Accounts of crisis in Europe have proliferated since late 2009. This article investigates the relationship between the diagnosis of crisis and the cohesion and enlargement of the ‘European project’ in the context of Southeastern Europe. The article adopts Michel Foucault's understanding of diagnosis as a strategic activity of language in order to re-construct the diagnostic discourse in relation to ongoing events in Greece and the Republic of Macedonia. Diagnostic practice produces accounts of crisis that are clinical, moralising, and prescriptive, affixing meanings to complex and overdetermined events in order that they can be acted upon. Diagnoses of the crises in Greece and Macedonia converge in their identification of political and cultural features of the national political economy in need of expert correction. The diagnosis of crisis emerges as an essential feature of European Union governmentality, which functions to delimit the bounds of political contestation in times of uncertainty and upheaval in favor of technocratic interventions.
The global political economy is in flux as a series of cumulative crises impacts its organization and governance. The IPE series has tracked its development in both analysis and structure over the last three decades. It has always had a concentration on the global South. Now the South increasingly challenges the North as the center of development, also reflected in a growing number of submissions and publications on indebted Eurozone economies in Southern Europe.An indispensable resource for scholars and researchers, the series examines a variety of capitalisms and connections by focusing on emerging economies, companies and sectors, debates and policies. It informs diverse policy communities as the established trans-Atlantic North declines and 'the rest', especially the BRICS, rise.
In response to the advance of right-wing populism in many Western democracies, political economists have sought explanations for political disaffection in the socioeconomic dislocations wrought by globalization, deindustrialization, and automation. Distrust of institutions and elites has been identified as a consequence of open markets and neoliberal governance. While affirming the public trust as a cornerstone of liberal democracy, this article directs analysis of the contemporary condition to a broader set of uniquely psychosocial and cultural dynamics. We identify sentiments ranging from disillusion to defiance that are now fueling a runaway politics narrowly defined around race, ethnicity, and national identity. We examine the stakes of eroding public trust in historical and theoretical perspective through an analysis of key works of Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, and E. H. Carr. Drawing parallels to their assessments of the interwar period, we argue that today's resentment politics is not singularly the product of economic hardship or even institutional failure, but emerges also from a breakdown of the social and cultural ties that underpin liberalisma "delicate order" built in part on sublimated psychosocial understandings of agency and community. Democracy again hangs in the balance.
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