Browsing by Author "Ekman, Johan"

This thesis addresses the question of disintegrative tendencies that the European integration project has faced after the Euro Crisis of 2008-09, with reference to EU youth policy. It analyses the effectiveness of EU youth policy in relation to how well aspirations for high employment rates and better social conditions were met in the context of the Euro Crisis. It engages with theoretical approaches on the origins of the integration project, and argues for the benefits of a critical political economy approach for better understanding how young people have been affected by its developments after the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty. It argues that disintegrative tendencies increased because of rigid, austerity emphasising policies adapted during the crisis in the southern eurozone, and that these policies derived from how the integration project had been configured to fit an epoch of capitalism conditioned by neoliberal ideology. The thesis shows how youth policies in the EU became part and parcel of the Lisbon Agenda that had as its supreme objective to structurally reform the economies of member states to become more competitive through flexible labour markets and leaner welfare states, which weakened social citizenship norms. In the context of the Euro Crisis, a significant restructuring of the political economy of the crisis countries took place, and this had serious effects on young people’s lives. The reforms that were conditional to the bailouts of Southern eurozone crisis countries aimed at calming markets and guaranteeing price stability, as well as to further entrench marketisation in accordance with the objectives of the integration project as spelled out in the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Strategy. A discrepancy between targets set and objectives of EU youth policy is revealed, as unemployment rose. The thesis also analyses how these policies were debated in the European Parliament 2009-2012, showing that young people rarely figure in the debates in 2009-10, after which the topic gains prominence in the debate. However, policy makers across the board continue to argue for a policy of structural reforms and a more flexible labour market