Southern Europe?: Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece from the 1950s until the present day - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3593504820 ISBN 13: 9783593504827

Verlag: Campus Verlag, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Gegenwärtig erlebt der Süden Europas in der öffentlichen Debatte eine neue Konjunktur. Mit Vorliebe wird dabei ein europäischer Nord-Süd-Gegensatz heraufbeschworen, ohne jedoch auf seine lange Geschichte zu blicken. Wirtschaftlich und politisch unterentwickelt, unterschieden sich Italien, Spanien, Portugal und Griechenland nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg von den sogenannten westeuropäischen Gesellschaften. Zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts schien diese Ungleichheit überwunden. Nun droht die Schuldenkrise den Kontinent erneut zu spalten. Die Beiträge hinterfragen gängige Annahmen und Bilder von "Südeuropa " und ergründen, inwiefern der "Süden" einen homogenen Raum mit strukturellen Gemeinsamkeiten darstellt.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Martin Baumeister ist emeritierter Professor für Europäische Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts an der Ludwig-Maximilans-Universität München; von 2012 bis 2024 war er Direktor des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom.

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Introduction

Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala

In 2004, The Economist published, under the title "The Fit and the Flabby", a cartoon depicting three men in underpants. The man at the center was remarkably obese and wore drawers in the colors of the German flag. At his sides, two slender bodybuilders-whose briefs had the colors of Spain and France-exhibited their fully oversized muscles. The message was clear. At that time, Germany was considered the 'sick man of Europe', as a country "facing its most serious stagnation in postwar history" (Hein and Truger, 2005). France, its traditional main concurrent, appeared to be in much better shape. The novelty was, however, the third counterpart: as Europe's new 'top performer', Spain appeared to match the two major economies of the continent. The Spanish economy represented a model envied by many that since the seventies had successfully managed the "transition from an agricultural society to a modern economy dominated by the service sector" (Mas and Quesada 2007, 87).

After the outbreak of the financial, the economic and eventually the debt crisis, a few years later the situation has fully changed. Not least thanks to its broad industrial sector, previously considered its weak spot, Germany has resurged and mutated from "Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar" (Dustman et al. 2014) while France has been hit by severe economic and social problems. Of the three, however, the main loser has been Spain, falling down from the economic miracle to a dramatic recession that has deeply affected the Spanish society as well as the cohesiveness of the European Union.

The rise and decline of Spain is paradigmatic for the area that-including also Italy, Portugal, and Greece-is usually called 'Southern Europe' in today's political and scientific discourse. Before the crisis, the international reputation of these countries was quite different. In comparison with other Western European states, Portugal and Greece were still regarded as less dynamic economies that, nonetheless, were achieving remarkable results. On the contrary, Italy was said to be a country affected by stagnation and still living off the economic boom of the past. Nevertheless, all four Southern European countries were considered an integral part of the wealthy (Western) European economies. Also by leaving behind the past authoritarian regimes, they seemed to have mastered the deep economic underdevelopment still affecting them after World War II and become solid democracies and reliable members of the Western community.

After 2007 and especially 2010, the South has been at the center of public debates over the crisis. Although Ireland-as regards the debt crisis the second 'I' of the PIIGS-and partly France have shared common problems with these countries, it is undisputed that 'Southern Europe' constitutes 'the' European problem. In other words-as far as their economic and social emergencies are concerned-the near future of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece appears to be decisive for the success or failure of the European integration project.

This book addresses the question of whether 'Southern Europe' is a useful concept for understanding the European present and recent past. Do Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece represent an area shaped by common paths and patterns of development as well as structural analogies? Or is 'Southern Europe' a misleading notion brought up by polarized political debates? From this perspective, following an interdisciplinary approach, the volume looks both at the current situation and considers its historical roots, back in the early post-war period.

While historiography has not dealt intensively with 'Southern Europe', in the last decades, disciplines such as economics, sociology, and political science have offered in-depth analyses of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece in terms of a common area of development. A recurrent characteristic of these studies consists of highlighting the supposed deficits of 'Southern Europe' with regard to a European 'core'. A good example is a passage that Maurizio Ferrera-a renowned expert in the field of welfare state studies-wrote in 1996 and that retrospectively appears almost prophetic:

"Within national debates, some voices have started to lament explicitly that perhaps the 'deeper and wider' European Union has arrived too early for the new southern Europe, which is therefore doomed to remain a second rate periphery. Others argue that the constraints posed by the integration process represent a good chance for a 'big' modernising 'bang', capable of finally aligning the still underdeveloped Mediterranean littoral with the more civilized European inland. The next decade is very likely to show which scenario will prevail." (Ferrera 1996, 34)

Even regarding the more technical aspects of his analysis of a Southern European welfare state, Ferrera focuses on insufficiencies of his 'Southern model', whose characteristics are its dualism, ineffectiveness, and particularistic clientelism, producing its permanent structural crisis (Ferrera 1996, 19, 25, 31). This tendency becomes especially evident in the opus magnum by Giulio Sapelli (1995)-one of the few historians dealing with this field-dedicated to the post-war history of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece (as well as Turkey, which the author considers to be part of that area). Adopting a Weberian perspective and examining both the economic and socio-political systems, Sapelli describes 'Southern Europe' as an area floating between tradition and modernity, i.e. as a region that-caught in archaic structures-has only partially achieved the features of a modern society. This development, in his opinion, is due to the fact that Southern European societies have experienced only a weak industrialization, changing almost directly from agricultural to service economies. Under these circumstances, the 'contractual system' and the 'market forces' shaping modern societies have not been able to develop fully. On the contrary, they have been slowed down by clientelistic and patronage structures both in economy and politics.

Without blaming their specific arguments, we can observe that Sapelli and Ferrera-like many other authors in the field-adopt a research framework dependant upon the normative narratives about the right or wrong path to European modernity. From this perspective, the volume is based on the assumption that both political debates and scientific research on 'Southern Europe' have been influenced by polarizing discourses reflecting internal European power hierarchies. To contextualize and historicize these discourses, however, does not mean rejecting the concept of 'Southern Europe' as a whole. It rather implies the necessity of identifying the danger of 'all-inclusive' interpretative paradigms, and of raising the question of to what extent this regional concept helps to understand Europe's present and recent past.

The volume consists of four sections. The first section, 'Southern Models?', surveys debates of the last three decades regarding the existence of 'Southern Europe' as an analytical category. In their chapter, Martin Baumeister and Roberto Sala examine the career and the potential of 'Southern Europe' as research agenda. They show that this concept is relatively young both in political and scientific discourses when referring to Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece. This category, as they show, almost ignored by historiography, has been increasingly employed since the seventies-in the specific context of the European integration as well as the Cold War and its aftermath-by social scientific studies. Although quite recent in its current use, the category of 'Southern Europe' has absorbed long-term normative discourses about the European South, especially those related to the idea of the 'Mediterranean'. Baumeister and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Campus Verlag
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 3593504820
• ISBN 13: 9783593504827
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 252
• Herausgeber: Baumeister Martin, Sala Roberto
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Beltz Verlagsgruppe GmbH & Co. KG; info@campus.de; ; Werderstr. 10; Weinheim; 69469; Deutschland