Austerity Measures

 La narrazione standard della crisi fase 1: 2007-2009. Finanza colpevole: una spiegazione convincente?  La narrazione standard della crisi fase 2: 2010-2014. Debito pubblico eccessivo: una spiegazione convincente?  Alla ricerca di una spiegazione alternativa: la crisi come effetto di una evoluzione strutturale  Le leve della crescita nei paesi a capitalismo maturo dagli anni 1980: finanza e debito  Il ruolo dell'euro nella crisi europea  Il ruolo della Germania

This paper moves beyond conceptualisations of austerity as fiscal policy towards exploring the multiple ways austerity may be lived and felt in everyday life. Drawing on research with families affected by disability, this paper argues that austerity is felt as a series of atmospheres that envelop and condition times and spaces of the everyday. Austerity is made both affectively and materially present through these atmospheric intensities as they register and radiate between individual bodies and everyday objects. As they shape both day-today practices and future imaginaries, atmospheres of austerity generate numerous individualised experiences that result in multiple affective relations towards austerity. As a result, this paper holds together the following relations to austerity: anticipating austerity, adapting to austerity, 'getting on with life' and accepting austerity. These show that austerity is more than an economic policy; it is a phenomenon that is understood through individuals' lived and felt realities that are often experienced through fluctuating, non-coherent and sometimes conflicting affective relations that come to shape how people feel and act in the everyday. It is through a conceptualisation of austerity as lived that we might galvanise people against austerity by encouraging a more nuanced and multi-tonal counter politics that takes into account the multiple affective relations that are expressed through various domains of everyday life.

O presente trabalho é parte de um estudo em andamento e procura
apresentar de maneira crítica categorias que se inter-relacionam na dinâmica
da austeridade nas já combalidas democracias latino-americanas.
Está estruturado em três principais capítulos: o primeiro resgata a matriz
econômica de períodos autoritários no Brasil e Chile, mas também em
instabilidades políticas recentes de matriz não militar, como é o caso
da Venezuela. O segundo capítulo procura situar o contexto para o
surgimento de uma onda constitucionalista na região, e esse movimento
como resposta às ditaduras; e, por fim, são apresentados os conceitos
de Pós-Democracia e a Austeridade como chave-interpretativa.

ABSTRACT In the clash between austerity and Keynesian stimulus paradigms in the advanced capitalist economies in general and the United Kingdom in particular, this paper argues that in the era of global climate change and global warming, merely proposing stimulus in opposition to austerity is flawed. In contrast, the paper proposes that an eco-socialist perspective with emphasis on green economy, sustainability and equality is of historic importance and relevance.

This article explores exclusion and sense of displacement through the austerity experiences of young adults in Ballymun, a disadvantaged urban neighbourhood in Dublin, Ireland. Such youth encountered exclusion on the labour market, urban housing, and support services. As austerity intensified urban exclusion, youth's affective relations with their neighbourhood, their city, and the state transformed. Using the concept 'at-homeness', it is argued that reduced income and funding for social services resulted locally in a partial 'sense of displacement'. Nationally, the class character of austerity reduced sense of belonging as youth felt betrayed and unfairly treated. It is argued that social, economic and political developments affect at-homeness, and that reduced sense of belonging induced by austerity can lead to a sense of displacement, not through physical movement, but by estrangement from the places one inhabits through processes of abandonment. Therefore, sense of displacement is expanded beyond gentrification as it can emerge from socioeconomic transformations in a more-or-less stable physical and demographic environment.

This article seeks to contribute to the analyses of the impact of the Covid-19 on the global political economy. It does so through a qualitative content analysis of the key policy documents published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) since the outbreak of the pandemic crisis. The IMF has been, historically, one of the main designers of international macroeconomic governance. The paper focuses on fiscal policy, which retains a central place in the strategy of the IMF to deal with the pandemic and especially for the post-pandemic recovery phase. The analysis of the documents of the IMF contributes (i) to appreciate the interpretation of the nature of the pandemic crisis through the lenses of a prominent international financial institution, (ii) to explore the policy strategy outlined to deal with the pandemic emergency, (iii) to assess possible changes at the level of policy, and accordingly, future directions in global political economy. Evidence suggests that fiscal stimulus, public investment and planning will likely have a prominent position in the future directions of the IMF policy advice.

Austerity versus democracy. Increasingly the contemporary urban landscape seems to be inscribed in this dialectical sphere, which is harshly scarring the present of our cities undermining their future as well. On the one hand, public policies originated by loan programs planned, decided and managed at a supranational level by financial Troika; on the other hand, a large variety of urban practises and participatory processes that have been raised at the local level to address the crisis, embody a significant critique to the representative democracy model. The debate between these two opposite parts are shaping the urban space in terms of conflict, revealing at the same time the political nature of the crisis as a sovereignty issue.
Consequently even the perspective of global cities that are interconnected on multi-levels (as described by Saskia Sassen in 1997) needs to be fully rewritten. Although global cities can be still conceived as hubs for trans-national processes, since the neoliberal system collapsed in 2008 an unprecedented function has been assigned to them in the view of a global power reorganization. The previous decentralization has been carried to the extreme of a new polarization, marked by the spatial inequality and social injustice increase. From this perspective, the debt politics seem to represent a new model of governance that has been translated both in a global and in a local scale.
Actually we can’t consider the crisis a historicized process yet, at the same time we need to outline a first short-medium period analysis. Back to territories: starting from a specific spatial narrative this paper will examine its potential influences on a global urban discourse. According to this, the aim is to give an ethnographic account of Exarchia, the radical and anarchist neighborhood based in the city center of Athens (Greece), from to the identities and practices passing through it up a metropolitan macro scale contextualization.

This article explains the popular revolt against austerity in Southern Europe as the outcome of profound politico-economic changes that are shaped by the transformation of the European Union’s (EU’s) macro-economic governance. It comprises three parts. The first part demonstrates how ordoliberalism – the Germanic variant of (neo)liberal economic thinking – was embedded in the EU’s new macro-economic governance, in processes that constitutionalise austerity and remove democratic controls over the economy. The second part examines the impact of austerity-driven reforms on welfare and employment in the aftermath of the sovereign debt crisis. These reforms undermined the social reproduction of Southern Europe’s familistic welfare model by destabilising three key pillars of social protection: employment security for households’ primary earners; small property ownership; and pension adequacy. The third part analyses the emergence of anti-austerity social politics in Southern Europe, both ...

Following the 2016 general ban on new psychoactive substances, synthetic cannabinoids ('spice'-type drugs) have moved into unregulated street markets and have become popular among homeless populations in the United Kingdom. Images of so-called 'spice zombies', rough sleepers in public spaces experiencing severe substance-induced fits, have been used by local and national media to suggest the growing scale of the problem. This article proposes that such depictions should be read through a cultural analysis rooted in the political economy of austerity policies, where the twofold stigma of substance and welfare dependencies directs guilt at the poor, concealing the systemic cruelty of benefits reforms. Through the circulation of such tropes and the ridiculing of a superfluous abject underclass that embodies them, media and political discourses of the 'broken society' highlight an evident need for welfare reduction and more generally for the austerity project.

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As nominal policy interest rates are hitting the lower zero bound in many industrialised countries, questions are raised about possible unintended consequences. This note argues that low interest rates reduce the long run rate of potential economic growth, but exiting “ultra-easy” policies now would be premature."

THE THEORETICAL PRESUMPTIONS OF EU CITIZENSHIP: ORIGINAL CONTRADICTIONS AND NEW LIMITS
ABSTRACT: This paper deals with EU citizenship and with some of the persistent ambiguities present in the case law of the Court of Justice. In the first part, it shows that EU citizenship, at the beginning, had a series of contradictions that are now emerging when it is under stress. In the second part, this work highlights how the economic and financial crisis and the consequent crisis of the political legitimacy of the EU is putting limits new and serious on the rights acquired through the EU citizenship by European mobile and static citizens. The fragility of the original institution emerged when, on the one hand, EU citizenship for the first time has gained the centre of the political discourse and when, on the other, it is put under stress by new and consistent intra-European migration, due to the financial crisis and encouraged by the inner opportunities offered by EU citizenship.

Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State is an exploration, on both theoretical and empirical grounds, into the nature and transformations of the state in the neoliberal era. Nowadays, a widespread crisis of legitimation affects the institutions and authority of the state; similarly, and especially after the Great Crisis of 2008 to the present, the European project is increasingly questioned by populist and neo-nationalist forces, which politically advance in the state and society, and promote further coercive-oriented reconfiguration of state powers and apparatus. The 'nationalist international', the 'new populists' and/or the 'rise of new international fascism' are questions on the verge of international scholarship and political debate. However, many of these studies often miss the specificity and critical importance of the study of the state and of state (institutional and ideological) powers; even more importantly, the phenomenon of populism/neo-authoritarianism is interpreted by the mainstream as a clear break with traditional centrist parties, with the result of neglecting the past authoritarian tendencies that accompany the entire history of neoliberalism.

This book is a guide for political activists and policy-makers; specifically, by showing how the state is of critical importance to the making of neoliberalism in institutional and cultural terms, it also aims to rethink the state as the arena of politics and, accordingly, as the key site to promote alternatives to neoliberalism.

Dans le but de faire pression contre des coupes budgétaires, une majorité de professeurs sur le campus d’Orsay de l’Université Paris-Sud en France ont choisi de ne pas inscrire les notes de leurs étudiants sur le fichier central de l’Université pour une période indéfinie. Dans un contexte d’austérité économique, cette tactique pourrait être employée au Québec.

Within its first month in power, SYRIZA has increased its domestic popularity even as it confronts deep institutional resistance to its anti-austerity agenda. Drawing on James Scott's conceptualisation of the charismatic relationship, this paper argues that, in voicing the ‘despair and demands’ of the Greek people, SYRIZA has been able to convert populism in opposition into charismatic leadership in power. It is, obviously, too early to
judge the ability of the party and its leader to sustain this appeal in the long run, to create deep and affective bonds with its electorate. And yet its first handful of weeks in power have already provided an indication, which is noteworthy to the extent that it offers the raw material for a miniature case-study in political charisma.

Since the onset of the 'age of austerity' in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash poverty and inequality in the UK have increased dramatically as a direct consequence of government policy. This full-length report for policymakers arises from the 2018-2021 ESRC funded project 'Life on the Breadline: Christianity, Poverty and Politics in the 21st century'. Drawing on our varied fieldwork the report shows how churches and Christian NGOs are in the vanguard of the struggle against austerity age poverty but argues that more needs to be done if they are to 'transform structural injustice'.

ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies

Vol 14, No 4 (2015)

Table of Contents

Themed Section:
The Sexual Politics of Austerity

Introduction: The Sexual Politics of Austerity
Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Gavin Brown
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Marriage and the Spare Bedroom: Exploring the Sexual Politics of Austerity
Gavin Brown
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Low Income LGBTGNC (Gender Nonconforming) Struggles Over Shelters As Public Space
Michelle Billies
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The Sexual Politics of Neoliberalism and Austerity in an ′Exceptional′ Country: Italy
Cesare Di Feliciantonio
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Queer Responses to Austerity: Insights from the Greece of Crisis
Konstantinos Eleftheriadis
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Themed Section:
Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States: The Execution of Troy Davis

Introduction: Geographies of Capital Punishment in the United States - The Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood
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If I am Troy Davis, I Failed Troy Davis: Abolishing the Death Penalty through an Antiracist People’s Geography
Nik Heynen
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Bare Life, Dead Labor, and Capital(ist) Punishment
James Andrew Tyner, Alex Colucci
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Life and Death in the Racial State: Collateral Consequences and the Execution of Troy Davis.
Joshua F Inwood, Melanie Barron
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Justice versus justice: Geographies of the Death Penalty and Place-Based Activism in the Troy Davis Case
Audrey Kobayashi
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Research

Reframing urban controlled spaces: Community gardens in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa
Efrat Eizenberg, Tovi Fenster
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Latin America’s Large-Scale Urban Challenges: Development Failures and Public Service Inequalities in Lima, Peru
Antonio Ioris
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Palestinian, Arab, American, Muslim: “Looping Effects” of Categories and Meaning
Anna Mansson McGinty
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With the Current, Against the Wind: Constructing Spatial Activism and Radical Politics in the Tel-Aviv Gay Center
Chen Misgav
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For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University
Alison Mountz, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ranu Basu, Risa Whitson, Roberta Hawkins, Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran
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Making Space for Critical Pedagogy in the Neoliberal University: Struggles and Possibilities
The University of Kentucky Critical Pedagogy Working Group, Carrie Mott, Sandra Zupan, Anne-Marie Debbane, R. L.*
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Inner-Suburban Neighbourhoods, Activist Research, and the Social Space of the Commercial Street
Heather McLean, Katharine Rankin, Kuni Kamizaki
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„Naturgesetze der Kultur“: Die Wiener Geographen und die Ursprünge der „Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie“
Norman Henniges
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This paper uses participant narratives and Marxist social movement theory to analyse resistance to water charges as the driving force of Irish anti-austerity struggles – or " the social movement in general ". It locates this movement within the history of working-class community-based self-organisation in Ireland. Contemporary resistance to metering and refusal to pay are not " spontaneous " , but articulate long-standing local rationalities.

The current situation has seen the crisis of other forms of working-class articulation: union dependence on a Labour Party which enthusiastically embraced austerity in government; the co-optation of community service provision within " social partnership " , under attack from the state since the mid-2000s; and the collapse of far left initiatives for shared parliamentary representation and resistance to household charges. New forms of popular agency are thus developing; community-based direct action has enabled a historic alliance between multiple forms of working-class voice and unleashed a vast process of popular mobilisation and self-education.

Finally, the paper relates the Irish movement to the wider loss of consent for austerity on the European periphery, and asks after the political prospects for effective alliances " within the belly of the beast " .

This article argues that the perception of a crisis in German-Greek relations that began with the „Greek crisis“ in the autumn of 2009 is the result of media coverage on both sides that indulged in football-style „us“ against „them“ generalizations and in national stereotypes, instead of conducting an adequately nuanced analysis. The paper examines instances of the strife between German and Greek print and online media during the period 2010-2012 and focuses on the discursive tropes that were used to invoke specific social, cultural, and historical images. While some German media stressed „Greek“ laziness, unreliability, and non-existent „Europeanness“, their Greek counterparts focused on Germany’s Nazi past, the memory of German occupation during World War II, and Greek sovereignty. This public discourse has increased the danger that politicians charged with making decisions in the crisis will be acting under pressure and on false or stereotypical premises. The changing image of Greece in the eyes of fellow Europeans might jeopardize Greece’s standing as a European nation.

This thesis proposes an investigation of the legitimation of austerity in Greece, Portugal, and Spain, in the period from 2009 to 2016. The research stems from the questioning of two influential approaches to the political economy of austerity during the Eurozone crises. The first sees austerity as an inevitability. Indebted to the ‘new politics’ literature on the welfare state, this approach understands austerity in southern Europe as an economic imperative. The second approach, informed by the literature on ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’, sees austerity as an external imposition forced upon southern European countries by a combination of market actors and foreign powers. Whereas the former builds on ontological premises that ultimately lead to the naturalisation of political outcomes, the latter fails to capture the complexity of the politics of austerity at the domestic level.
In turn, this research offers a reinterpretation of austerity in southern Europe that sees it as a political project construed and contested at the domestic, international, and transnational levels. The investigation is guided by the following question: how was austerity legitimated as a response to the southern European crises of the 2010s? Through the qualitative analysis of a substantial corpus of public declarations, parliamentary debates, and policy documents, combined with descriptive statistics, and semi-structured interviews, the thesis proposes an interpretive tracing of the processes of (de-)legitimation of austerity in the three countries during the period.
The thesis explores the construction of the southern European crisis narratives and their embedding in the crisis response, especially in the conditional financial assistance programmes negotiated between the countries and the Troika of European Commission, ECB, and IMF. This is followed by an analysis of how the austerity evolved as the policies were implemented and their outcomes observed, on the one hand, and as the radical critique of the social movement against austerity became increasingly institutionalised.
The in-depth analysis of the three cases sheds new light on how these crises were construed and on the discursive foundations for the legitimation of austerity as the only appropriate response to the economic predicaments in southern Europe.

En este artículo se analiza  el neoliberalismo, sus orígenes intelectuales , el contexto histórico que rodeó su ascenso, o auge,  a doctrina dominante de las políticas públicas en diversas partes del mundo para preguntarnos enseguida si este enfoque ha entrado en una fase de crisis de paradigma después de la crisis financiera global del 2008-2009 seguida por una fase de varios años de estancamiento económico y creciente desigualdad en el mundo capitalista desarrollado. Anticipando la respuesta se puede afirmar que presenciamos un doble movimiento: por un lado ha comenzado un proceso de crítica a este paradigma en diversos círculos de académicos, activistas y observadores autónomos. Al mismo tiempo, las prescripciones neoliberales de privatización, ajuste de shock, des-regulación del mercado laboral y redistribución regresiva del ingreso han sido componentes  centrales de las políticas de austeridad en la periferia Europea y en otros países; dichas políticas se han  impulsado por el Fondo Monetario Internacional, el Banco Central Europeo y la Comisión Europea en la actualidad (Troika).

An analysis of the debt negotiations between the Greek government and the EU partners in the months January-July 2015. The paper uses discourse analysis and international relations, identity and negotiation theories to claim that Greek national identity was used by the Tsipras government for negotiation purposes and that such use led to unsatisfying and poorly agreed results and undermined the existing relations between the parties.

Hungary is a major player in the European sex trade, not only as a host country for sex tourism and domestic punters, but also as a major provider of the labour force that works in western European countries. The scarcer the economic opportunities in a region, the more likely locals are to enter the trade and end up either providing or managing sexual services far from home. A vicious cycle of destitution locks large numbers of Hungarian women into sex work. Moving to western Europe to avoid prosecution, their vulnerability and isolation only increases.

The changes in the welfare systems and the reduction of resources have put strong pressure on social professions. In this article the impacts that cuts and austerity measures introduced in the welfare system have had on social work practice will be outlined through a comparative analysis of researches, studies on workings practices, and other considerations drawn from training activities. Through these materials, the reactions and survival strategies of social workers to the constant increase in workload and the pervasive feeling of not being able to respond to the social mandate of the profession will be explored. Signs of innovation and positive changes will also be traced.

This article explores the significance of disability for social justice, using Nancy Fraser’s theory of justice as a guideline. The article argues that the disability perspective is essential for understanding and promoting social justice, although it is often disregarded by critical thinkers and social activists. The article looks at three prominent strategies for achieving social justice under conditions of capitalism: economically, by decommodifying labour; culturally, by deconstructing self-sufficiency; and politically, by transnationalising democracy. The disability perspective reveals that decommodification of labour requires enhancement of disability support, deconstruction of self-sufficiency requires valorisation of disability-illuminated interdependence, and transnationalisation of democracy requires scrutiny of the transnational production of impairments. The article discusses each of these strategies in theoretical and practical terms by drawing on disability studies and Fraser’s analyses.

This paper draws on Polanyi’s analysis of the economy-democracy tension to discuss today’s crisis in Greece and the Eurozone. First, some of the economic and social effects of the Greek austerity program are discussed with reference to his observations on liberal international interventionism in the interwar period. Secondly, we look at the ways in which democratic outcomes (elections, referenda, parliamentarian decisions etc.) in Greece and elsewhere were, during different crisis episodes following 2010, put aside in favour of market discipline and austerity doctrines. It is argued that Polanyi’s thesis on the “mutual incompatibility” between capitalism and democracy (the core of what he termed “anti-democratic virus”) is crucial for understanding today’s crisis and crisis management in the framework of Eurozone’s liberalism.

Desde la década de 1950 con el surgimiento y desarrollo de importantes proyectos económicos, el gobierno de Puerto Rico ha considerado el Viejo San Juan como un recurso importante para el desarrollo económico y el turismo. Este modelo tradicional ha propulsado una serie de problemas urbanos tales como el turismo masivo, gentrificación, desplazamiento de sus residentes fuera de la ciudad, y el deterioro rápido de su infraestructura histórica. La presente crisis económica, la deuda pública, las medidas de austeridad, sumado a las pérdidas significativas luego del paso del Huracán María, continúan contribuyendo a la explotación y mal manejo del patrimonio cultural de la histórica ciudad en nombre del desarrollo económico. Como los recursos naturales, el patrimonio cultural es un recurso finito, irremplazable y necesario para el carácter urbano y la sensibilidad de las sociedades. Al utilizar el Viejo San Juan como caso de estudio, este articulo presenta una mirada crítica de como los enfoques en el turismo, y la utilización del patrimonio construido como un recurso exclusivo de desarrollo económico tanto en el pasado como en el presente, ponen en riesgo el patrimonio cultural de la ciudad amenazando su carácter social, sentido de lugar e integridad del espacio urbano. Examinando las problemáticas actuales que enfrenta la ciudad y considerando soluciones alternativas, este escrito es una invitación a cuestionar los discursos establecidos que han privilegiado el desarrollo económico a expensas del silenciamiento sobre las implicaciones sociales y sus impactos en el patrimonio urbano. Este escrito es una propuesta para romper con las nociones impuestas y pensar en maneras alternativas de reconstruir nuestras comunidades, conservando nuestro patrimonio. 

Abstract
Since several important economic projects in the 1950s, the govern¬ment of Puerto Rico has seen El Viejo San Juan as a significant asset for economic development and tourism. This traditional model has led to raising urban issues, such as mass tourism, gentrification, displacement, and rapid deterioration of the historic infrastructure, are amongst the most pressing problems that face the old city today. The islands’ economic depression, massive public debt, the austerity measures, and the significant financial losses after the devastation of Hurricane Maria continue to contribute to the exploitation and mismanagement of the historic city’s cultural heritage in the name of economic development. As with natural resources, cultural heritage is a finite resource, irreplaceable and necessary for the urban character and sensibility of societies. In examining Viejo San Juan as an example, this case study will look critically at how past and current approaches to tourism and using the built heritage as a resource only for economic development, poses a risk to cultural heritage threatening its social character, sense of place and the integrity of in an urban space. By examining current issues and considering alternative solutions, there is an invitation to question and challenge established discourses privileging economic development that silence the social implications and adverse impacts on the urban heritage. This essay is a proposition to go against the prevalent notions and think for alternative ways to rebuild our communities, preserving our heritage.