The peripheralization of Southern European capitalism within the EMU

The paper discusses the problem of the Southern European (SE) capitalism and its difficult path into the EMU (European Monetary Union), looking at the remote causes of the crisis that hit these economies. For this reason, we consider European countries as a set of asymmetrically integrated variety of capitalism. The institutional configuration chosen by Europe to aggregate the many varieties of capitalism not only reduced the political autonomy of the single states, but effectively hindered the specific coordination mechanism of Southern European (SE) capitalism which was importantly based on state intervention as a structural element and on inflationary policies. Despite the deep market-oriented reforms this change caused both structural and macroeconomic unbalances. The aim of the paper is to integrate some principles of the variety of capitalism and the dynamics of institutional change with some insights inspired by the work of Arrighi to supply a synthetic and ‘alternative’ perspective on the difficult role that Southern countries are experiencing in Europe.