Class and Politics in the Greek Debt Crisis

Book chapter


Fouskas, V. and Dimoulas, Constantine 2016. Class and Politics in the Greek Debt Crisis. in: Talani, Leila (ed.) Europe in Crisis Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 125-157
AuthorsFouskas, V. and Dimoulas, Constantine
EditorsTalani, Leila
Abstract

The mainstream view on the causes of the Eurozone crisis is that it is a fiscal crisis that emanated partly from the incompetence of the peripheral EU states to collect taxes, partly from their own states’ profligacy with a huge and uneconomic public sector, and partly from the ‘fact’ that these societies are not working as hard as their northern neighbours. This mainstream view has been defeated by original work carried out in the past few years not only by Marxisant scholars and heterodox economists, but also by important financial commentators and journalists, such as Martin Wolf of the Financial Times. The Eurozone crisis, this winning approach argued, is a balance of payments crisis that is bound up with Germany’s anti-inflationary, low wage, export-led growth creating permanent surpluses for itself and permanent deficits for the periphery. This chapter aims at going a step further. Following a ‘global fault-lines’ approach1, it produces a historical reading of the Greek social and political economy, bringing into context not just economic indicators but also geopolitical and security ones. Thus, readers will become aware that periphery social formations, especially Greece, are connected with some inextricable historical and structural contradictions and fault-lines that go well beyond the country’s entry into the EMU in 2001 and refer to the country’s geostrategic and geopolitical location in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans

Book titleEurope in Crisis
Page range125-157
Year2016
PublisherPalgrave Macmillan
Publication dates
Print11 May 2016
Publication process dates
Deposited31 Aug 2017
ISBN978-1-137-57707-8
978-1-137-57706-1
978-1-349-84657-3
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57707-8_6
Web address (URL)https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57707-8_6
Additional information

Fouskas, V. K. & Dimoulas, C., Class and Politics in the Greek Debt Crisis, 2016, Palgrave Macmillan, London. Reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

This extract is taken from the author's original manuscript and has not been edited. The definitive, published, version of record is available here: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57707-8_6

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