European elites’ discourses of the Greek crisis

On 20 November 2019, Dimitris Papadimitriou (University of Manchester) gave a talk on European elites’ discourses of the Greek crisis, tracing their evolution in a ten-year period: from the collapse of Lehman brothers in 2008 to the end of Greece’s 3rd bailout program in 2018. His aim was to explore the key messages of this discourse and identify junctures of change over time. Othon Anastasakis (St Antony’s College, Oxford) acted as the chair.

Based on the analysis of 1,872 direct quotes on the Greek crisis by 83 senior European and IMF officials which were drawn from a dataset of 22,533 news wires from Reuters, Papadimitriou highlighted the significant volatility characterizing the European elites’ discourses of the Greek crisis in the period under examination. The quotes were coded in five categories in terms of their tone on Greece and the proposed solutions for the Greek financial crisis. Those five categories were, Grexit’, ‘hard conditionality’, ‘neutrality/neglect’, ‘soft conditionality’ and ‘strong support’. The distribution of the codes varied considerably in time thus leading to the identification of six distinct narrative frames: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’, ‘reluctant redemption’, ‘conflict’ and ‘accommodation’. Those frames were punctuated by five discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, 2014 and 2015, all marking significant events on the Greek crisis and reflecting the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis.

Turkey – Russia arms deal: What can NATO do?

The seminar that took place on the 13 November at SEESOX focused on Turkey's recent purchase of S-400 missiles from Russia and its implications on security and defence within NATO borders. Dr Ziya Meral who is a Senior Resident Fellow at the UK Army's internal think tank, Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research, began his talk by perusing the current issues, trends and threats that the NATO faces in general. He then elaborated on what these challenges and trends mean for NATO's relationship with Turkey, which has the second-biggest military within the alliance. Turkey's recent arms deal S400 with Russia has recently become one of the main contention points among the NATO allies, but it is not the only one. Meral argued that Erdogan had sought NATO's support on several fronts before the purchase of S-400s but was disappointed by the lack of reflexivity from the alliance. He gave Erdogan's speech at a 2016 NATO Summit in Poland as an example during which Erdogan stated, 'I told him [NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg]: 'You are absent from the Black Sea. The Black Sea has almost become a Russian lake. If we don't take action, history will not forgive us." According to Meral this incident was the first among many that pushed Turkey away from NATO. The second significant event, according to Meral, was the widespread conviction within Erdogan's party that NATO officials tacitly condoned 15 July coup attempt in Turkey.

Albania’s “noncompetitive” elections: A means to what end?

On 7 November, Gjoralin Macaj of the University of Leiden led a seminar on the local elections that took place in Albania on 30 June, 2019. These covered the mayoralties and councils of the 61 Albanian municipalities.

Dr Macaj gave the background to the elections, which were held against a background of continuing opposition protests. Since February 2019 the opposition had been boycotting parliament, citing corruption and vote-buying by the Prime Minister Edi Rama. President Meta in early June canceled the local elections scheduled for 30 June, citing public safety concerns, and shifted them to take place in October. Parliament, however, rejected this cancellation, and continued preparations for elections on 30 June. The election commission, which by law should have a balanced political composition, was unable to fulfil this due to opposition boycott, and therefore comprised only the government nominees, a bare quorum. The President again sought to postpone the elections, but the government continued with their preparation, using government officials where local opposition officials prevented preparations through the usual channels.

The Last Bluff: How Greece came face to face with financial catastrophe and the secret plan for its euro exit

On the 4th of November, SEESOX hosted a panel on the latest book by Viktoria Dendrinou and Eleni Varvitsioti “The Last Bluff: How Greece came face to face with financial catastrophe and the secret plan for its euro exit”. The book deals with the calamitous events of 2015 when Greece, at the precipice of economic disaster, came close to exiting the eurozone under dramatic circumstances and amid confrontational politics between the country and its European partners.

Viktoria Dendrinou started the discussion by explaining how the book came about, why the two authors chose to deal with this topic and how they had to revisit every day of their own work at the time based on emails, notes and opinion pieces in the context of their reporting for newspapers and Greek television channels from Brussels. One of the great values of the book is its reliance on a number of interviews with some of the actors who played a pivotal role at the time. Eleni Varvitsioti in her presentation expressed the two authors’ opinion that the EU and the Greek side, while dealing with a mainly economic matter regarding the country’s survival in the eurozone, ended up in a much more political confrontation: both during the process of negotiations with the government of SYRIZA, and also during the last stages of the final settlement.

Measuring Peace: Principles, Practice and Politics

Richard Caplan’s new book Measuring Peace: Principles, Practices and Politics (Oxford University Press 2019) may be small but is mighty. Caplan covers a lot of scholarly ground that evidences his extensive knowledge and empirical research. Representing parsimony at its best, the book offers a succinct discussion about the key principles, best (and worst) practices, and political constraints in measuring peace.

Such were the conclusion of the panel on Wednesday 23 October consisting of Jessie Barton Hronesova, Neil MacFarlane and Lord Alderdice. The panel started with Caplan’s summary of the book.

Caplan’s key findings are highly important and timely. He demonstrates that ethnographic methods are superior to universal technical assessments in acquiring accurate data about local peace. He also shows that local knowledge and contextualised conflict analysis give the most accurate picture and that idiosyncratic benchmarking is important to understand how the conflict or peace is changing over time. The question to Caplan is not about what does peace require to survive but what does this peace require? Regional scholars can rejoice.

Barton Hronesova noted that the key contribution of the book is its ‘convincing and well-researched argument that is highly accessible beyond academia’. She stressed that the book succeeds in giving peacebuilders a ‘compass’ to navigate the peacebuilding landscape. She also stressed that the book focuses on how to measure the quality of peace (not what to measure as each context will vary). She noted that the term reconciliation might be added among related terms such as security, stability and resilience. She also outlined some additional challenges in measuring peace such as security of local researchers.

Greece after the crisis: Stocktaking, legacies and prospects

George Pagoulatos spoke on this subject at a SEESOX seminar on 24 October. David Madden chaired. He began by saying that the subject was over-researched: little remained unknown; but it was politically contested, and to some extent still emotionally divisive. It was still too early to gauge its longer-term implications, but it was a textbook failure in the EMU. There had been long-standing structural weaknesses in Greece, yet on this occasion the vulnerability came through the external account -the current account deficit and foreign debt.

Procyclical adjustment accentuated recession; all policies were contractionary during the crisis (fiscal; incomes; no monetary transmission), and there was no countercyclical response, leading to fragmentation. Common ground was that the EMU was unready, there was insufficient response and that Greece needed reform. Debt restructuring should have been earlier. Some recession was inevitable. Contested points were the magnitude of fiscal and incomes austerity (minimum wage cut), the content of structural reforms (labour market liberalization), the magnitude of adjustment, and the degree of hysteresis effects. There was tension between positive outcomes of forced economic adjustment and the hysteresis effects of depression. Labor migration was a correction mechanism, but a double-edged sword: mitigating unemployment but bleeding human capital.

EU Leaders to Western Balkan Reformers: You’re on your own!

By Adis Merdzanovic

The European Council’s decision not to open formal accession negotiations with North Macedonia and Albania today might go down in history as one of the most ill-advised policy decisions the EU has ever taken with respect to the Western Balkans – and that is quite something considering how contested that particular field is. Today, the Council did not just change a particular policy, but betrayed one of the fundamental principles of the European Union: the adherence to the pre-set rules of the game. Since today, at least from the Western Balkans perspective, the EU is no longer a “rules-based order”, but has become part of “politics as usual”.

Granted, there are good reasons for not taking this step today. Everybody knows that the accession process, as it is currently conducted, suffers from some major problems. That the countries of the Western Balkans could have progressed on their path towards EU membership in recent years while at the same time the quality of their democratic systems backslided and illiberal and authoritarian politics became ever more dominant, points to just one of the challenges the current system faces. Also, the role of parliaments, the civil society, and the power asymmetries involved in the process need to be looked at. Furthermore, the quintessential formula of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law needs to take a more prominent position in the entire enlargement process––something even the “fundamentals first” approach adopted by the Commission has done only to an insufficient degree.

All this is well known, and all of it is correct. But what makes today’s decision so colossally misguided is the fact that the EU broke its word. For years, it has been telling North Macedonia that it will progress on its path towards the European Union and benefit from all the goodies of being a candidate country if it only found a solution with Greece with respect to the name issue. North Macedonia delivered: its voters ousted the old government, the new government agreed to the historic Prespa agreement with Greece and changed the country’s name. True to its word, the EU Commission recommended to reward these efforts with the candidacy status.