Abstract
Chapter 6 goes into the details of the crisis emerged in 2007/2008 as the immediate context of the conflict over the 2012 labour market reform. Building on a discussion of issues of crisis and crisis management at European level, the chapter investigates these dynamics in the Italian case with a particular focus on the possible emergence of a crisis of crisis management. Among the key legacies for the observed conflict, the analysis points out the relevance of Berlusconi’s attempt to construct a new dominant social bloc involving also precarious classes as well as the assessment of Monti’s crisis management strategy not only as a reaction to external pressures but as a deliberate political project aimed at the construction of a ‘bloc bourgeois’.
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Notes
- 1.
This periodization is based on the integrated analysis of macroeconomic indicators, political events at the national, European and international level, the adoption of crisis management measures as well as related policy analyses, encompassing a period of observation from April 2008 to December 2012 (for more details see Caterina 2012a, b). On the one hand, the choice of this timespan allows focusing on the country’s situation before the outbreak of the crisis, i.e. to take also the change of government in May 2008 into account; on the other hand, it covers the whole extension of the crisis in the Italian context up to the resignation of Monti’s government at the end of 2012, which marks the end of the timespan of observation of the actor-process analysis conducted in Chaps. 8 and 9 (see Sect. 3.2).
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Caterina, D. (2019). Italy’s Political Economy Between Crisis and Crisis Management. In: Struggles for Hegemony in Italy’s Crisis Management. Contributions to Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95615-2_6
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