The financial crisis keeps us on edge and creates a diffuse sense of helplessness. Well-nigh unfathomable problems lead to measures that seem like emergency operations on the open heart of the Western world, performed with no knowledge of the patient's clinical history. The gravity of the situation is matched by the paucity of our understanding of it, and of how it came about in the first place.
In this book, compiled from his Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Streeck lays bare the roots of the present financial, fiscal and economic crisis, seeing it as part of the long neoliberal transformation of postwar capitalism that began in the 1970s. Linking up with the crisis theories of that decade, he analyses the subsequent tensions and conflicts involving states, governments, voters and capitalist interests—a process in which the defining focus of the European state system has shifted from taxation through debt to budgetary “consolidation.” The book then ends by exploring the prospects for a restoration of social and economic stability. Buying Time is a model of enlightenment. It shows that something deeply disturbing underlies the current situation: a metamorphosis of the whole relationship between democracy and capitalism.
Author(s): Wolfgang Streeck
Publisher: Verso
Year: 2014
Language: English
Pages: 240
INTRODUCTION: Crisis Theory, Then and Now
1 FROM LEGITIMATION CRISIS TO FISCAL CRISIS
A new type of crisis
Two surprises for crisis theory
The other legitimation crisis and the end of the postwar peace
The long turn: from postwar capitalism to neoliberalism
Buying time
2 NEOLIBERAL REFORM: FROM TAX STATE TO DEBT STATE
Financial crisis: a failure of democracy?
Capitalism and democracy in the neoliberal revolution
Excursus: capitalism and democracy
Starving the beast!
The crisis of the tax state
From tax state to debt state
Debt state and distribution
The politics of the debt state
Debt politics as international financial diplomacy
3 THE POLITICS OF THE CONSOLIDATION STATE: NEOLIBERALISM IN EUROPE
Integration and liberalization
The European Union as a liberalization machine
Institutional change: from Keynes to Hayek
The consolidation state as a European multilevel regime
Fiscal consolidation as a remodelling of the state
Growth: back to the future
Excursus on regional growth programmes
On the strategic capacity of the European consolidation state
Resistance within the international consolidation state
4 LOOKING AHEAD
What now?
Capitalism or democracy
The euro as a frivolous experiment
Democracy in Euroland?
In praise of devaluation
For a European Bretton Woods
Gaining time
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
