‘OXI’ projected onto the German Finance Ministry by Die Linke. Flickr/Fraktion die linke. Some rights reserved.Progressive social movements have long expressed support for ‘another Europe’. Their almost unanimous support for the Greek referendum’s ‘no’ vote against the Troika proposal for further austerity policies speaks volumes about the frustration of building a Europe from below. Indeed, anti-austerity protests have stated that the evolution of the European institutions is in the opposite direction: more and more a Europe of the (financial) market, in which democratically unaccountable institutions make decisions and then impose them, via blackmail and fear, on domestic governments and European citizens. Their diagnosis resonates with recent research on the European Union, which stresses how, from an initial democratic deficit, European institutions have moved towards a crisis of political responsibility. There is, in short, a fundamental inability to implement values of fraternity, solidarity and a dignified life.
Shutterstock/TravelNerd/openDemocracy. All rights reserved.In reality, only Greece had high debt at the beginning of the crisis while in the other countries at the European periphery, debt resulted from the economic shocks. Various decisions by the Troika, composed of representatives of lending institutions including the EU, seem based on a biased (if not racist) vision of peripheral countries as overspending plus cheating.
Flickr/Theophilos Papadopoulos/openDemocracy. Some rights reserved.Broadly applied policies of internal devaluation, with the goal of reducing prices through cuts in wages and employment, have been counterproductive as not only did gains in competitiveness remain marginal but also nominal growth was depressed, with the effect of further pessimism being spread by rating agencies. Similarly, labour market flexibility reduced incentives to increasing productivity.
