ABSTRACT
The competitive undercutting of labour costs and enhancing labour profitability is believed to lead to more investment in Europe, and enhance Europe's competitiveness. This chapter presents the eruption of the global economic crisis and the structural problems of the European Monetary Union. The rationale of European Union (EU) crisis management is that a decrease in prices improves competitiveness and ultimately net exports, which again is expected to stimulate further investments and to culminate in economic growth. EU crisis management blatantly reflects the demands of organized transnational capital and its unrestricted access to political decision-makers. The EU crisis management goes paired with the incorporation of a range of authoritarian neoliberal elements in the institutional outlook of its governing agencies. Almost seven years after the eruption of the global economic crisis, the structural problems of the European Monetary Union and the widening centre-periphery divide seem far from resolved.
