A Coming Crisis of the EURO?

Official ‘Eurospeak’ and mainstream European integration theory holds the completion of the 3rd stage of the European Monetary Union to represent a high point of achievement of forging ‘an ever closer union’ or a new novel ‘multileveled polity’. Whilst not incorrect in a formal sense, this is an extremely one-sided perspective, which disregards the more important disintegrative effects the EURO is having on the configuration of social accords that underpin European welfare capitalism. The paper will demonstrate that the EMU has systematically been configured into a structurally subordinate relation to the US Dollar in the neo-liberal transnational financial order, which seriously circumscribes the capacity of European state apparatuses to manage social antagonisms that are unleashed in the current process of capitalist restructuring. This is in contrast to the American case, where the capacity to turn debt into capital, makes it possible to draw on the financial order for these purposes. It is argued, therefore, that the EMU is ridden with crisis tendencies. Their actual and potential manifestations are explored, including the rise of right wing populism as well as prospective European challenges to current American hegemony, which might constitute a ‘blowback’ in Chalmers Johnson’s sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]