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coercion upon those on lower incomes. In short, we witness social democratic party actors continue to adopt an optimistic, cosmopolitan social democratic position as outlined above, viewing the Great Recession as a crisis-cum-opportunity through which to realise such an agenda. These initiatives have subsequently been promoted within the institutions of the European Union, witnessing for instance the PES leaders’ tabling of its ‘declaration on strengthening the Euro-zone and preparing the EU2020 Strategy’ at the European Council meeting of March 2010 (PES, 2010). EU
2008 led to a sovereign debt crisis after governments intervened to try to prop up their banking systems. This in turn contributed to the very specific Eurozone crisis that developed due to the constraints of EMU, and these three financial and economic factors in turn caused a widespread social and political crisis. The second overarching crisis is that of European integration. One analysis identified at least 13 different areas where the EU integration process has been challenged by ‘separate though related crises’ that are ‘multi-faceted in
evident, the PES began to try to develop new ideas and policies, in particular by challenging the growing move towards austerity programmes and instead calling for ambitious investment programmes. Third, as the crisis moved on to become a very specific threat to the stability and security of the Euro-zone, the PES began to focus particularly on the future cohesion of the single currency and of the EU, trying to find a means of encouraging European unity. In the The PES and the financial crisis217 final section, we analyse the policy response. Our analysis is built
Commission substituting for a venerable monarchy or a heroic republic. A lengthy financial crisis – which initially was dismissed as a temporary crisis of liquidity affecting several unimportant eurozone countries, only to turn into a systemic emergency exposing the disfunctionality of the currency union in fundamental respects – has undermined faith in the EU’s more vaulting goals. Effective common responses to the crisis have eluded EU decision-makers. As capital has fled homewards from stricken countries like Spain, Greece and Ireland in a desperate search for
of states (including those outside the Eurozone) in the early stages of debt crisis; enabling the ECB to provide member states with low-interest credit to finance social development; taxation of all speculative transactions; new taxes to be imposed on big capital and financial assets; abolition of tax havens established inside and outside of European territory and the banning of hedge funds and junk bonds; creation of a European public rating agency so that European countries would no longer be held hostage by private rating agencies; and issues of Eurobonds to
national GDPs, and a small EU corporate tax would be launched to fund the programmes of the agency. At the level of rule-making, both the Commission and the Parliament would evaluate the design of the common market and the Eurozone in light of the new distributive goals. A minimum EU corporate rate and an EU Labour Code consistent with the different level of prices of member states would be introduced to avoid tax competition and social dumping. The European Central Bank would incorporate distributive concerns when setting targets for the euro exchange rate. In turn, all
Ironically, the economic policies embraced by the Tories reflect the same commitment to fiscal austerity and ‘structural adjustment strategies’ that shift the costs of adjustment from capital and finance to labor that have been embraced by the EU and more particularly by the countries of the Eurozone since the 1990s, but with renewed vigour and ideological commitment since the Eurozone crisis of 2010–11. 16 The British experience suggests that political elites that persist in promulgating such policies, whether domestically or at the European level, do so at significant
based on the untrammelled supremacy of the United States. As the United States is preoccupied with internal troubles and the eurozone is mired in a debilitating debt crisis, a vacuum is increasingly being felt in the international system. This presents an opportunity for the BRICS to emerge as major global players. Plans are underway for some joint projects. A joint BRICS development bank that would finance investments in developing nations is on the anvil. But overall momentum for BRICS, a much-hyped initiative, seems to be flagging. Growth-rate estimates for all
were unable to meet their obligations. And it was the bursting of the bubbles that led to rising unemployment rates, saddling GIPSI countries with the rising burdens of the newly jobless. But what made all this catastrophic was that the GIPSI countries were all in the euro-zone and did not have their own currencies. If they had, they could simply have devalued them, allowing them to fall, as Iceland did, bringing the cost of their exports down by the rate of devaluation. Iceland had another advantage because it refused to salvage its banks. But GIPSI countries had
that the principles of neo-monetarism and supply-side economics should be imposed by constitutional rules, sanctions and through independent institutions (Feld et al. , 2015 ; Ferrera, 2020 ; Warlouzet, 2019 ; Young, 2014 ). The SGP is a paradigmatic example of the constitutionalisation of ordoliberalism as it calls for sound public finances, institutionalises monitoring devices and sanctions, and delegates monetary policy to the ECB. Moreover, global and European constraints are interrelated, as Eurozone members lost the power to print money and hence to