How Governance Produces Crises: The Dynamics of Alienation on the Eurozone

Crisis is generally understood as a negative condition, yet it acquires a positive meaning in the context of governance. Especially for political actors, crises can be instrumentalized as strategic moments that enable the reconfiguration of power, the restructuring of bureaucratic and organizational structures, or the justification of extraordinary administrative measures. Although this is vastly studied, it is overlooked that what enables crises to function as a window of opportunity, which becomes possible only when an enabling environment already exists. To discover the inner workings of this process, this paper drawing on Marxist theory argues that the transition from classical public administration to New Public Management and governance has reproduced forms of alienation within the public sphere. Applying the theory onto state as an organization, citizens become parallel subjects of alienation just as workers are alienated from their labor, they have become alienated from public decision-making; when production under capitalism prioritizes capital accumulation, governance prioritizes efficiency, markets, and competition; and where human needs become secondary in capitalist production, the public good becomes subordinate to managerial and neoliberal logics. These forms of alienation generate the conditions in which crises not only emerge but can be effectively instrumentalized by political actors. This paper focuses on the Eurozone Crisis as a case that exemplifies this dynamic of alienation.