"The European Monetary Union and the Spanish Left"

Boix, Carles. (1999) "The European Monetary Union and the Spanish Left". In: UNSPECIFIED, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

How does the internationalization of national economies affect their governance? How does the creation of a single European market and a quasi-unified economic authority affect the ability of national governments to deliver growth and ensure fair economic results? Why and how does the Left, under varying institutional domestic conditions, embrace and adjust to a single monetary system? Spain’s experience of the eighties and nineties provides an excellent case to explore these questions. Furthering a gradual process of trade liberalization and overall economic internationalization, that started in 1959, Spain has unconditionally embraced the European Community and the European Union in the last decade and thus accelerated its progressive loss of national sovereignty over fiscal and monetary policies. At the same time, and except for Greece, it has been the country that has experienced the longest (and more solid) socialist government in the last decade and a half in Europe: the Spanish Socialist Party, Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), governed alone from 1982 to 1993 and, as a minority government, up until 1996.

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