Resumen de Economic and political aspects of the persisting crisis in Southern Europe.
João Carlos Graça, Rita Gomes Correia
'Globalist' discourse became largely hegemonic in our cultural environment, one of the consequences of such hegemony, albeit mostly a performative one, being the crisis of nation-state and sovereignty. This nadir of sovereignty really expresses and reinforces a political process of mass disfranchisement, whereby democratic institutions are rendered irrelevant. The Euro experiment and the correspondent 'Europeanist' discourse ought to be understood fundamentally within this generic frame, although with a number of important specificities. Meanwhile, a big economic crisis has deeply injured the social fabric of most Southern Europe countries, worsening Euroland's regional discrepancies and producing a situation of seemingly permanent 'zero-growth' for various countries, namely Italy, Greece and Portugal. This can, however, become an occasion to interrupt the dogmatic slumber induced by Europeanism, a discussion that directly implies the consideration of multiple political aspects, relevant not only for the countries more directly impoverished, but really to all Eurozone members. This paper regards the evolution of various southern European economies since the beginning of this century, with particular emphasis on the Portuguese case, and suggests a confrontation with aspects referring to political attitudes.
The central ideas argued in this paper are that integration in the Eurozone has been rather injuring, indeed almost catastrophic to Portuguese economy and society; and that there is a high probability that it will continue to be so. The reasons for such state of affairs are manifold, having been argued by a number of authors, among whom a mention is due at least to Lapavitsas et al. (2010a, 2010b, 2011), Krugman (2012a, 2012b), Weisbrot and Montecino (2012), Jacques Sapir (2013, 2014), Streeck (2014, 2016) and Stiglitz (2016), besides various Portuguese commentators, namely João Ferreira do Amaral (2013, 2014), Octávio Teixeira, Jorge Bateira, João Rodrigues and Nuno Teles. The perception of facts constitutes, however, a totally different subject-matter. In Portugal, as besides in most southern European countries, a vast, overwhelming political and cultural consensus favorable to the Euro persists, including the so-called 'arch of governance', i.e. the two alternating dominant parties (PS and PSD), plus center-right CDS-PP, adding also the Europeanist Left: mostly Left Block but also a number of smaller groups.
This consensus is nourished by an important number of private associations, think-tanks, clubs, foundations, etc., and above all by the mainstream media, both private and public. In generic terms, this huge constellation of forces has endorsed, and fundamentally still upholds the ideas that European integration, and specifically European currency integration, has predominantly been a good thing for Portugal (the country's presumable situation thus being worse in the hypothetical case of Portuguese previous exit); and/or that another Europe is possible, meaning that the possible wrongdoings that European integration may have caused to Portugal have mostly been unintended effects, or merely 'collateral damage', a set of reforms incorporating the fundamental Portuguese interests thus being possible, and indeed feasible with the present institutional European framework.
