• VersoBooks.com
    http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2146-wolfgang-streeck-the-euro-a-political-error

    Très important entretien accordé par Wolfgang Streeck le 7 juillet à l’Espresso et désormais disponible en anglais.

    Wolfgang Streeck dirige l’Institut d’Etudes sociales Max Planck de Cologne - son livre « Du temps acheté » a récemment été publié par Gallimard.

    ‘The euro is not Europe’. Wolfgang Streeck suggests this as a basis for an accurate analysis of the negotiations over the Greek debt. ‘The equation between the monetary union and Europe is simply ideology, and serves to conceal prosaic interests’, the director of Cologne’s Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies explains.

    The interests of the countries of Northern Europe, against those of the South; of international finance against the peoples of the Mediterranean; of the ‘market people’ [Marktvolk] against the ‘state people’ [Staatvolk]; of capitalism against democracy. For the author of Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, the Greek case in fact merely represents the latest variant of a process dissolving the postwar democratic capitalist system. That is, the system that had fought to hold democracy and capitalism together in a fragile and unstable combination, and which gave rise to a social pact that has now exploded.

    Even in Europe. And precisely because of a European Union that has become ‘the engine of the liberalisation of European capitalism, a tool of neoliberalism’. And because of a single currency that serves ‘the market’s interests’. For Wolfgang Streeck, one of today’s most influential sociologists, if we are to get out of the vicious circle of a free-market Europe condemned to austerity, we must start by renouncing the euro as a single currency. With a new European Bretton Woods.

    #monnaie #dette #Grèce #Allemagne #Etalon_Or #austérité