When the global financial crisis hit in 2008, its immediate policy aftermath destabilized several decades of neoliberal spending restraint through widespread banking sector support and economic stimulus. More familiar elements of the neoliberal policy package would not be suppressed for long, and austerity soon followed through a number of measures affecting public sector spending and discourse, staff and agencies, labour market flexibilization and programme restructuring. Necessary to the needs of capital as a bout of state activism had been, its continuation was to be avoided. The resumption of austerity was painful for many, creating vulnerabilities and exacerbating problems for already precarious communities. A crisis of capital soon transformed into more debt for households, less generous social programmes, enhanced precarity for women, youth and immigrants, and discipline for labour generally. There is an undeniable class component to austerity in its many guises, interwoven with social disparities of all sorts.

Austerity is multi-faceted, as are national experiences. For some countries, like Ireland and Spain, restraint and retrenchment emerged in 2010 in the context of serious structural issues for budgets and labour markets; they too, along with Denmark, had equally to deal with banking sector collapse. Elsewhere, countries like Canada escaped the worst of the initial crisis only to face deep cyclical downturn owing to an international credit crunch and export market-induced recession. Whatever the combination, the 2008 crisis is an important origin story for the past decade of austerity. It is not the only origin story, however. Often austerity was launched where the crisis was comparatively mild (Canada), or where similar plans had been in place for some time (Ireland, Denmark), and austerity reforms were incongruent with the actual experience or cause of the crisis (Canada, Ireland, Denmark, Spain). And in all cases, labour market and public sector restructuring were located in decades-old neoliberal reforms, institutional inheritances, exposure to international organizations, and related to structural positions in the global economy. The international pressures to implement austerity measures were apparent in all cases, though they varied from moral suasion to conditionalities in exchange for financial assistance.