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The architecture of European labour policy has changed in the past years of the euro crisis and its management. While in the pre-crisis phase EU labour policy still had a mainly symbolic character, the EU crisis management gave it a much more binding character. The article analyses the continuities and shifts in European labour policy against the background of austerity and crisis policy arguing that a new labour policy complex was able to emerge at the European level. While institutional shifts were considerable, the market-liberal orientation of labour policy remained in place. However, it was radicalized with the resilience approach. The article therefore provides an overview of the continuity and change of European labour policy in the euro crisis on the basis of institutional and discursive shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom about the European sovereign debt crisis and its handling defends that fiscal austerity is unpopular and that external conditionality and/or imposition on national democracies generates backlash. However, not enough research has addressed this question: How willing are citizens to accept unpopular policies imposed on their national governments by European institutions? Would they object to unpopular policies less if these were coming from their national representatives? In this article, we propose a survey experiment, complemented by four focus groups, to test whether citizens' willingness to accept economic policies varies depending on whether the decision originates in the national parliament or in EU institutions. The experiment was conducted in Spain in 2017. Our results show that agreement with a particular policy does not depend on the policy-making actor but on the policy's content. The bitter pill of austerity is no less bitter because elected politicians decide it at home. Similarly, EU 'diktat' does not make a popular policy less popular. Our conclusion is that Spanish citizens during the Euro crisis objected to the policy of austerity due in large part to its content and not to the EU intervention in favour of implementing it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of its introduction is threefold: We start from a conceptual clarification of preference formation, defining it provisionally as a political process 'by which social actors decide what they want and what to pursue'. After an analysis of different conceptual and theoretical approaches, the introduction offers a critique of liberal intergovernmentalism, one of the major explanatory frameworks of preference formation in European Union studies. This critique centres on the context in which national preference formation took place during the European Monetary Union crisis. This special issue argues that the conceptualisation of preference formation as state-based, unidirectional and unchanged by the regime is deeply problematic. Preference formation is typically messy and non-linear and rarely closed to the possibility that both preferences and positions may change, sometimes radically, it is even more complex, context-sensitive, and open to a wide range of influences in a multi-level system such as the European Union. In other words, the traditional understanding of preference formation as a purely domestic process of interest aggregation and competition require revision given the multiple factors that shape preferences in general and in the interdependent policy-making of the European Union in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to analyse the costs of responsible governance on the national political establishment of the Eurozone in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Our analysis tests two main hypotheses. First, we argue that financial crises like the one unleashed by the global financial meltdown of 2008 have an asymmetric impact on the electoral records of establishment parties depending on whether the countries affected by the financial crisis were financially intervened in or not. Our second hypothesis states that externally imposed austerity affects Left and Right national establishment parties differently. By choosing to act responsibly, that is, assuming the conditions of the intervention, the establishment Left pays a much larger electoral price than the one paid by the establishment Right under the same circumstances. To test our argument, we use a panel data set of 12 countries from the Eurozone in the period between 1999 (stage III of the monetary union) and 2015 that contains 54 country-election-year observations. Our findings show strong support for our two hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research has identified the frames and metaphors used in the reporting on the Euro crisis. War and disease turned out to be the two most frequently used metaphorical frames. Since coverage of the current financial crisis may have a tangible effect on public opinion, research into the effects of metaphorical frames on attitudes is needed. By employing two survey experiments, a student sample (N = 259) and a nonstudent sample (N = 507), this article traces the effects of both metaphorical frames. Our results show that individuals take over the metaphorical frame elements in their evaluation of the Euro crisis. Participants in the war conditions significantly more often referred to war when answering the open questions. Alternatively, when the Euro crisis was framed as a disease, participants were more likely to use words and sentences containing disease frame elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euro crisis has revealed severe conflicts between EU member states and challenged a shared European identity. This article investigates how the crisis was reflected in identity constructions in media discourses in EU key countries. European identity construction is conceptualized as framing of the EU in favour or against belonging to the EU and togetherness with other members. Conducting a systematic content analysis of two weekly newspapers and magazines in Germany, France and the UK, we compare identity constructions between 2011 and 2014. Findings show that while support of belonging to the EU is low in general, the countries differ remarkably in terms of their sense of togetherness. This particularly applies to strong or weak political integration, market regulation or market freedom and financial stability or impulses for economic growth. The positions reflect long-term political conflicts between the countries but are also flexible enough to adapt to the particular event context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Central Bank (ECB) is one of the most independent central banks in the world, but this independence is also highly constrained: the Maastricht Treaty established a primary mandate to pursue price stability and prohibited it from engaging in monetary financing. Using an historical institutional framework, this article analyses the ECB's unconventional monetary policy during the Euro crisis. The Maastricht Treaty's constraints forced the ECB to act incrementally during the crisis and rely primarily on the layering of institutional changes. Nevertheless, the self-reinforcing effect identified by historical institutionalism meant that these gradual changes had important consequences over time. The unconventional monetary policies are contrasted with the more drastic institutional change instigated by the Member States, the ECB's designation as the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM). The self-reinforcing effects and path dependence set by the ECB's high degree of independence in the Maastricht Treaty, however, also constrained the EU in ensuring the accountability of the ECB, as the accountability structure is another instance of layering despite the very different nature and consequences of financial policy supervision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is little doubt that the European Central Bank (ECB), and in particular its presidency, has taken the lead in tackling the euro crisis. But can this leadership be also characterised as charismatic? This article answers the question by focusing on language – a key component as well as a reliable indicator of charisma. By means of a software‐assisted content analysis of the entire corpus of ECB presidential speeches, it is found that the crisis has indeed led to the emergence of the Bank's presidency as a charismatic euro leader. This in turn confirms the recent politicisation of the ECB, but at the same time might be seen as mitigating the problems related to the Bank's democratic deficit, to the extent that charisma can be seen, from a Weberian standpoint, as an alternative source of political legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union (EU) response to the euro crisis brought new relevance to the debate on socialization through European institutions. While previous studies differ in their support for EU socialization, many have argued that the euro crisis revealed a far-reaching convergence of views among Europe's leaders. Theoretically, the European Central Bank (ECB) in particular is expected to have the power to socialize its governors into a common worldview. The present article questions this proposition. Using the technique of cognitive mapping to provide an in-depth analysis of the views of five members of the ECB Governing Board, we find that even for ECB governors national culture generally trumps EU socialization. Only for ECB President Trichet significant evidence of EU socialization is found. The study also points to some new scope-conditions for socialization that may further our understanding of how European institutions may foster the sustainable socialization of views. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this contribution is to account for the different political reform trajectories resulting from two of the most recent governance challenges faced by the European Union (EU), the so-called euro and refugee crises. While the euro crisis triggered various EU-level reforms, the refugee crisis has produced calls for policy and institutional reforms, most of which have - to date - not been adopted or implemented. We employ a liberal intergovernmentalist framework and show that differences in member states’ preferences in the two crises ensue from different exposures to negative externalities. Moreover, we attribute differences in EU member states’ willingness to engage in political reforms to variation in preference constellations among member states, producing different situation structures and bargaining dynamics. While the EU’s response to the euro crisis reflects a situation structure, which highlights both redistributive conflict and a demand for joint action, the response to the refugee crisis resembles a ‘Rambo’ game situation: the states least affected by migratory pressure were satisfied with the institutional status quo, and were thus able to leave the more affected states aggrieved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical studies investigating political parallelism in news coverage mostly look at the frequency and evaluation of party actors, though political parallelism is not only tied to parties but also to broader political ideologies. By contrast, this study examines country differences in political parallelism focusing on the alignment of media's issue interpretations with political ideologies. Based on a content analysis of 7256 statements in 961 articles about the Euro crisis in German and Spanish online newspapers, issue frames were identified in a data-driven approach before examining how the argumentative structure of these frames referred to ideologies. Results show that ideology-guided framing is present in nearly half of all articles. But Spanish media more often used frames corresponding to their political alignment than their German counterparts indicating stronger political parallelism in the Mediterranean Model. Thus, the results support the revision of the Hallin/Mancini Model of media systems proposed by Brüggemann et al. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How have European Union institutional actors sought to build, defend or undermine the legitimacy of crisis management during the euro crisis? Scholars have tended to investigate the euro crisis from either a pragmatic and prescriptive perspective - asking which reforms are necessary to build legitimacy in the governance structure of the Eurozone - or an analytical perspective focused on the power wielding of actors useful for understanding what actors have done and why they have been influential or not. The paper argues that rather than bifurcating the issues of legitimacy and power politics, much may be gained by investigating the relationship between legitimacy and power. Specifically, the paper employs the concept of ideational power to analyze the strategies through which actors have sought to defend their claims to three constitutive dimensions of legitimacy - input, output and throughput legitimacy - and proposes a matrix of nine pathways to legitimation that played into processes of legitimacy battles in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the ECB helped mitigate the euro crisis in the aftermath of Lehman, it has stretched its monetary mandate and moved into fiscal territory. This text describes and summarizes the crucial role played by the ECB in the intervention spiral resulting from its bid to manage the crisis. It also outlines ongoing competitiveness problems in southern Europe, discusses the so-called austerity policy of the Troika, comments on QE and presents two alternative paths for the future development of Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure seeks to prevent and correct destabilizing economic imbalances in the European Union (EU). Scholars are divided as to whether this instrument of economic policy co-ordination relies on familiar intergovernmental modes of decision-making or reflects supranational institutions more significant role in economic policy following the euro crisis. Such diametrically opposed interpretations are symptomatic of longstanding concerns over the lack of a clear-cut definition of European integration. To address these definitional difficulties, this article turns to the concept of legalization. Taking account of the design and early implementation of the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure and using the Broad Economic Policy Guidelines as a point of comparison, it shows that the former can be understood as a modest but clear-cut increase in legalization compared to the latter. On this basis, it considers whether legalization, in spite of its own conceptual limitations, can contribute to a more rigorous definition of European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the metaphoric frames in the coverage of the Euro crisis in newspapers across five EU countries. Our quantitative frame analysis identified five dominant frames: war, construction, disease, natural disaster, and game. In all five countries, the Euro crisis as war turned out to be the most prominent news frame. Such framing uses martial, aggressive language to describe the European public sphere. This finding is not without importance, as newspapers play a key role in shaping the general public’s perception of the Euro crisis and by extension the European Union’s institutional elite and its (in)ability to cope with crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the (lack of any lasting) impact of John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory on economic policy-making in Germany. The analysis highlights the interplay between economic history and the history of ideas in shaping policy-making in postwar (West) Germany. The paper argues that Germany learned the wrong lessons from its own history and misread the true sources of its postwar success. Monetary mythology and the Bundesbank, with its distinctive anti-inflationary bias, feature prominently in this collective odyssey. The analysis shows that the crisis of the euro today is largely the consequence of Germany’s peculiar anti-Keynesianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The EU is a distinct actor in global politics. Researchers have developed different concepts to explain its sui generis nature. All approaches, however, converge in the sense that the EU has acted as an important transformative power that altered political preferences in member and candidate countries and informed dominant policy paradigms that organise state-market relations in its sphere of influence. This study argues that the EU's transformative power is under stress as never before due to the internal and external political economy challenges. From an internal point of view, the way in which the euro crisis and migration waves were managed dramatically jeopardized the solidarity ethos in the EU. From an external point of view, the changing international order and the rise of emerging powers weaken the appeal of the EU governance model in global politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Previous research finds citizens' attitudes towards international redistribution in the European sovereign debt crisis to be related to party preferences. This article further reveals the nature of this link. We show that citizens follow party cues on international bailouts, rather than having merely ideologically congruent positions. By employing an original survey experiment that exposes respondents to elite cues, we additionally uncover underlying dynamics. First, party cues mobilize support for bailouts even in the face of salient elite dissent and, second, even a strong elite consensus does not affect citizens without PID and low levels of political sophistication. The findings of the experiment are cross‐validated with data from the voter survey of European Election Study 2014. The results suggest that current debates about international bailout packages deepen a polarization between politicized and non‐politicized Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the perforation of national states by immigration, integration and trade may signify a critical juncture in the political development of Europe no less consequential for political parties and party systems than the previous junctures that Lipset and Rokkan detect in their classic article. We present evidence suggesting that (1) party systems are determined in episodic breaks from the past; (2) political parties are programmatically inflexible; and, (3) as a consequence, party system change comes in the form of rising parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Question time represents one of the most relevant institutional arenas where parties compete to get their favourite issues on the parliamentary agenda. Parties select which issue to address by weighing up two commitments simultaneously: fulfilling the party mandate received by their voters at election time and responding to the current priorities of voters. This article assesses the extent to which the recent sovereign debt crisis impacted the way parties balance these two imperatives of democratic representation. Through the issue coding of around 10,000 parliamentary oral questions tabled in Italy, Portugal and Spain between 2003 and 2014, the analysis shows that the worsening of economic conditions intensified the impact of citizens’ priorities. However, there is no clear evidence of a decline in the importance of the party mandate for either the majority or opposition parties. These findings offer insights on the topic of party political representation in Southern Europe and whether it was affected by the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the comparative capitalism literature, the European Central Bank's (ECB's) ‘one-size-fits-none’ monetary policy played a key role in the widening of trade imbalances in the euro area (EA) by being overly restrictive for the region's coordinated market economies (CMEs) and overly expansionary for the region's mixed market economies (MMEs). According to this literature, wage setting institutions mediated how the ECB's monetary policy re-distributed resources between the traded and non-traded sectors in these varieties of capitalism. By examining three separate transmission channels of the ECB's monetary policies (wage and price setting in labor and product markets; nominal exchange rate of the euro; funding costs and bank credit), this paper goes beyond the traditional emphasis on wage setting institutions and draws attention to those institutions that underpin the non-price competitiveness of traded sectors. Overall, the paper explains how the institutional infrastructure of the CMEs bolstered the adaptability of their traded sectors to the ECB's single monetary policy and its three transmission mechanisms – both during the pre-crisis era of widening imbalances and the period of asymmetrical trade rebalancing since the outbreak of the euro crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demarcated by growing austerity, economic uncertainty and EU-exits, the past decade witnessed monumental shifts across the political and economic landscapes of Europe. Citizenship is a stabilising force in this era of crisis, particularly for intra-EU migrants. In this contribution, I examine how the Euro crisis impacted citizenship acquisition among these migrants. Building upon the model proposed by John Graeber's article [2016. 'Citizenship in the shadow of the Euro crisis: explaining changing patterns in naturalisation among intra-EU migrants.' Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 42 (10): 1670-1692], I discuss the relative importance of citizenship in times of crisis from global and regional perspectives. I argue Graeber's theory presents a strong model for citizenship acquisitions during the crisis, yet leaves the core dyadic structure and several inconsistent findings unexamined. I replicate these models and introduce a dyadic model using bilateral data from 21 receiving and 23 sending states in Europe between 2007 and 2013. Contrary to Graeber's theory, I find citizenship acquisitions among intra-EU migrants primarily coincide with increased in-migration, rather than influences of the Euro crisis. I conclude that while economic sending and receiving contexts matter, the Euro crisis did not appear to restructure intra-EU migrant citizenship incentives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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How do political parties respond to a major economic shock? This article studies this question in the context of the eurozone crisis. Specifically, I analyze the partisan appeals made by German politicians in the run-up to the 2013 federal election in Germany. Contrary to existing models of party responsiveness, I argue that enacting quick crisis resolution mechanisms is not always the main concern of reelection-seeking politicians. Instead, officials may have incentives to deliberately withhold emergency measures in an effort to win a mandate for more comprehensive policy solutions later. The findings have implications for notions of democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euro crisis has put to test the intergovernmental decision-making regime institutionalized by the 2009 Lisbon Treaty for dealing with the economic policy side of the Economic and Monetary Union. Under the pressure of the euro collapse, the heads of state and government have introduced new legal measures and intergovernmental treaties that have radically transformed the European economic governance. How to interpret this transformation? The article discusses two of the main paradigms (liberal intergovernmentalism and neo-functionalism) used by scholars for interpreting the EU, showing their weakness in explaining that transformation. Looking at the euro crisis institutional implications through the two paradigms is a necessary exercise for elaborating a more comprehensive approach to the changes in the European economic governance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The European Union is facing multiple crises: the euro and sovereign debt crisis puts into question its economic and social cohesion as well as the rules of coexistence within the Economic and Monetary Union; the refugee crisis brought to the fore a high degree of disagreement among member states as to the duties of mutual solidarity and assistance; Brexit highlighted the need to continuously justify EU membership (Britain being the most evident, but not at all the only case in which public opinion sees membership with deep scepticism), and to address the social and economic roots of dissatisfaction with the EU – inasmuch as EU-internal, economically motivated migration has been one of the key issues of the ‘leave’ campaign; the security crisis put into question the Schengen agreement and the mutual trust between member states in security issues. The political conundrum currently challenging the EU calls for reflection on what went wrong with the process of European integration in the first place. The essay offers a possible diagnosis and traces a number of scenarios for the future development of the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In mid-November 2011, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tendered his formal resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano. It was a humiliating ‘political exit’ for the controversial Italian leader who had been the dominant figure in Italian politics since the mid-1990s. With Italy in the throes of an unprecedented financial crisis, Berlusconi’s squabbling centre-right coalition had appeared increasingly incapable of dealing with the economic emergency engulfing the country. To restore credibility, Napolitano appointed Mario Monti who quickly put together an emergency government. Since then, the downfall of Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister has generated a good deal of controversy. Allegations that Berlusconi was pushed out of power by a cabal of domestic and international detractors have been rife both inside and outside Italy. But how plausible are these claims? Was Berlusconi brought down by a conspiracy orchestrated by Napolitano and instigated by Italy’s EU partners? This article will address these questions and, to do so, it will chart the dramatic events that led to his downfall and examine the international and domestic contexts in which these events took place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the transmission of financial shocks among the euro-periphery (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain), the euro-core (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium), and the major European Union (but not euro) countries (Sweden, the United Kingdom, Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark). Using extreme returns on daily stock market data from 2004 until 2013, we find transmission effects for the tails of the returns distributions for the pre-crisis, US crisis and euro crisis periods from the euro-periphery to the non-euro and euro-core groups. During the crises, the shocks transmitted were more substantial, indicating significantly higher losses on extreme return days. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article it is argued that citizens take into account the degree of a government's political autonomy to implement particular policies when expressing their views on satisfaction with democracy (SWD) but, in order to do so, they need to perceive it. When citizens directly observe the external constraints that reduce their government's autonomy, then variations in levels of regime satisfaction may no longer be exclusively about government performance - as widely argued by political economists - but also about democratic choice. The argument develops after comparing the existing scenarios in the Eurozone before and after the Great Recession. Citizens only began to perceive their own lack of choice to decide between policy alternatives when the sovereign debt crisis broke out in May 2010, the date of the first Greek bail-out. It is then when citizens started to update their beliefs about the functioning of democracy as a system in which alternative policies can be adopted as bail-out deals were signed between national governments from the Euro periphery and the Troika. This updating process towards the way democracy works explains the increasing gap in the levels of SWD between bailed-out economies and the rest of the countries in the Eurozone. Empirical confirmation for this claim is found after analysing Eurobarometer surveys from 2002 to 2014 and using a two-step difference-in-difference analysis that combines individual and aggregate data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis in the Eurozone between 2009 and 2015 provides an opportunity to test whether financial markets fully display the characteristics associated with the efficient market hypothesis or whether behavioral approaches which focus on excessive pessimism and confirmation bias also offer insights into the performance of markets. In this paper we test several important aspects of market behavior. Specifically we examine the extent to which large changes in risk premia amongst the countries that encountered crises were related to news. We also investigate whether the impact of good and bad news was symmetrical. Finally we explore whether changes in risk premia in Greece affected risk premia in other countries in an asymmetrical and biased way. We discover that while there is considerable evidence that financial markets often performed in an efficient way during the crisis, there are also important departures from this pattern that are consistent with the behavioral approach. Our findings imply that both the efficient and behavioral approaches are helpful when trying to understand how markets perform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sheds light on how new Eurosceptic parties are received and interpreted by the media. It does so by analysing the quality press coverage of three specific cases: the Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) (Italy), the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) (Germany) and the Team Stronach (TS) (Austria). These cases represent non-extremist Eurosceptic challengers to the political establishment, which capitalized upon the Euro Crisis and competed in national elections in 2013 for the first time. We look at their representation in the coverage, which issues they were mainly associated with, and how they were pictured overall. The results of the analysis show that the presentational style differs among the parties: a strong personalization, a strong negativity and a focus on events characterized the presentation of the M5S and the TS, while issues played a slightly greater role for the AfD. The three parties' coverage, however, converges in a generally peripheral role of issues, in an overall negative bias, and in depicting them as dangerous and irresponsible populist protest parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the spatial differentiation of statehood in the process of European integration, looking at its consequences for the reorganization of political rule. First, we elaborate our theoretical foundations resting in materialist theories of the state. It is argued that hitherto analytical approaches have hardly been able to systematically integrate the societal generation of space. This shortcoming is addressed by drawing on theories of space discussed in radical geography. Second, we trace the spatial transformation of statehood in the EU. Our assertion is that the latter is characterized by the emergence of a multi-scalar ensemble of state apparatuses. Finally, we discuss the implications of this transformation for the reproduction of domination. We assume that the multi-scalar form of statehood offers a significant basis for the emergence of authoritarian forms of politics in the EU. At the same time, social conflicts over the political design of the EU are intensifying. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hailed initially as the country's saviour for saving Italy from default, Mario Monti's technocratic government (2011-13) ended in controversy and with its achievements questioned. Aware of this contested legacy, this article seeks to revisit Monti's term in office and to assess his approach to the crisis that engulfed Italy and the eurozone in 2011-12. In doing so, it looks primarily at Monti's European policy, but also briefly examines his domestic agenda. Monti's legacy has so far drawn very limited academic interest. By filling a gap in the existing literature on contemporary European and Italian affairs, this article aims to improve our understanding of a critical phase in the recent politics and foreign policy of one the key EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the determinants of parliamentary support for international fiscal aid. Departing from the literature on presidential systems, it analyses an exemplary case of a parliamentary system, Germany. Two theoretical accounts are distinguished. The first perceives MPs as policy-seekers and focuses on the positioning of government and opposition parties and individual MPs on an economic left?right and a pro- versus anti-EU dimension. The second regards MPs as vote-seekers and presumes an electoral district connection. The statistical analysis of a new data-set containing information on 17 Bundestag roll-call votes from 2009 to 2015 finds support for the first account: voting in favour of fiscal aid measures is mainly driven by government membership and EU support. By contrast, neither economic ideologies, nor district or mandate characteristics influence support for fiscal aid. The article contributes to a growing literature on the domestic politics of international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Euro crisis has transformed the European political and economic landscape. Amidst lingering political uncertainties, austerity, high unemployment, and diminished levels of trust in the European project, how has the Euro crisis affected the institution of citizenship within the European Union? While the development of EU citizenship and the number of rights and freedoms attached to it since the 1990s has progressively reduced the incentive of intra-EU migrants to acquire citizenship in other member states, I argue that the Euro crisis and its political and economic consequences have reinvigorated the perceived value of national citizenship. In its wake, many intra-EU migrants, and especially those from the most crisis-stricken countries, may have a renewed incentive naturalise in other member states. Using data collected for 14 Western European countries from 2000 to 2013, I demonstrate how a growing lack of trust in political institutions and economic hardship since the Euro crisis has inspired surprising new naturalisation trends across Europe. Rather than perpetuate a further decline of national citizenship in Europe, the Euro crisis appears to have rendered national citizenship once again politically consequential. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we examine the role of EMU-China monetary and trade relations in the divergent evolution of the extra-regional trade balance of Germany and the GIPS countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain). These deepening relations generated an asymmetric shock in the Eurozone: while Germany largely benefited from the rise of China in the global monetary and trading system, the GIPS countries have been much less adapted. Drawing on the insights of the varieties of capitalism literature, we argue that the institutional adaptability of these countries to these deepening relations has been a function of the presence of particular labor market institutions that allow manufacturing firms to maintain their competitiveness. Coordinated labor market institutions supported Germany's extra-regional trade balance performance by bestowing its manufacturing firms with comparative institutional advantages, whereas the absence of these labor market institutions in the GIPS rendered their manufacturing firms much less institutionally adjusted to deal with the competitiveness pressures associated with the rise of China. As such, EMU-China monetary and trade relations have been a contributing factor in the Eurozone debt crisis by forcing the GIPS countries to run increasing extra-regional trade deficits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the impact of right and left moderate political orientation of newspapers on the levels of plurality in the news coverage of the Euro Crisis in 20 newspapers from 10 European countries through a methodology based on Simpson’s D index. The expectation of finding distinct patterns of coverage leading to high levels of plurality was not fully supported and the results have shown that national frames influence levels of overall plurality more than political ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper offers an account of the Euro crisis based on post-Keynesian monetary theory and its typology of demand regimes. Neoliberalism has transformed social and financial relations in Europe but it has not given rise to a sustained profit-led growth process. Instead, growth has relied either on financial bubbles and rising household debt (‘debt-driven growth’) or on net exports (‘export-driven growth’). In Europe the financial crisis has been amplified by an economic policy architecture (the Stability and Growth Pact) that aimed at restricting the role of fiscal policy and monetary policy. This neoliberal economic policy regime in conjunction with the separation of monetary and fiscal spheres has turned the financial crisis of 2007 into a sovereign debt crisis in southern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Regional financial cooperation (rfc) aims to secure the liquidity of central banks and build and maintain regional risk to be relatively homogenous. One aspect of rfc consists of the fiscal requirements to guarantee price stability and homogeneity among member countries. The regional accounts unit requires a stabilization fund and a debt bailout fund in order to ensure the spreads. This paper provides an overview of lessons for Latin America based on how rfc has worked in Europe, both before and throughout the euro crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until 2013, right-wing populist or extremist parties were unable to establish themselves as a relevant political force in Germany. With the advent of the Alternative für Deutschland the party landscape has changed significantly. The window of opportunity for the newcomer was opened in 2013 by the Euro crisis. Combining euroskepticism with liberal economic policies and a conservative social issue agenda the AfD mainly capitalized on the neglecting of these matters by the liberal party and the Christian democrats. Controversy between the market-oriented moderate wing represented by party founder Bernd Lucke and the radical advocates of national populism led to the split off of the former in July 2015. Only with the refugee crisis did the AfD regain its electoral fortunes and obtained its best results thus far in the March 2016 state elections. Most probably, the party's prospects will remain promising if one considers the voter's side. The main risks lie in its own ranks, where ideological battles, personal struggles and the unresolved question of how to distance the party from right-wing extremism could further self-destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When countries face balance-of-payments crises, their policy responses vary widely. This article argues that the choice between the two main options of internal adjustment (i.e., austerity and structural reforms) and external adjustment (i.e., exchange-rate devaluation) depends on how costly each of these strategies is for a country overall. Although the choice of adjustment strategy is thus structurally determined, the level of political conflict associated with crisis management depends on both the national vulnerability profile and partisan interests. Moreover, irrespective of the adjustment strategy, all governments design the specific reforms in ways that shelter their own voters. Empirically, this article uses qualitative case studies and survey data to examine the significant variation in crisis responses, crisis politics, and distributive outcomes of the 2008-2010 global financial crisis in eight Eastern European countries. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the Eastern European experience for crisis politics in the Eurozone crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A crisis can reveal characteristics of a political order which in normal times remain invisible. Two such moments of clarification hit European Union (EU) countries in quick succession. The euro crisis tested the resolve of leaders and peoples to save the single currency. The geopolitical standoff around Ukraine necessitated a joint response to a show of force. In both cases we saw a 'return of politics'. Geopolitical interests trumped economic ones; a need for government (and not just governance) made itself felt; European politics became more salient and intertwined with domestic politics. In the turmoil, notwithstanding calls for a big leap toward greater unity, the European Union also showed its dynamic in-between nature. The public perceives this politicisation perfectly, hence both its disenchantment and the calls for more democracy. EU integration, after 'permissive consensus' and 'constraining dissensus', could be moving to the era of binding dissensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eurozone crisis resulted in a decisive change of Europe’s fiscal surveillance regime that brought the question of public finance oversight sharply into focus. The Stability and Growth Pact, the fiscal cornerstone of Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), was fortified, expanded and supplemented by the so-called ‘Six Pack’, the ‘Fiscal Compact’ and the ‘Two Pack’. These substantial initiatives all aimed at strengthening the credibility and enforceability of the EMU’s rules-based economic coordination regime through further formal competence transfer and an improvement of the EU’s problem-solving capacity. This article explains that from a process perspective, their adoption showed an ability of the EU polity to produce agreement and find a way out of its chronic institutional paralysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Van Vossole's article explores the racist framing of the peripheral member states of the European Union, the PIGS (Portugal, Ireland (and/or Italy), Greece and Spain). It demonstrates a strong connection between the processes of racialization and depoliticization, as well as the return of colonial dynamics in the Eurozone. Side-stepping political economy and history, the culturalization of politics perfectly complements the ‘post-political’ neoliberal hegemony. Political and media discourses reproduce it in both populist and corporate interests. The culturalization of politics reduces the differences between centre and periphery to certain ‘cultural characteristics and habits’, as reflected in stereotypes of laziness, non-productivity, corruption, wasteful spending and lying. These make it possible to blame the PIGS for the current crisis, legitimizing drastic austerity measures and a loss of sovereignty. The loss of sovereignty shows remarkable similarities with what Kwame Nkrumah defined as neocolonialism: the continuation of colonial power relations through processes of economic dependence, conditional aid and cultural hegemony. While this problematic only resurfaced during the recent Euro crisis, Van Vossole discusses how today's racist discourses and neocolonial politics have their roots in the past, particularly in anti-Irish and anti-Mediterranean racism and in the (semi-)colonial position of the PIGS in the British and Ottoman empires. Besides structural violence against the periphery, a major consequence of this racialization is that it jeopardizes any possibility of further democratic political integration on the basis of a common European identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The euro crisis has called into question the constitutional compromises formalized in and by the Lisbon Treaty. The compromise between different (supranational and intergovernmental) interests, the compromise between member states engaged in building the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and those allowed to opt out of it and the compromise, within the EMU, between a centralized approach to monetary policy and decentralized economic policy. Unions of states, as the European Union (EU) is interpreted to be, are necessarily structured on interstate compromises, because they derive from the aggregation of states with different demographies/capabilities and national identities. However, in the EU, contrary to the other unions of states (as the United States and Switzerland), the aggregation has not been supported by an agreed constitutional framework from which to derive procedures and discourse for solving disputes and constituting new interstate compromises. This is why the wrecking of those compromises by the euro crisis has led the EU to a constitutional conundrum. From the analytical perspective used in the article, Treaty reform seems to be the necessary, although contrasted, strategy for escaping from the conundrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protracted euro area crisis has led to a resurgence of academic interest in integration theories. In a recent piece in this journal, Bauer and Becker argue that the euro crisis allowed the European Commission to strengthen its role in economic governance, in particular with regard to its implementation powers. Contrary to Bauer and Becker’s claim, I contend that the euro crisis has resulted not in strengthening the Commission. Rather, the Commission is undergoing “subtle disempowerment”, that is, a gradual transfer of decision-making authority and resources from the Commission to the intergovernmental level and to the European Central Bank. I illustrate the Commission's subtle disempowerment along three dimensions: the creation of the intergovernmental European Stability Mechanism; enhanced oversight mechanisms of the Commission via the troika constellation; and the creation of the European System of Financial Supervision, Banking Union and Single Supervisory Mechanism under the aegis of the European Central Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The euro crisis and a new debate about immigration in Europe have undermined support for the EU while the unsolved Greek debt problems as well as the ECB's quantitative easing policy have raised new crucial policy issues. It is necessary to identify the key issues of Eurozone stabilization and to clarify the economic benefits from monetary integration. As regards the economic welfare analysis of the euro, the new model presented shows the benefits of the euro's reserve currency position, namely in the framework of a neoclassical growth model with seigniorage based on international reserve holdings. Discounted benefits are about 10,000 € per capita in a stable Euro area. Thus the benefits are bigger than often considered, at the same time one may raise the question of whether the existing institutional setting of the Eurozone is sufficient for achieving long-term stability and prosperity. As regards the envisaged third rescue package for Greece it is emphasized that a haircut of public creditors along with adoption of a Greek capital levy plus privatization efforts are required to achieve debt sustainability and growth. The traditional interpretation of subsidiarity in the EU is found to be misleading and the vertical division of politics is destabilizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an interpretation of the European crisis based on balance-of-payments imbalances within the Eurozone, highlighting the role of the “internal” real exchange rates as a primary cause of the crisis. It explores the structural contradictions that turn the euro into a “foreign currency” for each individual Eurozone country. These contradictions imply the inability of national central banks to monetize the public and private debts, which makes the euro crisis a sovereign crisis similar to those typical of emerging countries, but whose solution presents additional obstacles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European responses to the financial and public debt crisis have triggered a process of administrative reorganisation and growth in the governance of the internal market in financial services and economic and monetary union. Such a process is characterised by four main tensions, referring respectively to: the powers conferred on the satellite administrative bodies established in order to tackle the crisis; the jurisdictions of the new administrations; the degree of centralisation which is sought within the new mechanisms for the implementation of EU laws and policies; and to the accountability mechanisms. The effects of such tensions are deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, they might operate as ‘fault lines’ within the EU administrative machinery. On the other hand, by pointing to a host of unsolved issues in EU administrative law, they provide an opportunity for opening a genuine institutional and scientific discussion on the ways in which the EU administrative system should be adjusted or reformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]