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splits from the UK to rejoin the EU, this would create a border that would impede trade between the two. The UK was always an aloof member of the EU and has avoided some of the problems of Europe by staying out of the eurozone, and not signing up the Schengen agreement, which entailed maximally open borders within the EU. But even with these opt-outs, too many people were too unhappy with EU membership, and Brexit succeeded. In addition to the crisis of the euro, the EU is indeed a vast elite-led bureaucracy, its key governing bodies democratically remote from the
Given the significant similarities and differences between the welfare states of Northern Europe and their reactions to the perceived 'refugee crisis' of 2015, the book focuses primarily on the three main cases of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Placed in a wider Northern European context – and illustrated by those chapters that also discuss refugee experiences in Norway and the UK – the Danish, Swedish and German cases are the largest case studies of this edited volume. Thus, the book contributes to debates on the governance of non-citizens and the meaning of displacement, mobility and seeking asylum by providing interdisciplinary analyses of a largely overlooked region of the world, with two specific aims. First, we scrutinize the construction of the 2015 crisis as a response to the large influx of refugees, paying particular attention to the disciplinary discourses and bureaucratic structures that are associated with it. Second, we investigate refugees’ encounters with these bureaucratic structures and consider how these encounters shape hopes for building a new life after displacement. This allows us to show that the mobility of specific segments of the world’s population continues to be seen as a threat and a risk that has to be governed and controlled. Focusing on the Northern European context, our volume interrogates emerging policies and discourses as well as the lived experiences of bureaucratization from the perspective of individuals who find themselves the very objects of bureaucracies.
era was a fig leaf masking Soviet power helped newly democratic societies accept another supra-national jurisdiction. Greater supra-nationality remains one path for the Eurozone, a way to handle intervention within a broader political and constitutional framework. In 2008–9, when the American origin of the economic crisis, trigged by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, was beyond dispute, and the euro a refuge, the path to institutional design at the supra-national level might have been easier but the impetus only came in response to the problems of the Eurozone which
one in three of the population (36 per cent). Since the eruption of the sovereign debt crisis in late 2009, Greek governments have been obliged to implement three Economic Adjustment Programmes (EAP), under the supervision of the Troika and currently the Quartet,2 as a prerequisite for the loans granted in 2010, 2012 and 2015 by Eurozone partners and the International Monetary Fund. Prior to 2012, Greece’s minimum wage was determined by national-level collective bargaining and was a core feature of its wage-setting system. In 2012 and 2013, the Greek government
Ireland and the other peripheral countries only partially succeeded (at best) in undertaking this task, even as the income gap between them and the core European economies closed. This incomplete Europeanisation became a significant problem during the Eurozone crisis of 2008 and after. In Europe in the 2000s, as in the US, financialisation depoliticised growth and distribution and allowed these cracks in the European economy to be papered over – even as it drove a further wedge between core and periphery in Europe.18 However, the politics of capitalisms within Europe
geographic position would make it vulnerable to an expansion of illegal economic activities already present in Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. Economists who consider the strains between surplus and deficit countries in the Eurozone to be unsustainable advocate a Greek withdrawal from the Eurozone (Grexit) because Greece could then devalue – as if the Greek economy produces Managing space better 115 so many goods and services for which there is a market if only they cost less. Indeed, with a floating Greek currency, the price of imported goods would rise
Following the 2008 financial crisis, Portugal signed up to a four-year structural adjustment programme with the ‘Troika’ (i.e. the IMF, the ECB and the EU) in May 2011, which resulted in a €78 billion bailout on condition of severe cuts to State expenditure. Under a right-wing coalition Government, harsh tax increases, spending cuts and reductions to welfare benefits shaped the programme’s implementation. Similarly to other countries on the indebted periphery of the Eurozone, the core Portuguese policies of austerity centred on measures of internal devaluation, mainly
, which dominated the news for months, had been anticipated in 2008. By the time the depth and duration of the crisis became apparent, the opportunity for radical reform, either of creditdriven housing markets in the United States or of Eurozone governance, had passed. Structural reforms that worked in the 1990s became more difficult to launch, and less likely to show short-term results. Clearly something outside previous experience happened. Macro-economic and fiscal policies have yet to build a sustainable recovery. The loss of wealth and confidence will take years to
the problems of the Eurozone demonstrates, constitutional considerations weigh heavily when designing and implementing measures that reduce risks. Institutional frameworks and legal traditions vary from one jurisdiction to another, but the challenge remains, to arrive at roughly similar outcomes using different means, taking account of the fact that compliance at the sub-national level is critical. Conflicts over who does what, between existing and proposed regulations, and about whether government has acted within the rules or arbitrarily are likely to go to the
this order of magnitude are usually associated with other, dramatic events and geo-political crises. This is why the combination of the global crisis which has lifted uncertainty to unprecedented levels, and the demonstrable incapacity of the post-Cold War state system to cope with more instability than we have seen in a generation is so pregnant for the future. The lack of co-operation among nations on new financial regulations, the frustrations of the Eurozone torn between deficit-reduction rules and supply-side strategies to develop infrastructure and investment