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Orthodox integration scholarship failed to identify the factors leading to the euro area (EA) economic and financial crisis because of weaknesses that Horkheimer identified in ‘traditional’ theory: disciplinary splits and a tendency to idealize from particular instrumental perspectives. By contrast, critical political economy offered a plausible and coherent elucidation of the emergent properties and limits of finance-led capitalism and their concrete manifestation in the EA. This contribution both reviews state-of-the-art critical political economy research on the EA crisis and makes a distinct contribution to it. In addressing the puzzle of why not only the Economic and Monetary Union persists despite morbid symptoms but why crisis management is extending and deepening a discredited finance-led capitalism, the contribution synthesizes theories of transnational class formation and inter-state relations, and proposes that Europe is caught in an ordoliberal iron cage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the idea that intervention in the labour market through the suspension of labour rights and freedoms, fear and a fall in purchasing power all played a key role in achieving political and economic objectives in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. However, in each of these cases, the success of this policy was not as had been expected. These European experiences were essential for the configuration of the labour framework in the Franco dictatorship. The iron-fisted control of the labour market came to Spain through legal texts and institutions that were in many cases a blatant copy of those applied in Italy and Germany. In spite of the ideological distance between them, we can also find some common traits with Stalin's labour policies. The results obtained were even worse for Spain, and the negative effects on the economy were more serious, due to the greater longevity of the Spanish dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]