Austerity and structural reform are the one true way to salvation, they insist. As Merkel put it in 2013: “What we have done, everyone else can do.”
Even with Mr. Ash’s three provisos this is still Neo-Liberalism. Note the idea of ‘structural reform’ as indicative of that Neo-Liberalism at it’s most formulaic?
But recall, for all the Teutonic self-congratulation and or to call it at it’s most vulgar, bootstrapping of Ms. Merkel, that Germany was bailed out in 1924, 1929, 1932 and 1953. See the essay by Gillian Tett at the Financial Times of January 16, 2015:
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/927efd1e-9c32-11e4-b9f8-00144feabdc0.html?siteedition=intl#axzz3Tpp8Y1TZ
A report on an address by Benjamin M. Friedman titled A Predictable Pathology.The PDF is here:
Mr. Ash is an historian, and yet such a potent piece of evidence is excluded from the melodramatic story of the destiny of Europe and it’s self-creation, the monetary union. And that it should come from the house organ of Capitalist Apologetics is surprising, to say the least.
From my perspective, it will take two generations to fully purge the Neo-Liberal Collective’s political/ethical delusion from what remains of our civic life and institutions, and most importantly from our very process of thought!
Almost Marx
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