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The Eurozone is not suffering from an economic crisis, but a crisis of national politics

Alonso, S., (2013), “The Eurozone is not suffering from an economic crisis, but a crisis of national politics”, LSE European Politics and Policy Blog, 20 November.

One of the most worrying aspects of the Eurozone crisis has been its effect on democracy. Sonia Alonso argues that while the crisis has weakened democracy in several countries, particularly with regard to the implementation of austerity policies against public opposition, this should not be understood as the imposition of technocratic policymaking from Brussels. She writes that national governments have a tendency to downplay their responsibility for European decisions, with national actors in both core and periphery Eurozone members having more scope to shape policy-making than they present to their electorates.

Allegedly, a ‘democracy without choices’ is unfolding in the Eurozone periphery (GIIPS – Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain). Governments in these countries are adopting a set of economic policies (so-called austerity programmes) that a majority of citizens reject and voice opposition to at the ballot box. Changing governments, however, has not produced policy change.

The view from the periphery, among national publics and elites alike (including national governments attempting to elude responsibility), is that national governments, as members of the European Union and the Eurozone, have no choice but to implement the austerity programmes imposed on them by a combination of unelected European institutions, creditor member states and international markets. The final implication of this argument is that national governments lack policy autonomy and this, in turn, necessarily brings about an absence of policy alternatives. Therefore, although people vote they do not really get to choose.

The view from Eurozone core countries, particularly Germany, reflects the other side of the coin of the crisis. According to this view, all EU member-states have been subject to the same rules of the game, democratically legitimised at the national level by either referendum or parliamentary ratification, and have been hit by the same financial crisis. The difference between countries is that some had done their homework (in terms of structural and economic reforms) prior to the outbreak of the crisis, while others had used the early years of the euro to spend beyond their means by way of unsustainable levels of public and private debt.

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