Construction of the Eurozone crisis: re- and depoliticising European economic integration

ABSTRACT

The Eurozone crisis is among recent developments that upset the European Union (EU) most profoundly. It deprived large parts of the population of their previous standard of living, put the rationality of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) into doubt and sparked unprecedented contestation. This article adopts a discursive notion of politicisation and the frame of Discursive Political Studies to investigate whether that moment of contestation re-politicised EU economic governance in substantive terms. It argues that, while emerging counter-narratives of crisis projected alternative scenarios of economic integration and established a practice of constructive EU critique, they were co-opted by the dominant mass-mediated story of a public debt crisis. This is shown in a combined content, network and discourse analysis of crisis narratives, which were issued by leading EU representatives, anti-austerity parties and European media between 2010 and 2013.

KEYWORDS:

• Eurozone
• European Union
• politicisation
• crisis
• discourse
• crisis narratives
• austerity

Acknowledgments

This contribution is a product of the author’s Marie Skłodowska Curie project ‘Reconfiguring centre and periphery in the European Union after crisis: a discursive political study’, financed by the European Commission (PCIG14-GA-2013-632071). I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their remarks to an earlier version, which helped to work out a more stringent argument. I am greatly indebted to Gesine Lenkewitz and Christopher Fritzsche for collecting and annotating the corpus of political statements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ‘household analogy’ suggests that both states and families may expand expenditure when income is high but must cut back when income is low. Critics suggest that state revenue can be manipulated to a greater degree compared to household income, by adjusting base rates, stimulating growth, adjusting taxation, printing money, devaluation and selling or rolling over government debt. They follow Keynes’ assertion that the analogy is false for recessions, when the state, unlike the family household, is able to borrow and invest, and undermines its solvency if it withholds investment in the public and private sectors, from which it will later generate revenue (Todorova 2007, for a discussion).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission [Marie Skłodowska Curie Grant (PCIG14-GA-2013-6320].