The Asymmetries of European Integration and the Crisis of Capitalism in Portugal

Abstract

This article analyses the crisis of Portuguese capitalism within the wider crisis of the Eurozone. Portugal's prolonged economic stagnation, associated with an increasingly dependent and fragile insertion in the Eurozone, can now be seen as an early manifestation of the asymmetries and fractures between the Eurozone's core and its periphery that are now wider and more visible. By focusing on the manifestations of ‘embedded neoliberalism’ in a country of the periphery, the article sheds light on how neoliberal restructuring has made the economic structure increasingly incompatible with the social developments that had previously helped to guarantee its legitimacy. The troika's structural adjustment reveals that this incompatibility is now fully assumed and that, in the absence of social resistance, the brunt of adjustment will be felt by the majority of workers.