Marica Frangakis: Inequality and Financialisation: The Case of the EU

After the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the elimination of the system of fixed exchange rates, global finance made new inroads into the world economy, while the deregulation of financial services marked the beginning of the era of financialisation. Inequality in the distribution of income and wealth feeds the process of financialisation and is fed by it. It is a two-way relationship, which has favoured the meteoric rise of the More

Lutz Brangsch: The “Hard Core” of European Integration

Dimitris Sotiropoulos notes quite rightly that the Euro is not just a currency, but a mechanism: “It has set up a particular form of symbiosis among different capitalist economies” (Sotiropoulos 2012, 66). But what is the material nature of this “symbiosis among different capitalist economies”?

This key issue had already been raised by John Grahl in 2003. He stressed that globalisation and the associated process of European integration More

Peter Gowan: Crisis in the Heartland. Consequences of the New Wall Street System

The long credit crunch that began in the Atlantic world in August 2007 is strange in its extraordinary scope and intensity. Mainstream discourse, referring to a ‘sub-prime’ crisis, implies that the credit crunch has been caused, rather than triggered, by a bubble in the real economy. This is at best naïve: after all, the bursting of an equally large bubble in the Spanish housing market led to no such blow-out in the domestic banking system More

Vassilis K. Fouskas: Sovereign Debt Crisis and Peripheral Capitalism

This article calls on the need for scholarly studies to compare and contrast the failure of neo-liberal policies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s in view of the sovereign debt crises in the periphery states of the EU today. It explores the way(s) in which “shock therapy” financial statecraft in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere did not alleviate the debt problem but, quite the opposite, augmented it. The international mechanism in operation in the past, as well as today, has not been and is not real development, modernisation More

Peter Gowan: The Ways of the World. Interview by Mike Newman and Marko Bojcun

I was born in Glasgow in 1946 and then moved to Belfast with my mother and sister, where we lived until I was eight. (Our father was a Scottish Canadian who had spent his wartime leave with our mother, but went back to his wife and family in Canada at the end of the war.) When I was nine I was sent to a prep school in England, and then to Haileybury and Imperial Service College. More

Peter Gowan: Economics and Politics within the Capitalist Core and the Debate on the New Imperialism.

In the lively new debate on what has come to be called the New Imperialism one focal point is the extent to which there are structural sources of conflict between the main centres in the capitalist core and if there are, whether these currently take the form of inter-state rivalry. Perhaps the two strongest poles in this debate amongst authors with a connection to Marxism are Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin on one side and Giovanni Arrighi on the other. More

Eric Toussaint: The Euro Crisis and Contradictions between Countries in the Periphery and Centre of the European Union

The crisis that started in the United States in 2007-2008, hit the European Union head on in 2008, and has been causing major problems in the eurozone since 2010. Banks from the strongest European countries are responsible for spreading this plague from the United States to Europe, because they had invested massively in structured financial products. It is important to explain why this crisis has struck the European Union and the eurozone harder than the United States. More

Gavin Rae: The Debt Crisis in Poland and its Impact on Society

This paper considers the question of public debt and how it impacts upon other areas of socio-economic life in Poland, in the context of the recent global economic crisis. It begins by placing Poland’s public debt in its historical context that reaches back to the Communist period. One result of the large debt incurred during this time, was that Poland became indebted and dependent upon creditors in the West. This dependency helped to shape its neo-liberal economic policy from the late 1980s. More