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stirring up of matters fed into and sustained the general uncertainty prevailing. Despite the decision of the Eurozone taken on 25 March, at the beginning of April it was reported that the government and the European socialist parties would be presenting a ‘more effective proposal’ for a new support mechanism, one without the IMF. A government official stated that he was not satisfied with the Brussels accord. ‘The government accepted it because it had no other choice’, Greece.indb 47 3/13/2014 1:56:36 PM 48 Part I: How we arrived at the first Memorandum but ‘an
of its part of the loan, the IMF indicated what its own contributions would be. Despite objections expressed at the meeting of its board of directors, its contribution was set at €28 billion, to be disbursed in 17 instalments (of approximately €1.65 billion each) over the next four years.2 The loan from the Eurozone and the IMF was to total €172.7 billion. On 13 March the Eurogroup finalised the terms for the release of its first instalment, of €39.4 billion. Approximately €30 billion of this was the agreed bonus in EFSF bonds, to be paid to bondholders who had
this crisis to its apparent conclusion (2010–15). I delineate the manner in which labour movement competition and/or cooperation is appraised, before setting out studied substantive indicators: levels of unemployment and employment security. Countries selected for case study are then presented. Four countries which exhibit different values in terms of status within the Eurozone and form of labour movement are chosen, so that deductions about the importance of these variables are as broad as possible. I outline in detail the cases of Germany
Introduction Our last case study, Cyprus, is particularly interesting insofar as it is the only one where there was a bail-in rather than a bailout during the Eurozone crisis. By the time Cyprus entered the Adjustment Programme, the rescue mechanisms had already been well institutionalised. In fact, it was 2013 when Cyprus signed the Economic Adjustment Programme as a result of delays on the part of both Cyprus and the European partners. Cyprus successfully exited the programme three years later in March 2016. The Cypriot
are suggested. Attention then turns to the political context that Habermas addressed. The failure of the Constitutional project and, five years on, the crisis of the Eurozone can be traced to the same underlying ‘conceptual deficit’: a dearth of postnational political thought. A reluctance to transcend the nation-state as a frame of reference has characterised elites as well as European populations – only a minority of key players (the late Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa 3 , for example) have stated this to be a problem. A critical
state of affairs is reinforced by a fierce competition amongst member states regarding corporate taxes and labour laws. In turn, I argue that poor policy choices can only partially explain the levels of indebtedness of the currently distressed member states. I claim that the design of the Eurozone and the “distributive vicious circle” I just mentioned played an important role in the origins of the Eurocrisis. In addition, I argue that freedom of movement generates two types of distributive obligations. First, EU mobile workers should be protected from the social risks
, transformed what was a crisis of capitalism into a crisis of the State, which could only be cured by drastic public spending cuts and structural reforms. Thus, as Mark Blyth aptly put it, ‘austerity became and remains the default policy response to the financial crisis in the Eurozone for both material and ideological reasons’:2 material because there have been few other easily available policy options, and ideological because the programme of reducing the size of the State matched the programmatic aims of the centre-right governments that governed most countries of the
Eurozone banks not to request immediate payment of the liabilities. Rather, the debts 113 Greece.indb 113 3/13/2014 1:56:40 PM 114 Part III: Debt restructuring and power games held were to be serviced over a significantly expanded temporal framework. This was all undertaken on a voluntary basis. The Commissioner responsible, Olli Rehn, proposed a comparable solution for Greece. The ECB withdrew its absolute rejection of this proposal when the representatives of the international banking sector (the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, ISDA) indicated
Tomorrow we approve the reform of the labour market and you will see that it’s going to be extremely, extremely aggressive. (Spanish Economy Minister Luis de Guindos to Olli Rehn, European Commission Vice-President and Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro. Brussels, February 2012) Spain is a country on the periphery of the Eurozone. After the introduction of the euro, Spanish unions concluded inter-sectoral agreements which attempted
state and structural funds together paint a picture of the EU in social policy until about 2010, when the Eurozone debt crisis was an opportunity for a major increase in regulatory ambition over member states combined with a strong distrust of social expenditure entrenched in policy. Since 2010 the member states of the EU have opted to increase the breadth and ambition of its role in social policy through fiscal governance mechanisms – a great expansion of the EU’s fiscal regulatory state (Schelkle 2009 ; Greer and Jarman 2016a ). The Eurozone crisis, and the