Economic Crisis and the Politics of Austerity

This chapter discusses mainstream approaches to economic crisis and austerity. It focuses on different feminist approaches, which expose the costs of any gender-blind approaches. The European Union (EU) neoliberal regime and its emerging institutional configuration have heavily influenced the policies in the aftermath of the crisis; the new economic governance regime has reorganised the coordination of economic policy along the lines of ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’. EU crisis responses have primarily comprised efforts to encourage and coordinate states’ reduction of sovereign debt through various instruments and discourses designed to enforce states’ reductions in public spending. The austerity agenda includes measures that promote deregulation and liberalisation of the market, including the labour market, through the reduction of labour rules, the decentralization of collective bargaining from state to enterprises, and cuts in wages. The economic crisis and the austerity that followed in Europe and the EU need to be understood from a variety of feminist analytical perspectives.