In the absence of a strong and concerted political direction, the EU is undergoing a process of structural divergence, featuring diverging employment, growth, productivity, competition, and fiscal trajectories. This is not a recovery, but a joyless and jobless stagnation. Ignore it at your peril.
Can the EU still be rescued following its disastrous failure to tackle the economic crisis?
European workers are less protected than ever: a song soon considered as the “anthem of a generation” in Portugal asked what was wrong with a world where, “even to become a slave you have to study”.
By conceding that growing inequality is the main challenge facing the US, President Barack Obama finally admitted last week that the much lauded “recovery” is a myth.
Europe, and the process of 'forging a people', goes beyond economics. If the EU is to be a longstanding project, this process cannot be reduced to the level of economic interests and resource allocation.
Was the European sovereign debt crisis fuelled by Keynesian policies? Or has the structural framework of the Eurozone something to do with it?
There can likely be no repeat of the 2008 bailouts, sovereign states do not have the capacity. But the accumulating debt is now so large, the point of no return may have been breached. Euro collapse could trigger far wider meltdowns.
Backtracking on the EU's monetary union will be politically very costly, but in the absence of a genuine economic and political union this stands out as the most likely scenario. What are the alternatives? Are there any?
Creating a common currency area means replacing indifference by cooperation and conflict. In this sense the Eurozone crisis might not be a deadly challenge to the whole European construct, but rather become a further step towards a European society.
Oskar Lafontaine, the former Die Linke chairman and a figure of the German left, has recently called for a return to national currencies. But while frustration with the euro is widespread, his solution doesn't make sense from an economic, political or even moral point of view.
The extraordinary bounce-back of the banks reveals the most disturbing, but least obvious, largely invisible, feature of the unfinished European crisis: the transformation of democratic taxation states into post-democratic banking states.
The simple truth unpalatable to Eurozone authorities is that small peripheral EU economies and even big economies like Spain and Italy, are victims, not designers of the liberalised financial architecture that was built way back in 1992, repeating earlier twentieth century failed experiments that
