Introduction: Europe at the crossroads
The Euro is in danger. This danger comes from those who claim to be its saviours in the current crisis – from the German government, the parties supporting it, and most of the German media. They believe that responsibility for the crisis lies mostly with those members of the Eurozone that have trouble servicing their debt, and have therefore been forced to subject themselves to the EU’s as well as the IMF’s socalled ‘conditionalities’. In a rerun of the last decades’ debt crisis in the countries of the global South they are pushing for savage cuts in welfare spending. They are demanding cuts in public sector wages, and the elimination of infrastructural spending. In short, the social and cultural rights of citizens are being trampled on, at the same time as collective sovereignty is being curtailed. The mere rump of a ‘European Social Model’ agreed some 11 years ago in Lisbon is being silently buried in this financial crisis of the banks and the debt crisis of the states.
