The shock waves of the 2007-2008 financial crisis threw the world into a global recession whose impacts were severely felt in Southern Europe. While the crisis affected the financial and banking system throughout the European Union (EU) and led to a protracted Eurozone sovereign debt crisis (2010-2017), its effects were particularly significant and structural in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain. After the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had applied the austerity prescription in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in developing countries in Asia, Africa, and South America, but also in some European countries, as was the case of Portugal in 1978 and 1983, the Eurozone crisis set the tone for the deepening and generalization of this policy in the peripheral states of the EU.

The financialization of the economy, monetarism, the deregulation of economic and production relations, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the orthodoxy around deficit control, public debt, and public spending are structural and characteristic axes of the political-ideological and economic-social agenda of neoliberalism. The international popularization and legitimization of their theses with the awarding of the Nobel Economics Prize to Friedrich Hayek (1974) and Milton Friedman (1976) and the electoral triumphs of Margaret Thatcher (1979) and Ronald Reagan (1980) marked a rupture – accentuated by the implosion of the USSR and “real socialism” (1989-1991) and the assertion of the Third Way in the social democratic and labor parties of the Euro-American world (1980-1990) – with the political and socio-economic architecture of post-World War II Western Europe.

Austerity must, in this sense, be equated in light of the context, the process, and the consequences of the hegemonization of neoliberalism and globalization. These inaugurate a new international order – post-Soviet – marked by the qualitative inflation of word-concepts-values such as market and individual, but also by the rejection of ideology, plurality and transitoriness. The market economy and liberal democracy, as understood in the Euro-American world, represented, for some, the end of history and a new era of technical, economic, and political rationalism. Political plurality and divergence are only acceptable if they do not call into question the hard core of neoliberal doxa. In fact, the orthodoxy and inflexibility with which the EU, the ECB and the IMF formulated the financial bailouts and structural adjustment programs applied to Portugal and Greece, and the way in which the first two dealt with the sovereign debt crises in Italy and Spain, demonstrate how, despite the consequences for the economic and social fabric of these countries, Margaret Thatcher’s there is no alternative guided the economic and financial policy of the EU, the ECB and the IMF.

The bailouts and financial adjustment programs imposed on the most affected countries, as well as the refusal of community solutions aimed at sharing the costs and consequences of the crisis and rethinking the processes and mechanisms of economic integration, were based on a priori and essentialist considerations in relation to the peoples and governments of Southern Europe, blaming them for the financial crisis they were in. The European Commission, the ECB and the economically more developed countries of the EU rejected any responsibility in the crisis that disproportionately affected the countries of Southern Europe, revealing in their speech and action that those they represented as unproductive, irresponsible, spendthrift and more susceptible to corruption were not worthy of the support and solidarity of the rich and enterprising North-Central Europe.

Organized by CITCEM – Center for Transdisciplinary Research Culture, Space & Memory, of the Faculty of Arts, University of Porto, this Congress aims to contribute to the deepening of reflection and open, cross and multidisciplinary scientific debate about the different dimensions that characterize the neoliberal agenda and thought. Memory, of the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto, this Congress aims to contribute to the deepening of reflection and open, transversal and multidisciplinary scientific debate about the different dimensions that characterize the neoliberal agenda and thought, the processes of integration and convergence of southern European countries within the EU, the crisis of their sovereign debts and the austerity programs they have implemented between 2010 and 2017, from the perspectives of History, Sociology, Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology, Communication Sciences, Law, Economics and Cultural and Literary Studies.

Thematic lines:

– Neoliberalism and austerity: history, political-social program, economic agenda, academic and media expression;

– Neoliberalism and austerity as ethics and morality;

– Neoliberalism and austerity in everyday life: impoverishment, inequality, precariousness, unemployment, emigration;

– Rescues and adjustment programs and their consequences;

– Neoliberalism and austerity – reflections on the welfare state;

– Southern Europe and the European Union: the process of construction and integration in Europe and the Eurozone and its consequences for the economies of the peripheral states;

– Political responses and consequences of the Eurozone crisis in the EU and its member states, particularly in southern Europe;

– Self-representations of Southern Europe in the context of the crisis and representations of Central-Northern Europe (press, institutions, governments) towards the South;

– Populism, neoliberalism and crisis: interdependent or autonomous phenomena?

– Political, social, economic and cultural alternatives to neoliberalism and austerity;

– Expressions of neoliberalism, recession and austerity in artistic-cultural production.

Organizing Committee:

Bruno Madeira (ICS/UM; CITCEM)

Conceição Meireles Pereira (FLUP; CITCEM)

Paula Grenha (ICS/UM)

Scientific Committee:

Ana Sofia Ferreira (IHC/UNL; FLUP)

António Costa Pinto (ICS

Fátima Moura Ferreira (Lab2PT; UM)

Gaspar Martins Pereira (CITCEM)

Luís Velasco-Martínez (University of Vigo)

Manuel Loff (IHC/UNL; FLUP)

Patrícia Alves de Matos (CRIA/ISCTE)

Rodrigo Turin (UFRJ; LETHE)

Silvia Correia (FLUP)

Virgílio Borges Pereira (IS-UP)

Secretariat:

Bruna Lobo (CITCEM/FLUP)
Estefânia Lopes (CITCEM/FLUP)
Tânia Ferreira (CITCEM/FLUP)

Contacts:

Tel: 226077177 | e-mail: citcem@letras.up.pt