WPU May Day School, 2729 April 2012 The Future of European Integration: Left Perspectives

The symbolic beginning of the current financial and economic crisis is usually located in the year 2007, when the fourth biggest American investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsed, throwing the national financial system into disarray. The crisis soon extended far beyond the borders of the country of origin and used interconnected financial and commercial markets to cover the whole global economy. It received its European expression a particular interest of ours in a form of a debt crisis, which first hit countries of the Eurozone periphery, such as Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (i.e. the PIIGS club). But close financial links, internal trade imbalances and unfavourable balance of political forces, which has prevented the timely implementation of the necessary institutional adjustments and policy measures, threaten the existence of the Eurozone and the European Union as a whole. At the level of individual countries, the debt crisis is gradually gaining the devastating magnitude witnessed already in the first half of the 1980s. But at that time, it had mostly befallen developing countries. This time, it threatens the very heart of the developed countries of the Eurozone, calling into question the sustainability of the regional as well as the global political and economic system.

The purpose of this years May Day School is to closely analyse the situation of the countries of the Eurozone periphery in the light of the dual crisis of the neoliberal capitalism and European integrations. This will enable us to consider possible political strategies that put as their ultimate goal a still global, but socially and environmentally more sustainable political and economic system.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The political and economic logic of financial crisis: Can financial crises be seen as random excesses of an otherwise stable capitalist system, as a consequence of autonomous action of morally corrupt individuals employed by the financial sector, as the economists of currently dominant neoclassical school would have it? Or are they rather expressions of the normal functioning of capitalism? And if the latter is the case, which texts, authors, theories and concepts can provide us with an insight into the origins and development of financial crises, including the current one?

Historical and geographical approaches to the current financial and economic crisis: Dominant interpretations of the current crisis see its beginnings in the American real estate bubble, which had been inflating for most of the past decade. Alternative insights, e.g. from the proponents of the Post-Keynesian, Marxist or World-Systems traditions, differ from the prevailing interpretations in both temporal and geographic scope of the analysis. So which historical and geographical approach is most suitable for understanding the current financial and economic crisis? And what are the consequences of different historical and geographic approaches for developing strategies for exiting the current crisis?

Critical perspectives on European integrations: EU was more or less explicitly created with the purpose of providing conditions suitable for a stable and continued accumulation of industrial and financial capital, but was hamstrung by its fundamental contradictions. The eurozone, for instance, is troubled by the imbalance between fiscal heterogeneity and monetary homogeneity (Costas Lapavitsas), which sits atop of the uneven European development patterns (Joachim Becker). This topic will take a look at the EU as a neoliberal project, its beginnings, development and fundamental contradictions.

Prognosis and possible strategies for exiting the current financial and economic crisis: The final and most important task of this years May Day School will be an analysis of the already existing proposals for exiting the current crisis, and a development of new ones, with the emphasis on the perspective of the countries of the Eurozone periphery. We will discuss proposals that seek only to reform the current politico-economic system, e.g. in the direction of stronger EU institutions and a common welfare state (see, e.g., the so-called Modest Proposal by Yanis Varoufakis and Stuart Holland), as well as those that want to replace this system entirely, but which differ from one another in their relationship towards the EU as a possible institutional starting point of such thorough changes (the key debate being the one between Costas Lapavitsas and Michel Husson in the International Viewpoint and Socialist Register).