The establishment of the European Monetary Union in the ’90s and the introduction of the euro a decade ago have accelerated the financialisation process in Europe. Antonio Tricarico of Italy's Campaign to Reform the World Bank calls for reflection on how to implement a strategy for excluding financial markets from certain spheres of society through the redefinition of public finance, and for reintroducing controls for movements of capital at national and regional level.

In response to the eurocrisis, most EU countries are imposing austerity policies designed to reduce public deficits and bring down state debts by cutting down public spending on health care, education, social services, nature preservation, development aid and more. Jan Willem Goudriaan, deputy secretary general of the European Federation of Public Service Unions (EPSU), tells the story of how the EU sought to brush away a clear no of the Italian people against water privatisation but how this failed as a result of strong campaigning by the broad and vibrant Italian Water Movement.

Back in 2009, when the Treaty of Lisbon entered into force, many observers expected a pause in the European integration process after almost a decade of hard bargaining over the revision of the Union’s contractual foundations. But since the start of the eurozone crisis, Europe has come up with more and more mechanisms designed to impose drastic and lasting restrictions on the power of national governments to pursue their own budgetary and social policies. The reconstruction of the eurozone and the EU is in full swing. Political economist and ATTAC Germany council member Alexis Passadakis

As the recent worries about Spain becoming ‘the next Greece’ show, the so-called eurocrisis is far from over. While the European Central Bank had bought time by pumping more than one trillion euros into Europe’s banks, none of the underlying structural problems have been solved. In fact no serious attempt has been made to address the deeper causes of the crisis. Political scientist Bastiaan van Apeldoorn argues that the eurocrisis expresses the failure of a neoliberal European project driven by a transnational corporate elite.

In 1997, at the time of the EU Counter Summit from Below, four friends in Amsterdam set up Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and published the report Europe, Inc.: Dangerous Liaisons between EU Institutions and Industry. This first CEO report uncovered the powerful role of lobby groups such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ERT), in promoting and shaping an EU-wide free trade area (the single market), a single currency (the euro), and numerous other major EU projects and policies at the time. The report warned that the far-reaching influence of corporate lobbies over EU decision

The financial and economic crises have revealed how entrenched the power of banks is in the European Union. In this EU in Crisis essay, Corporate Europe Observatory’s Kenneth Haar describes the wave of financial regulation that was set in motion with the crisis of 2008. By now most of this regulation has been passed, and there’s plenty of evidence to show that the banks are being let off the hook. Looking back, banking lobbyists can conclude that decision makers have practically fallen over themselves to serve the banking industry’s interests. The dream of a European Union that would curb the

In this second essay in a series that we are publishing in the run-up to our EU in Crisis conference on 5-6th May 2012, Lina Filopoulou, who is active in the Athens Neighborhood Assembly, describes the development of the Greek resistance against the austerity programmes imposed on Greece as a condition for the ECB-IMF-EU loans. She also looks at the future potential of these movements.

The UK's House of Lords has recently published a report saying that the financial transaction tax proposed by the European Commission is flawed, yet, as CEO's report on the lobbying around the tax revealed, many of the peers involved in the report have been identified as having conflicts of interest, so questions should be raised about their neutrality.

Big banks and financial companies are doing their best to stop the introduction of a financial transaction tax (FTT) in the European Union. A proposal for an FTT is on the table, but still has to be approved by the Council. The industry has put all its lobbying machinery to work, implementing a scaremongering strategy, to convince member states to reject the tax. There is a real risk that their lobbying will pay off, either by defeating the entire idea of taxing transactions, or by watering down an already timid proposal.

On 27 March, the Budget committee voted on an excellent report by MEP Monica Luisa Macovei (PPE, Romania), proposing to postpone the approval of the 2010 budget of the European Food Safety Authority. Macovei stated that "conflicts of interest could .. have a negative impact on the impartiality of the decision-making process and also on the citizens' trust in the institutions". The vote in Plenary is scheduled on 10 May 2012.