ABSTRACT
This is a chapter about the everyday Feminist Political Economy of debt-driven austerity in the European context, examining the political conditions created by persistent financial crisis. Financialisation is as entrenched now than it was before 2008, and the political power of austerity, as the combination of monetary expansion and fiscal consolidation, is accepted as the ‘new normal’ – at least among policy elites. The mainstream study of International Political Economy has tended to emphasise a top-down institutional focus which frames financial crises, including the global financial crisis of 2008, in a distinctive way: Crisis appears as an aberration in the normal functioning of – otherwise rational – markets. To understand the significance of austerity in the contemporary European context, it needs to be positioned as part of a longer period of financial market liberalisation and capital market integration.
