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In the context of the current Eurozone crisis, this paper argues that the economic crisis has provoked a crisis of identity in the EU. This paper examines popular discourse on Germany and Angela Merkel in the Eurozone periphery, France and the UK according to which Europe is effectively being colonised by Germany—the so-called ‘Fourth Reich’. Using theories of fear and disgust including Burke's Sublime, Kristeva's Abject and, especially, Freud's Uncanny, it is argued that this Discourse can be understood as an essentially Gothic narrative based around the fear of the ‘return of the repressed’—in this case Nazi Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European crisis is the best case study for examining both the vulnerabilities of Europe's framework for economic governance and the very process of European integration itself. This statement is true for several reasons: first, because the European crisis is the most serious crisis the European Union has faced to date; second, because of the crisis, limits on the process of economic integration in Europe have been put to a real test; and third, because the main causes of the crisis are tied into the framework for economic governance that has been developed over the last few decades and therefore are connected to the very process of European unification itself. The primary aim of this paper is to demonstrate whether and to what extent the new framework for economic governance in Europe is largely a result of interstate bargaining and consequently whether national preferences continue to play an important role in the framework's general transformation. The economic crisis showed that important issues in economic policy concerning the change in economic governance and the role of the nation-state, which were ‘swept under the carpet’ in recent decades, must be resolved to make the European venture viable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To get a realist picture of the economic crisis in Europe, we need to know the heterogeneity of European capitalism. Differences in terms of competitiveness and institutions are huge. With the crisis as point of departure, I will outline this heterogeneity. First, I describe the comparative (dis-)advantages of selected EU-member states. The differences are big, particularly in terms of economic specialisation and innovation capacity—aspects getting little attention in the standard literature. In the second part, the paper concentrates on institutional development in the past decades. To identify gradual differences and change, I distinguish ideal-typical from empirical capitalisms, which are located in the field between the types. Based on state–economy and capital–labour relationships as criteria, my types are liberal and embedded capitalism of which the latter is split into statist, patrimonial and corporatist types. Data from the Index of Economic Freedom, the OECD and the World Bank are rough indicators to locate the cases, but show that the strongly corporatist capitalisms in the Nordic countries are highly competitive, while competitiveness and the capacity adequately to act declines the more patrimonial capitalism is, as in the Mediterranean countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the late 1990s, the main Italian ‘welfare cultures’ and the resulting innovation strategies of the welfare system refer to the question of ‘pluralization’. The current crisis is causing the expansion of the public functions carried out by different private actors. As a consequence, discussions of welfare cultures are increasingly making reference to the notion of horizontal subsidiarity that requires new forms of governance. Three subsidiarity approaches emerge: the liberal subsidiarity approach which is related to the ‘free choice’ welfare model; the incomplete subsidiarity approach related to the ‘second welfare’ strategy; and the radical subsidiarity approach related to the ‘radical plural welfare society’ perspective. The paper develops a theoretical discussion of these different welfare cultures—these latter seen through the point of view of subsidiarity—arguing that the problems arising from an economic understanding of welfare pluralization could be addressed by a cultural change which sees in the definition of a new plural welfare system and role for the public sphere the opportunity for aggregating social demand, reinforcing social ties, creating shared value and re-socializing social risks. The hypothesis is that the ‘radical subsidiarity’ approach could better capture these chances for social innovation that this phase of crisis can unlock. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]