Table Of Content
Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life
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Crisis, Austerity,
and Everyday Life
Living in a Time of Diminishing
Expectations
Gargi Bhattacharyya
University of East London, UK
© Gargi Bhattacharyya 2015
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-41111-2
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Is it Too Late to Write a Book about Austerity? 1
2 The Primacy of the Economic and the Degradation
of Politics 41
3 The Institutionalisation of Despair and
Diminishing Expectations 75
4 Austerity and Extending the Racial State 111
5 Reproductive Labour in Austere Times 149
6 Ending – Surplus Populations and Austerity Forever? 189
Bibliography 203
Index 227
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank all of the places and people that allowed me to try
out the ideas discussed in this book. These include the Feminist Research
Group at University of East London (UEL); the Centre for Research in Race
and Education at the University of Birmingham; the Centre for Migration,
Refugees and Belonging at UEL: The Feminist Theory Seminar Series at
the University of Manchester; the British Sociological Association teach-
ing conference; and the convivium organised by Massimo De Angelis in
April 2015. I would also like to thank Tracey Jensen for inviting me to
join her panel at the Austerity Futures conference at Goldsmiths. The
BSA postgraduate conference kindly invited me to be a plenary speaker
at a time when I was working through the final parts of this book and
the discussion at this event helped me to think about some tricky points.
Two tea dates, one with Paul Warmington and another with Parminder
Bhachu, Les Back, and John Solomos, forced me to say out loud what
I was trying to do. Thank you for putting up with my squirming awk-
wardness; having to say it helped a great deal in getting it down on paper.
During the writing of this book, I had the pleasure and honour of
being part of the research team for the project ‘Mapping Immigration
Controversies’. My thanks go to Hannah Jones, Kirsten Forkert, Yasmin
Gunaratnam, Roiyah Saltus, Will Davies, Sukhwant Dhaliwal, and Emma
Jackson for coaxing me back into sociable working after a time when
I found it hard to speak or to see others at all. This was the very best
and most special of collaborative experiences and I hope it is a sign that
things can be done differently in spite of the pressure on us all to see each
other as competitors in an academic world of ever-increasing scarcity.
My thanks go to colleagues and students at UEL who offered me a new
intellectual home at the most difficult of times. Despite the many and
extensive pressures on the sector, colleagues at UEL have managed to
retain their intellectual zing and sense of humour. For this, I am bound-
lessly grateful to them.
In common I suspect with many, I write about the things that bother
me. It is either this or shouting on the bus, and we all know what a dan-
gerous pastime that can be. I thank Palgrave Macmillan for giving me
the opportunity to do my shouting in a more respectable format. I hope
the finished product can repay their trust.
vi
Acknowledgements vii
Writing this book helped me to make sense of my own world and my
place within it and to think again and differently about how worlds can
change. Although I know that it is sadly lacking in laughs, for which
omission I apologise sincerely, I hope readers can see that this is not an
altogether miserable book. Better to see your enemy as they are. Better to
plan our response in the clear light of day. Better to speak to each other
with our best efforts to understand what is going on. This is the best that
I could do for now, I hope that it will help others to do more.
Lots of things happen in the course of writing a book. At the same
time, lots of things do not happen. Dinners go uncooked. Parks and
playgrounds go unvisited. Everyone watches too many movies while
they wait for mummy to finish. Despite all my efforts, these pages
are also a reminder of games not played and patience stretched tight.
Once again, my thanks and apologies to Stanheed Butt who, after all
these years, still cannot believe how long it takes to write a book.
Of course, in the end it is all for my children, all of it. Even the parts
that cause them irritation and make my three-year-old say that I am
always angry. There is so much to be angry about, but not with you, my
loves. This book is for you, Abir, Amlan, and Swadhin, in hope of better
times.
1
Is it Too Late to Write a Book
about Austerity?
This is a work that tries to describe the immense changes that have been
implemented in the name of austerity in the early twenty-first century
across Europe and that seeks to imagine the world after austerity. This is
an approach that understands that there will be a time when ‘austerity’
ends, although the repercussions of what has been enacted in its name
may continue to reverberate. This work presents ‘austerity’ in the twenty-
first century as a time-limited campaign that mobilises the sense of crisis
in order to institute some extreme and hitherto unexpected measures
within a short period. Yet this approach, reliant as it is on crisis-rhetoric,
cannot continue indefinitely, and it will end at some point. However,
the end of austerity is not a return to things as they were. This volume
seeks to demonstrate both that austerity is a campaign to transform eve-
ryday life, including when the urgency of austerity as crisis-response has
passed, and that this campaign seeks to remake the terrain of the social
in such a manner that previous agreements about equality and the reach
of mutuality are under threat.
This work takes as its focus the impact of early twenty-first-century
austerity on European nations, both within and outside the eurozone.
In this, the discussion that follows encompasses both the imposed aus-
terity of those economies that have received bailout funding from the
European Central Bank and other international financial institutions
and the austerity measures introduced by national governments in the
name of deficit reduction in other parts of Europe. Although I am unable
to give a detailed account of the impact of so-called austerity among such
a diverse range of locations, the overall argument applies to this variety
of spaces where some form of welfare has been assured until recently
and yet is now in the process of dismantlement in the name of austerity.
Although there may be moments of resonance, this is not a discussion
1
2 Crisis, Austerity, and Everyday Life
of austerity in North America or Australia, because the formation of wel-
fare in these spaces has taken a different trajectory. Overall, this work
suggests a general frame through which to reconsider the remaking
of political terrain in a region that is learning to take a very different
and less economically powerful place in the world. In saying this, I do
not mean to suggest that austerity operates in the same manner across
Europe. However, I do want to argue that the manoeuvrings undertaken
through austerity represent an attempt to defend privilege and influence
for some in the face of global crisis and without regard for the divisive
consequences of such strategies. These defensive measures occur both
within national spaces in the form of attempts to safeguard the posi-
tion and privileges of local elites and between nations in a regional bat-
tle to retain the privileges of ‘being Europe’ for a few, regardless of the
consequences for less affluent European nations. Overall, this volume
argues that ‘austerity’ is a choice and should be read as a particular set
of policy choices in the face of apparent economic crisis. Other choices
could have been made. Examining how austerity becomes the approach
of European governments (and others) in this moment of rapid change
and uncertainty helps us to understand what is at stake in such choices.
Although this period of austerity is a response to the 2008 financial
crisis, this work tries to argue that the practices and habits of auster-
ity build upon formations that are set before this moment of crisis.
It is for this reason that we can see traces of austerity practice occurring
in Germany from the beginning of the century at least, with cuts to
pension rights, extensions of working life, and an overall depression of
wages. Overall, this work argues that the phenomena that we know as
austerity, in fact, should be regarded as an acceleration of longer run-
ning trends. The moment of the financial crisis may spark and enable
the most extreme of austerity measures to be implemented, but the
overall project of austerity was not formed in that moment. This work
tries to identify and understand these moments of an acceleration of
existing tendencies.
The impact of austerity has not been uniform, and clearly suffering
has been more extreme in some places. However, the overall event of
a strategy can be understood as a shared experience across Europe, and
there are some constant threads across the deficit-reduction strategies of
richer and poorer nations in the region. These include:
(cid:115)(cid:0) an attack on pension rights and concerted efforts to extend the length
of working life;
