politics, economy and employment & labour
The last year has seen the Right and extreme Right capitalise on the dissatisfaction and despair fostered by neoliberalism – and usher in a ‘post-neoliberal order’. Their success is based on championing and monopolising the idea of national sovereignty, but only of a certain kind. The Left has accepted their discourse that national sovereignty goes […]
The question of public debt is once again making headlines across Europe, most notably in Italy and Greece. Yet, public debt is not among the most pressing issues facing the EU and Eurozone (with the possible exception of Greece), at least from a financial-economic standpoint. Moreover, when talking of “the problem of public debt” or […]
Since the crisis began in 2008, an intense European discussion has challenged official policy priorities. Civil society organisations (CSOs), trade unions, think tanks and grassroots campaigns have called for ending austerity and restoring shared prosperity, reforming (or dismantling) EU institutions, reducing inequality and making Europe more inclusive, achieving environmental sustainability and reacting to climate change […]
Italy’s latest budget bill – approved just a few days ago – confirms what many government critics have been saying all along: Matteo Renzi’s anti-austerity rhetoric is nothing more than that. Ever since his appointment as prime minister, in February 2014, Renzi has been an outspoken critic of austerity. Recent headlines – often accompanied by […]
Italy is once again in the spotlight. As its banking system undergoes a slow-motion implosion – the country’s banks are weighed down by €360 billion of bad loans, of which €200bn are deemed insolvent – all eyes are now on the Renzi government. How did we get to this point? Though there have been some […]
Throughout the crisis – and ostensibly as a response to it – Europe has increased its focus on external competitiveness as a means to transform both the EU and eurozone into a huge German-style, export-led economic machine (as emphasised by the Global Europe strategy). Various experts and economists have pointed out that this is a […]
Europe’s post-crisis response – consisting of a combination of fiscal austerity, neoliberal structural reforms and expansionary monetary policies – has unambiguously failed. In early 2016 – eight years after the outbreak of the financial crisis – the eurozone’s overall real GDP was still below the pre-crisis peak (March 2008). The Greek economy was 27.6 per […]
In recent weeks, Germany has put forward two proposals for the ‘future viability’ of the EMU that, if approved, would radically alter the nature of the currency union. For the worse. The first proposal, already at the centre of high-level intergovernmental discussions, comes from the German Council of Economic Experts, the country’s most influential economic […]
On 1 January 2016 the EU’s banking union – an EU-level banking supervision and resolution system – officially came into force. The move to a banking union has been the most significant regulatory outcome of the crisis – ‘a change of regime, rather than an act of institutional tinkering’, as Christos Hadjiemmanuil of the London […]
The global financial crisis has exposed the deep flaws of the euro, and particularly Maastricht’s original sin: to have deprived member states of their fiscal autonomy – by taking away their power to issue money and by imposing strict (and totally arbitrary) limits on government deficits through the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) – without […]
The Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has recently been making headlines in the European and international press for his anti-austerity stance. ‘If Europe does not change course there will be no growth’, Renzi recently said in a speech to parliament, warning the ‘high priests and prophets of austerity’ that ‘there can be no stability if […]
In the first part of this article I looked at the mounting evidence against austerity by organisations as varied as Caritas, the ILO, the Council of Europe and the IMF. So why is the European establishment pushing for more of the same? Social and economic misery and despair, growing inequality, dwindling public services, loss of hope and […]
