Austerity and New Spaces for Protest

The first major economic crisis of the 21^st century is comparable to the ‘Great Depression’ after 1929. Like its 20^th century predecessor, the epicenter has been the US and Wall Street. The 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers is its symbolic core, with the City of London not far away. The major differences with 1929 are the dense web of financial globalization and new technologies. The disaster has had two distinct phases. The first involved the collapse of major Anglo-American financial institutions that led to a credit crisis and a crippling of the ‘real economy’. The second began with contagion from the US-UK crisis to the Eurozone, the group of EU members belonging to Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which wrought havoc on EMU’s poorer members, the EMU itself, and the EU more broadly. The origins of both phases are now well understood, as are the public policies proposed to restore economic health. The results are less clear, however. Recovery from both crises has been halting, and their consequences will take many years to be clear.