Search

The article analyses the solidarity discourse in the Euro crisis and Europe's migration crisis and examines how meanings of solidarity are framed and which political parties participate in these debates. The discourse coalition and coalition magnet approaches are combined to study the two discourse dynamics of demanding solidarity (migration crisis) or being criticised for not showing solidarity (Euro crisis) in the German media discourse. By applying the discourse network methodology, the interdependence of framing and actor visibility is analysed. It is demonstrated that solidarity is linked to austerity by a conservative party discourse coalition in the Euro crisis. The migration crisis discourse is shaped by one large discourse coalition, arguing for political solidarity. In 2015, political solidarity is challenged by security and demarcation claims in the migration crisis. The study contributes to the ideational research framework and demonstrates the different trajectories of solidarity in Europe in hard times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Preserving the trust of bond markets is crucial for the world's many indebted countries, but it is still unclear when and how national or international actors can contribute to this goal. We present a set of arguments addressing this question and test them on the case of the eurozone debt crisis. Distinguishing between actors' capacity and willingness to avoid defaults, we argue that the crisis was marked by a lack of capacity at the national level, and limited or uncertain willingness at the European level. Accordingly, we find that European‐level efforts to reassure markets had considerably stronger effects than similar efforts at the national level. Furthermore, national efforts appear to have mattered the least in countries with the least capacity. These findings are based on a comprehensive new dataset of political events and relevant news, and they hold across a number of robustness checks and placebo tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 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]

This article highlights the renaissance of the essentialist topos of the ‘lazy and irrational’ ‘Südländer’ (Southerner, Southern countries, South) in the German political and media discourses during the ‘Euro crisis’. It argues that it served to legitimate the political and economic measures taken in Southern European countries that pushed them into still more peripheral positions within the European Union (EU) and deepened the cleavage between North and South. Culture, or better culturalism and racism as its political ideological version, thus were used as a trap, as an intellectual battleground for justifying extremely complex economic and political decisions in a simplistic fashion throughout a crucial period of European history. The article furthermore demonstrates how a postcolonial reading may productively decode the processes ofOtheringtaking place within Europe itself, especially between the so-called core and peripheral countries. [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]

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 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]

In their different ways, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Fed combine expertise with representation: key members of these institutions along with their staff are appointed on the basis of their expertise and professional qualifications whereas each organization is conceived, in part, so as to represent the constituent nation-states or regions that make up their currency zones. In this article, the tension between expertise and representation apparent in the constitution of each institution is explored with emphasis on the ways in which geography is represented in monetary policy decision-making. The formal representation of nation-states in the ECB, their voting rights, and the significance or otherwise of large Eurozone countries is also considered. Being an analytical assessment of the effectiveness of the ECB compared with the Fed, the effectiveness of each institution is assessed in the light of financial risk and uncertainty and the complex interplay between monetary policy-making and fiscal federalism. Implications are drawn as regards the management of the Euro crisis has been managed, and the ways in which the welfare of peripheral countries have been discounted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coming on the heels of the global financial crisis, the Euro crisis was first an issue of banking solvency, then an issue of sovereign indebtedness, and then an issue of the stability and integrity of the Eurozone and its currency. Market agents take bets on the future of the Euro, how it might be saved (or not), and the likely interventions (or not) of leading politicians and their governments as well as the European Central Bank. The integrity, powers and governance structure of the ECB are fundamental issues for the Eurozone, its members and the stability of global financial markets. Just as important are the geographical manifestations of the Euro crisis, since the national and urban and regional effects of the crisis often translate directly into political movements that question the legitimacy of the European project. This special issue brings together a set of papers that provide an overarching perspective on the Euro crisis and maps the uneven spatial effects of the crisis across countries, cities and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Euro crisis is mainly a consequence of the international financial crisis of 2008. Thereby, the term Euro crisis is misleading as there is no currency crisis. First, the article shows some of the birth defects of the Euro. Second, it shows that the increase in public debt was caused by rescue measures for banks and anti-cyclical fiscal policy. Third, we argue that the Euro crisis is not just one crisis (a sovereign debt crisis) but it is a combination of several macroeconomic crises including a growth crisis, a labour market crisis, a public debt crisis, and a current account crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until very recently, European employers and political leaders denied the need for any coordination in industrial relations at EU level. In 2011, however, the European Parliament and the Council adopted a new European economic governance regime that makes EU member states' labor policies subject to multilateral surveillance procedures. This paper analyzes this ‘silent revolution’ from above and assesses organized labor's responses to this challenge. It shows that the EU's new governance regime does not follow the classical model of a federal state, but rather the governance structures of multinational corporations that control their local subsidiaries through the use of whipsawing tactics and coercive comparisons. European trade unions' and social movements' difficulties in politicizing European economic governance are thus best explained by the ability of the new supranational EU regime to nationalize social conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Europe’s woes mark a new chapter in the longstanding theory/history nexus in European studies. The euro crisis has brought integration theory back onto the scholarly agenda and highlighted the value of neo-functionalism – and more precisely its key ‘spillover’ mechanism – as a framework for interpreting current politico-institutional dynamics in the European Union. We are, however, at a particular point of the neo-functionalist narration, in which the transition from low to high political integration has opened a phase of political fluidity that makes ideas and political leadership crucial in determining the future course of integration. In this phase, the positive scheme of neo-functionalism and the normative one of federalism come together, bringing the intellectual trajectory begun after WWII to full circle. Whether this new encounter will result in further integration depends primarily on the content of new federalist ideas, the emergence of an effective European leadership, and the presence of a favourable international environment. For all three factors, the record so far has been mixed at best. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the relationship between European states and the informal American empire following the Second World War. Building on neo-Marxist theory, it argues that any attempt to understand the political response to the ongoing euro crisis has to consider the deeper determinations of the trajectories of the states of North America and Western Europe through the course of the making of global capitalism since 1945. This involves, in particular, taking seriously the leading responsibility that the American state has had, and still has, for securing the conditions for capital accumulation internationally, even while other capitalist states retain their ‘relative autonomy’ within the informal American empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the global financial crisis, many observers expected that the European Union would initiate and spur the reform of global finance. However, it turned out that the European endeavours have only been modest and unassertive so far. This contribution aims to explore this development. It argues that there are various causes of the European defeat, but that it is possible to identify some structural factors which enabled powerful political actors to defend a liberally organized financial market environment: externally, international communication and bargaining processes have been and still are structurally biased towards a liberal global financial order owing to the strong role of global financial centres and the dynamics of competitive deregulation; and internally, the emergence of a new European economy, based on financial market integration and manifold processes of financialization, has brought about fundamental changes of European capitalism as well as of societal and intergovernmental power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

France and Germany played a highly visible leadership role during the management of the Euro crisis and the efforts to design a reform governance framework for the Euro area. This article provides a conceptualization of this bilateral leadership, which is then applied to trace the process of Franco-German leadership during the ongoing crisis of the Euro area. Franco-German leadership grew ever more important as the crisis deepened. After the French presidential election of 2012, however, the divergences between the two core states of the Euro area deepened and made the exercise of joint leadership more difficult to achieve. I consider this leadership role to be based on a compromise by proxy logic in which France and Germany, starting from divergent positions, strike bilateral compromises acceptable to other member states that feel their own interests are represented by either France or Germany. Their common capacity to find suitable remedies to cope with crisis, however, is not beyond doubt. The Franco-German approach followed an additive logic, combining the temporary and permanent financial support schemes-a French preference-with a concomitant strengthening of fiscal rules advocated by Germany. In the end, the two governments did not develop a common comprehensive strategy based on a shared conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the financial crisis in Europe and politically charged responses to the crisis. It mentions changed electoral support in the European Union (EU) countries owing to financial crisis. Other topics discussed in the article include effect of economic shock on voting outcomes, increasing importance of radical parties and influence of social movements on European Countries.

Proponents of Asian monetary integration have always looked to Europe for inspiration. This paper reconsiders the cas in light of the eurozone crisis. I ask what aspects of the earlier consensus remain intact in the wake of the crisis and what aspects must now be rethought. Is there a danger of "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" - a danger, in other words, that Europe's negative experience since 2009 will cause Asia to turn away too quickly and completely from monetary integration? Or is it in fact appropriate to "throw out the baby" - to conclude in light of Europe's example that Asian monetary integration is not an appropriate and desirable goal? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the likely impact of the global crisis on the prospects for the European project. First, it considers the nature of the current crisis. It argues that it is comparable, in terms of its deep structural character, to the one in the 1930s. The crisis manifested itself first in the financial sector, but was caused by underlying problems of overaccumulation, which explains the succession of speculative booms and busts from the 1980s onward. The article then analyses how the financial crisis transmuted into the current sovereign debt crisis in Europe. It identifies a number of interdependent factors responsible for this: the bailouts of banks following the credit crisis; the stimulus programmes necessitated by the danger of a deep economic recession; the structural problems of the European Monetary Union leading to the accumulation of debt in the peripheral members; and finally the catalytic action of speculation in the financial markets. Finally, the article discusses responses to the debt crisis, outlining the contours of two alternatives (muddling through and Europeanisation), their implications, and some of the conditions for success. The conclusion is rather pessimistic: chances that an effective, timely and sustainable solution will be realised do not seem high. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]