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Ten years of crisis. Regulation of wage relations and unequal development in the European Union. Ten years after the outbreak of the global financial and economic crisis, this article explores key results of austerity based crisis management in the EU. Focusing on the decisive shifts in European economic governance, it argues that the dominant crisis management strategies have increasingly transposed the regulation of the wage relations, i.e. labour market and wage policies, to the European level. This made it possible to contain and even overcome the crisis on a short-term basis, mostly at the expense of wage-dependent parts of the population in Southern Europe. However, as the analysis of key macroeconomic indicators suggests, these crisis management strategies have failed to resolve the fundamental imbalances and contradictions of uneven development in Europe. Currently, Italy in particular has become the point of condensation of these imbalances and contradictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After more than seven years of fiscal austerity and neoliberal structural reforms, the fundamental imbalances that led to the Eurozone crisis have remained unresolved and the project of European integration as such appears to be in the deepest crisis it has experienced so far. This has prompted the dominant forces in the EU to at least partially reconsider their present crisis management strategies, envisioning deeper integration towards a "Genuine Economic and Monetary Union" and outlining different future scenarios for the EU. While especially the Five President's Report does acknowledge fundamental construction problems and crisis tendencies of the Economic and Monetary Union, the strategies to address them either fall tremendously short of this diagnosis or lack assertiveness. We argue that this inability to confront these crisis tendencies results from the growing economic and political asymmetry in the axis between France and Germany as the principal mechanism of compromise which undergirded previous cycles of European economic integration. At the bottom of this paralysis lies a gradual shift in the dominant internationalization patterns of the German political economy within the European division of labor: away from Southern Europe and France and towards Eastern Europe and the Emerging Markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presidential and parliamentary elections were a political earthquake for the French political system. While the two big parties experienced massive losses of political support, the rise of new political formations took place. Emmanuel Macron is not only the youngest president of the V. Republic so far, he is also the first president not to be supported by either one of the two biggest parties. This article argues that the election results are an expression of a deep crisis of representation in France that is rooted in the economic transformations of the 1970s. The article analyses the political situation after the elections and tries to give an outlook on further political developments in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The establishment of a Commission for the Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste by the state puts the anti-nuclear movement into a new situation. In the past, the relationship between the movement and the institutions of the state was mainly characterized by confrontation. But the establishment of a Repository Search Committee changed the situation and raised the question of cooperation. Using the hegemony theory, the article analyses the developments and conflicts between the movement and the state in the case of the search process for a nuclear waste repository. Thereby the article mainly focuses on dynamics inside the anti-nuclear movement and the relationship between the different fraction of the movement and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the latest european election, the Front National (National Front) is now the strongest party in France. With the aid of the hegemony theory, this article analyzes the contextual conditions for the rise of the Front National and the political strategy in the european elections campain. The aim of this article is to answer the question how the party managed to resolve the poor results of the presidential elections 2007 and gain such high approval rates in the latest elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]