>>The class content of this process has of course been controlled by the
>>ruling class, finance capitalism,
>
>is that really the case? wasn't the italian govt's inability to impose the
>conditions a factor in the fall of the euro?
Yeah, and the bad reputation continental Europe has on Wall Street and the City of London is the inability of governments to make more than marginal cuts in their welfare states. No doubt the creation of the euro was an attempt to go over the heads of national governments and present the need for austerity as something external and "objective," but it hasn't quite worked out that way yet.
I also suspect that European capitalists aren't quite as hardassed as their U.S. counterparts either. A friend of mine who was a correspondent for a financial wire service in Western Europe said that CEOs and bankers, even in private conversation, just don't have that war of each against all spirit that they do on this side of the Atlantic. Maybe they've made a virtue out of political necessity, but the sentiments captured in the June 1997 FT article I just posted aren't just those of Eurocrats.
Doug