The scissors of debt : comments from Southern Europe

The debt crisis and austerity policies are hitting the societies of Europe's Mediterranean periphery, particularly Portugal, Greece, and Spain, hard. With the onset of the economic crisis, a whole growth and development model based on low wages and property speculation has come crashing to the ground. But in addition, as a result of the adjustment measures implemented, the entire social model and the system of social rights won in previous decades have entered into crisis. The austerity measures affect welfare states that are particularly fragile compared with the European Union average. The Mediterranean countries, especially Portugal, Greece, and Spain, developed weak welfare states in comparison with the European Union as a whole. These countries established their welfare regimes later, in the 1970s, in an international context in which neoliberal policies were already gaining the upper hand as Keynesian policies were being abandoned (Rodríguez Cabrero 2004; Adelantado 2000). This does not mean, of course, that on a world-comparative scale the workers in Mediterranean Europe did not achieve a standard of social rights unheard of on other continents. But the future of these rights is now under threat from the austerity bulldozer.