arabia.

Russia or Norway are perhaps more important for european oil imports, but do also have  export more diverse exports.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

It would be really interesting to see how much major economies spend to get their energy from "outside"

This crude ol eurozone crisis

Looking back 10 years, we find that Germany's cumulative current account surplus adds up to roughly $1,900bn, while the combined cumulative deficit of Italy, France, Spain, Greece and Portugal equates to $1,500bn (Chart 6). Most interestingly, our analysis suggests that oil has moved from 67% of the combined deficit of these countries in the 2000-2010 period to being close to 80%, suggesting that Germany's export surplus is effectively financing the rest of the Eurozone's oil deficit

[....] the torrent of material goodies that comes surging through the channels of the consumer economy is the payoff for cooperating with the existing order of things; so long as you want the things you're supposed to want, you can have them in fantastic abundance [....]

The entire operation of the modern magician state, after all, depends utterly on uninterrupted access to gargantuan supplies of cheap, highly concentrated energy. [.... The] largest fraction of [the energy] goes into produce that torrent of goods and services mentioned above, the collective payoff that keeps those target audiences docile. Now factor in the depletion of concentrated energy sources--above all petroleum, which provides 40% of the world energy supply and close to 100% of energy used in transportation [....]

[.... When people in the middle] criticize the system, their criticisms by and large focus on the barriers that keep them from having as large a share as the rich--not the ones that keep them from having as small a share as the poor, or to phrase things a little differently, that keep their privileged share from being distributed more fairly across the population as a whole.

[....] The real force behind [the 1960s protest] movement was the simple fact that the American middle classes were no longer willing to send their sons off to Vietnam, and were willing to use their not inconsiderable political clout to make that change of heart heard. It was indeed heard [....] Attempts to launch American antiwar movements since that time have foundered on the unmentionable but real fact that middle class Americans by and large have no trouble at all reconciling themselves to war, as long as someone else's kids are doing the fighting.

It's in this light that last year's spasmodic outbursts of protest from within the middle classes need to be understood. Since the peak of conventional petroleum production in 2005, economies around the world [....] have been stuck in a worsening spiral of dysfunction, and the middle classes have abruptly found themselves struggling to maintain their lifestyles. Their annoyance at that fact is easy to understand. From their point of view, after all, they've kept up their side of the bargain; they've bought what they were supposed to buy, borrowed when they were supposed to borrow, lined up obediently behind one or another of the approved political parties, and steered clear of all the hard questions [....]

The payoff is nowhere to be seen, in turn, as a result of processes sketched out more than thirty years ago in a forgotten classic of political economy, Paul Blumberg's 1980 study Inequality in an Age of Decline. Analyzing the downward spiral of the American economy in the 1970s [....] Blumberg showed that while a rising tide lifts all boats, a falling tide behaves in a much more selective fashion, as those groups with more political influence and economic clout are able to hang onto a disproportionate share of a shrinking pie at the expense of those with less.

The decades since Blumberg's book appeared have only sharpened his argument. One after another, nearly every economic sector has undergone drastic reorganizations that slashed jobs, pay, and benefits for everyone below the middle class, and a growing number of people in the lower end of the middle class itself. Now that everyone below them has been thrown under the bus, the middle classes are discovering that it's their turn next, as the classes above them scramble to maintain their own access to the payoffs of privilege [....]

[....] Now that the supply is running short, those lifestyles are going away, and since the decline in petroleum production is gradual rather than sudden, the way it works out is that some people are losing access to them sooner than others.

That's how borrowing what you are supposed to borrow correlates with the energy access.