Wolfgang Streeck is professor emeritus of sociology at the Max Planck Institute.
A master politician like Merkel will never let a good crisis go to waste. It wasn’t just media stories about suffering migrants that led her to invite the refugees in Budapest to come to Germany, no papers required and no questions asked. What Merkel called ‘showing a friendly face in an emergency’ was meant to shame those who, during the euro crisis, had enjoyed the cartoons of Merkel and her finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, in Nazi uniform. By opening the German border, Merkel could hope to recapture the moral high ground.
Now that his cards are fully on the table it is a good moment to try to answer the question: how did Wolfgang Streeck turn critical theory into a vehicle for the assertion of the primacy of the nation?
The single currency has turned into a monetary choke-lead, forcing a swathe of economies – more than half the Eurozone’s population – into perpetual recession.
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