British Politics and Policy at LSE

Has the Eurozone crisis undermined Europe’s place in the world? In an interview with EUROPP’s editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Saskia Sassen discusses the role of finance in the crisis, the threat posed by transnational systems of surveillance, and the potential for public disorder to give a political voice to the powerless.

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

In your view, what is the root cause of the Eurozone crisis?

I have great respect and great admiration for the project that is European integration. That respect comes not from the notion that we should all get together and create some sort of ‘super-state’, but from the foundational elements that drove the project: the belief in law and the belief in non-military solutions. But there is one big qualifier to that respect, which is that when the push to accelerate the adoption of the euro was taking place it was driven by corporations. The big winners from the euro were the big corporations who could become bigger and who could enter the global economic space more effectively. The ones that suffered were the smaller firms connected to subnational and regional markets.

Credit: Ash Violette (CC BY 2.0)

Now, I’m not against having an integrated currency – certainly for me, as someone who travels all over Europe, it’s fantastic – but the problem was the rush. I remember the debates that there was supposedly no way we could do it. Well, we got it done. Why? Because enormously powerful corporate interests were behind it and when they want to get something done, by God they get it done. The fact that most of these national economies are constituted by small enterprises, regional markets, and localised production – that was simply overlooked. And now I think we’re paying the price for that.

There are, of course, other issues that come into the picture. One is that by integrating on the continental scale, and by having a single currency, it became much more worthwhile for finance – which is very different from banking – to do its thing. If we still had separate national currencies then central banks sitting on top of the situation tightly would have prevented the scale-up that makes it worthwhile for global finance. When you have that level of integration, finance moves in and finance ‘financialises’.

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Prior to the accession of the United Kingdom to the European Economic Community in 1973, the French language held a privileged position as a lingua franca of the Community. David Fernández Vítores assesses the demise of the French language’s status and the failure of France to develop an effective strategy for preventing the advance of English. He notes that the country is now refocusing its efforts on consolidating the position of French in the legal sphere, one of the few areas where it still enjoys a privileged position in comparison to other official languages.

This article was originally published on LSE’s EUROPP blog.

France is not only one of the founding members of the European Community, but also one of the main drivers of the integration process. However, this does not necessarily mean that France has systematically allowed the erosion of its political identity as a result of European integration. In fact, it has done the opposite. France’s attitude regarding the position of the French language in the EU is a good example of its savoir-faire. Since the early years of the Community, France’s strategy for safeguarding its language has focused solely on adopting measures aimed at promoting the language or strengthening the privileged position it previously enjoyed in the institutional arena.

Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Public Domain)

The main challenge to this privileged position came in 1973 with the accession of the United Kingdom, as well as Ireland and Denmark. In addition to concerns about the French language losing its importance on the European stage as a result of English becoming an official Community language, this first enlargement brought with it a proposal to reform the EU language regime. Interestingly enough, the proposal for reform did not come from the states in which French and English were spoken, but from one with a minority language in the Community: Denmark.

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