Crisis in Greece- Book launch talk

Dr Peter Siani-Davies (Honorary Senior Research Associate, UCL SSEES)

For over half a decade the international media gave extensive coverage to a crisis in Greece, with the story at times dominating the headlines as violent mass protests in the centre of Athens caught the world’s attention.

The crisis in Greece intersected with a global financial crisis and later a euro area sovereign debt crisis and within the outside world in particular the underlying narrative usually centred on the soundness of Greek public finances and the possibility that the country was about to default on its loans or even exit the euro and return to the drachma. However, especially inside Greece, it could also at times be cast in other guises, rendering it among other things a political, social, moral and even humanitarian crisis as it devastated the Greek economy, leaving over a quarter of the working population jobless and average household incomes cut by more than a third. 

Adopting a broadly interdisciplinary approach and drawing upon a multitude of sources the research presented in this seminar seeks to move beyond the dramatic headlines and many of the more popular explanatory narratives proffered at the time to reassess the origins of the crisis and the reasons why it proved to be so prolonged. In the process a sharper focus is placed on the complex interplay of internal and external factors that shaped events in Greece both as regards the particular conjunction of circumstances that led the country to topple into crisis and the reasons why the downturn in the economy proved to be so lengthy and deep. Almost a decade since it first began, the crisis as well as the effects of the implementation of the various adjustment programmes shaped to meet its exigencies remains a potent and divisive factor in Greek life; and, with the economy still frail and the issue of debt relief unresolved, it looks likely to continue to do so for at least the immediate future.

Crisis in Greece will be published in 2017 by Hurst in the UK and Oxford University Press in the USA.

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES South-East European Studies Seminar Series.
Convenor: Dr Diana Georgescu