Adam Bennett (SEESOX Associate; Academic Visitor, St Antony’s College, Oxford)
On November 26, Eleni Panagiotarea, research fellow of the Hellenic Foundation for European & Foreign Policy in Athens, returned to Oxford (for the first time since completing her PhD) to reflect on the predicament of Greece and the Euro at a SEESOX seminar in the European Studies Centre (ESC). Greece and the Euro, the Euro, and Greece – separately and together – have been recurring topics of debate at the ESC ever since the onset of the Eurozone crisis. The experience of Greece, at the bluntest end of this economic earthquake, encapsulates dramatically many of the dilemmas and stresses that have rocked the currency union. As Eleni made clear in her presentation, despite the declarations of victory from the ECB and ESM, this sorry saga is not yet over.
The seminar was held at an unusually timely juncture, with the IMF (as lead player of the troika) poised to undertake the sixth review of the Extended Fund Arrangement, amid calls from some quarters that conditions now permit an early end to this arrangement (currently scheduled to expire in March 2016), making this potentially the last review and the last dose of the hated conditionality. With the European funding component of the Troika’s package coming to an end anyway in December, and with Ireland and Portugal already out of the clutches of the IMF, there was an eagerness in Greece to graduate (to use an IMF term) from its program. But was Greece really ready to do this?
