MONEY AND POWER. FLOODING EUROPE WITH DEMOCRACY
VENUE:
Vienna University of Economics and Business | Building TC, Audi Max,
Welthandelsplatz. 1, 1020 Wien
Yanis Varoufakis
Economist; Former Minister for Finance of Greece
The world’s largest economy, the Eurozone, is governed by an informal group, the Eurogroup, which subscribes to no written rules, meets secretly and without minutes being taken, and which is accountable to no legally instituted body or Parliament. Is this the Europe that Adenauer, De Gaulle, Brandt, Kreisky, Giscard, Schmidt, Berlinguer, Kohl, Mitterrand etc. had worked towards? Or is it the epitaph of the Europe that Europeans had always thought of as a beacon of democracy, a point of reference, a compass for peoples far and wide?
When politics and money are “de-politicised” what happens is that democracy dies. And when democracy dies, authoritarianism raises its ugly head, confining prosperity to the very few who cannot even enjoy it behind the gates and the fences they need to erect to protect themselves from their victims.
To counter this dystopia, the people of Europe are now waking up to re-embrace a radical idea: the conviction that democracy is not a luxury afforded to creditors and declined to debtors.
Moderation:
Robert Misik, Journalist and Author
Yanis Varoufakis
is an academic economist who was elected to Greece’s Parliament in January 2015 and then served as Greece’s Minister of Finance from January to July 2015. He is currently working towards the establishment of a Pan-European political network for democratizing Europe’s money and power. Varoufakis new book on the euro is entitled And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe’s crisis, America’s economic future. Previous books include The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy and several academic texts on economics and game theory. He describes himself as a ’libertarian Marxist’: „In truth, Karl Marx was responsible for framing my perspective of the world we live in, from my childhood to this day. It is not something that I volunteer to talk about in ’polite society’ much these days because the very mention of the M-word switches audiences off.“
in cooperation with Roter Börsenkrach, Gesellschaft Plurale Ökonomik Wien, Mastervertretung VW.Sozök.SEEP (WU)