Austerity Across Europe

Lived Experiences of Economic Crises

Sarah Marie Hall, Helena Pimlott-Wilson, John Horton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429574795
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

Drawing together multidisciplinary research exploring everyday life in Europe during times of economic crisis, this book explores the ways in which austerity policies are lived and experienced - often alongside other significant social, political and personal change. With attention to the inequalities produced by these processes and the measures used by individuals, families and communities to help them 'get by', it also envisages hopeful, affirmative socio-political futures. Arranged around the themes of intergenerational relations and exchanges, ways of coping through crises, and community, civic and state infrastructures, Austerity Across Europe will appeal to social scientists with interests in everyday life, family practices, neoliberal state policy, poverty and socio-economic inequalities.

1 Introduction

Austerity across Europe: lived experiences of economic crises

Sarah Marie Hall, Helena Pimlott-Wilson and John Horton

In January 2014 The Guardian, a leading British newspaper and media outlet, issued a call to its younger readership to send in pictures of their bedrooms. The reason? There was evidence that growing numbers of young people in the UK aged 20–34, three million in fact, were living at home with their parents (ONS 2014) as a result of direct and indirect austerity policies affecting access to jobs, welfare and housing (Heath and Calvert 2013; MacLeavy and Manley 2018; Wilkinson and Ortega-Alcázar 2017). Similar trends can be seen across Europe, with reports of ‘over three-quarters of young adults aged 18–24 in the EU usually live with at least one of their parents’ (Eurofound 2019, p. 56). As The Guardian story explained, this was ‘the highest number since records began’ and an increase of 25% since 1996 (The Guardian 2014a). The interest here was specifically in young people who were still living at home or had gone back home and were living in their childhood bedroom: ‘Has it changed at all since you were at school? Or have you still got the same posters up as you had 10 years ago?’

The challenge, it seems, was accepted. Viewers replied in their droves, and the website still carries some of these images and quotations about their experiences of living at home (The Guardian 2014b). The photographs have common themes, including the careful arrangements of soft furnishings, furniture, storage boxes, more than often stuffed awkwardly into small or ill-fitting spaces, with just about enough room for a single bed (also see Horton and Kraftl 2012). The quotations carry tales of job losses, high rents, leaving university and indebtedness. And when placed in tandem with short vignettes, these images also tell a stark and profound story of the lived and felt impacts of austerity on the ground.

As editors of this collection and scholars with research interests in this field, we have together and individually been working in this space for what seems like a very long time. Significant proportions of our careers have been dedicated to questioning, interrogating and quietly observing the ongoing ramifications of austerity policies for communities, families and society at large (e.g. see Hall 2019; Horton 2016; Horton et al. in press; Pimlott-Wilson 2017). This is not to say austerity is a new problem, rather that austerity is highly contextual and situated, while at the same time can represent shared experiences. Moreover, austerity is not a flash-in-the-pan event or policy; over the last ten years, it has become the new normal for state and personal finances alike across many European countries.

With this collection we explore the multitude of ways in which austerity and economic crises are experienced in everyday life across Europe. We connect and place into conversation emerging, cutting-edge social science research evidencing everyday experiences of austerity and crisis across diverse European contexts. With a pan-European perspective, the collection explores the geographically differentiated, regionally distinctive and personally provoking nature of these experiences via case studies from different states, regions, localities, cities and communities. In doing so, we aim to offer key thinking and evidence of the multi-scalar nature of personal, local and family experiences of austerity and crisis, and so too the relational impact of austerity and crisis on lived experiences.

Furthermore, we are interested in not just what everyday experiences of austerity look like, but also in how they are imagined and lived with over time, including how they shape and are shaped by socio-spatial inequalities. We ask: How is austerity lived in and lived with? How is it felt on the ground, and by whom? And what can we learn from taking a European perspective? In what follows, we outline key scholarship across the social sciences on austerity from throughout Europe, as well as that which has focused on lived experiences. We also provide a summary of the contributions within the collection and the themes by which they are arranged.

Austerity across Europe

Austerity comes in many forms, with local, regional and national particularities in how austerity policies are adopted and the impact they have (see Farnsworth and Irving 2012). However, what connects approaches and fiscal measures that come under this umbrella is that they involve the retraction of public spending with the specific aim of reducing a national deficit. There is a general consensus within social and political science literatures that austerity cuts have been pursued with most enthusiasm in some parts of Europe, namely Southern Europe (Italy, Greece, Portugal, Spain), the UK and Ireland (see Farnsworth and Irving 2012; Knight and Stewart 2016; Matsaganis and Leventi 2014). Here, the impacts of these fiscal measures are deep and pervasive across employment, housing, health, social care, welfare, education and more, as well as having implications for marginalised groups and communities (see Bassel and Emejulu 2017; Eurofound 2017). Furthermore, while the socio-spatial differentiations in austerity policies are highly interesting, with this collection our interest lies in the everyday impacts of austerity, or rather how austerity is lived with, across a range of European contexts.

Although austerity is a global phenomenon, the case of Europe is an interesting one and provides our collection with parameters for discussion. Trends across Europe, while contextually significant, can be seen through increases in unemployment, growing wealth and intergenerational inequalities, and changing living circumstances and family arrangements (Christophers 2018; MacLeavy and Manley 2018). There are also important cross-European issues to consider, including but not limited to migration and refugee flows shaped by national and international economic policy and humanitarian disasters (Carastathis 2015); a rise in right-wing, authoritarian political movements, considered by some to be a backlash against migration and austerity cuts (Hall and Ince 2018; Moore and Forkert 2014); and growing dissatisfaction with governance by the European Union with related class and race tensions, including of course the recent Brexit referendum (Burrell and Schweyher 2019). Europe – here loosely defined according to cultural affiliation, various bodies of membership, and as a physical continent – is a highly topical and vibrant context by which to examine the impacts of austerity and economic crises.

Moreover, while there have been suggestions that austerity is ‘ending’ (see Raynor 2018), what this means in practice is lesser known. Not only have recent policies across Europe offered little in the way of reversing austerity cuts, but this also has been coupled with a lack of reinvestment in public services (Hall 2019). As emerging commentaries suggest, more focus should be placed on what ends in austerity: ‘the absent, as well as the silenced and the muted’ (Raynor 2018). And at the time of writing this introductory chapter, the unfolding crisis surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the damage caused by years of austerity measures that have left public services underfunded and under-resourced (see Flesher Fominaya 2020). We are, therefore, particularly interested in the difference that the recent and ongoing era of austerity has made for the everyday lives and futures of people living in Europe.

Lived experiences of austerity and economic crises

There has been increased interest among social scientists in how recent years of austerity and economic crises have shaped everyday lives. This has also led to reconceptualisations of what is meant by austerity. In the preceding section we drew on a definition that refers mainly to state financial policy. However, austerity has another meaning: it is understood as a condition of severe simplicity and restraint. Understanding austerity as having these interconnecting meanings then allows us to think through austerity as simultaneously a condition of the personal and the social (Hall 2019; Hitchen 2016; Stenning 2020). These definitions also hint at the multi-scalar nature of austerity (Pimlott-Wilson and Hall 2017), an intimacy that is at once local and global in its effects (also see Oswin and Olund 2010). Here we are also reminded of Dyck’s (2005, p. 234) observations that ‘attention to the local … provides a methodological entry point to theorising the operation of processes at various scales – from the body to the global’. With this collection, we establish dialogue and discussion between these multiple scales of austerity politics and experiences across Europe.

A growing body of scholarship across human geography, sociology, education, social policy and more illustrates the importance of examining austerity as a multi-scalar, lived experience. Examples include García-Lamarca and Kaika (2016) on mortgage debt and the financialisation of housing in Spain, which they conceptualise as a form of biopolitics, and mortgages as a biopolitical tool. As they explain,

mortgage debt securitisation significantly changed the performance of mortgage contracts as biopolitics, mutated what used to be experienced as an embodied and often personalised debt relationship (usually with a clerk or director of a local bank branch) into a disembodied debt relationship with an opaque and unreachable global financial entity.

(García-Lamarca and Kaika 2016, p. 314)

Garthwaite (2016a, p. 148) makes similar observations about the traversal of spatial politics from her ethnographic research in a UK foodbank. She notes how media stories ‘are fuelling the idea that foodbank users are in some way to blame for having to ask for a foodbank parcel’, and that such dichotomous representations of poverty (i.e. the deserving and undeserving poor) then ‘manifest themselves in the lived experiences of people using the foodbank’. Arampatzi (2017, p. 2156), writing from the Greek context, argues that residents are rethinking the outcomes and possibilities of the recent global financial crisis via solidarity tactics and community organising ‘from below’ – itself a direct reference to scales of austerity resistance.

What these and many other rich contributions (too many to name, in fact!) illustrate is that statistics can only tell a partial story, and there is real value in developing approaches and methodologies to elicit detail on such lived experiences. They also remind us of how interconnected austerity experiences can be. For instance, it is hard, if unnecessary, to separate findings on housing or employment, either from one another or from other concerns such as intergenerational wealth or increasing care burdens (also see Holloway and Pimlott-Wilson 2016; MacLeavy 2011). In part because of the depth and breadth of these lived experiences, and that austerity does not appear to be going away any time soon, the subject matter of this book remains a burgeoning area of research interest. This collection therefore brings together writings by scholars who have been researching this topic for a long time with new voices and analyses. We aim to synthesise this work, to provide distinctly European perspectives and thereby to consolidate this vibrant and significant field of research.

Intergenerational relations and exchanges

The intergenerational features of austerity are of intense interest and debate in academic, policy and media forums. Whether in discussions about cuts to social care provision for the elderly and children alike (Power and Hall 2018), concerns about generations sandwiched by caring responsibilities (Pearson and Elson 2015) or tensions between the politics of young and older voters (Team Future et al. 2017), intergenerationality is a common theme across austere international contexts (also see Horton et al. in press). Entanglements of intergenerationality and austerity emerge in many forms, through the day-to-day experiences, conditions and impacts of austerity; in the form of dreams, hopes and imaginaries shaped by austerity; and are produced by formal and informal political processes and decisions (Kretsos 2014). That is to say, the intergenerational features of austerity are plural and plentiful and are ‘lived’ in various ways. Furthermore, cross-generational relations and exchanges may in some cases engender a sense of interdependence and solidarity, whereas in others they may unearth tensions and resentments. The intergenerational implications of austerity cannot therefore be understood out of place or in isolation, given the multitude of intersectionalities with other social categories and experiences according to race, class, gender, sexuality, disability and so forth (see Ginn 2013; Hopkins and Pain 2007; McDowell 2012; Tarrant 2018).

The chapters in the first themed section of this collection interrogate ideas about intergenerationality in different ways, but all mobilise around an understanding of generational relations beyond simply exploring dualistic, book-end approaches (also see Tarrant 2013; Vanderbeck 2007). The authors work through complex accounts of austerity in the present, but also as to how this connects to previous cycles of crisis, recession and poverty, and how these might be used as life-course markers for current generations reflecting back upon such experiences (see Hörschelmann 2011; Jupp et al. 2019; Knight and Stewart 2016). Moreover, intergenerational differences can be understood as more than individualised and personal experiences, but also as providing insight into deep-seated structural inequalities in matters such as housing, wealth and employment (Christophers 2018; MacLeavy and Manley 2018; Pimlott-Wilson 2017). An intergenerational perspective then also offers an insight into the temporality of austerity, or rather, austerities (see Horton 2016). Moreover, the intergenerational relations and exchanges that form the focus of these chapters can be noted in various guises. Whether in the provisioning of material things, the sharing of political sentiments, or in co-presence in community spaces, intergenerational concerns are provoked within all lived experiences of austerity.

In Chapter 2, Rebecca O’Connell, Abigail Knight, Julia Brannen and Silje Elisabeth Skuland open the section with their discussion of food, family and poverty. Drawing on data collected using mixed methods across the UK and Norway, they examine the experiences of children and young people in low-income families eating out with friends and the challenges and exclusions they face. They identify a complex but significant relationship between foo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: austerity across Europe: lived experiences of economic crises
• Part I Intergenerational relations and exchanges
• Part II Ways of coping through crises
• Part III Community, civic and state infrastructures
• Index