GREXIT OR GREBOUND: Will Greece Exit or Rebound (original) (raw)

All in: Market expectations of eurozone integrity in the sovereign debt crisis

Review of International Political Economy

The behaviour of sovereign bond investors stands at the heart of the euro area debt crisis. By pushing upward the yields on the government debts of member states standing in the eurozone’s periphery, investors caused, in a self-fulfilling way, the crisis that ultimately threatened the eurozone’s integrity and the euro’s survival. So how do we explain the behaviour of market investors before, during and after the eurozone’s sovereign debt crisis? Why did investors not discriminate in their pricing of eurozone sovereign bonds before the crisis? Why did they abruptly change their minds in 2010? And why have they gradually felt reassured enough from mid-2011, depending on the country, to ask for significantly lower yields on sovereign bonds? To answer these questions, the paper argues that investors’ confidence rests to a large extent on the expectation of the eurozone’s solidarity, which is why large-scale multilateral solutions coming from the euro area were more successful in resolving the crisis than unilateral ones coming primarily from the debtor countries. As a result, this paper improves our understanding of the international political economy of financial (currency, bank and debt) crises by looking at the particular case of a monetary union with a single currency.

The role of power in negotiations and its impact on Southern European countries before, during and after the Euro crisis. Case study: Greece

This dissertation aims to analyze the impact of power in negotiations on Greece before, during and after the euro crisis within the framework of the features and measurements of negotiation styles in the context of the European Union and linking the negotiation styles to the events of the crisis from 2009 to 2016. Also, an overview about the Euro crisis and its impact on Greece had been provided in order to give a complete background about Greece’s dilemma. This dissertation emphasizes that power plays a key role in the negotiation process due to the hard negotiation strategies that were adopted by the EU leaders since the rise of the crisis, aiming to pull the country out of recession, however, the strategies and polices that were adopted had weakened Greece’s country. Negotiations between Germany and Greece have not reached to a dead end yet as they are negotiating whether to debt relief Greece or not.

From Discretionary to Discipline: Policy Change in Greece after Crisis

Policy change, especially the significant one, is something rare in Greece. Ruling political parties, as the legitimate decision makers, are not inclined to impose any significant change due to its unforeseen consequences. And yet, since Greece approved the rescue packages in 2010 and 2012 from international institutions, namely European Commission (EC), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) –herewith “troika”, significant policy change started to appear. Generally speaking, each package consists of bailout funds and austerity measures. The latter is aimed at promoting sustainable fiscal balance for Greece mainly through fiscal policy tools to enhance revenue and reduce expenditure. Drawing from these instances, this research will attain two-folded goals which are to assess the extent to which policy change in Greece is deemed to be significant rather than incremental and how this policy change happens. Based on the Punctuated Equilibrium (PE) model employed as the main analytical tool in this research, the extent to which policy change in Greece is considered significant can be seen from the drop in government expenditure, changes in some policy domains and the nature of policy feedback. Furthermore, this significant change can be understood by looking at the promotion of policy image done by policy entrepreneur and the change in institutional policy venue. The interaction between policy image and policy venue provides the chance for significant change to happen. It is supported by disturbance or policy punctuation on Greece’s political system in the forms of economic crisis and leadership change. Keywords: austerity measures, debt crisis, fiscal consolidation, Greece, policy change

Disciplining Greece: Crisis Management and its Discontents

The mainstream narrative of the Greek financial crisis blames Greece for being the architect of its own financial crisis. This narrative reduces the complexity and global nature of the Greek financial crisis to an internal and national focus that justifies a strategy of structural adjustment and austerity targeted to reduce the public debt. Yet, Greece's public debt has grown over the course of treatment. This paper contends that the strategy intended to resolve the Greek financial crisis is not a resolution strategy at all—it is more accurately conceptualized as a crisis management strategy, which is insufficient to reduce the public debt and instead fuels a deflationary spiral in Greece. The Troika, consisting of the European Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund, alongside the Eurogroup, credit rating agencies, and private investors endorse a crisis management strategy that has engendered an unprecedented wave of discipline, surveillance, and control alongside a neoliberal restructuring of the Greek economy that has functioned to protect private interests. In effect, power is increasingly wielded by unelected international political and financial institutions, which not only temper the sovereignty Greece, but also undermine the functioning of democratic processes.

‘When Some Are More Equal than Others: National Parliaments and Intergovernmental Bailout Negotiations in the Eurozone’, Government and Opposition, , pp. 1–27. doi: 10.1017/gov.2016.49.

This article argues that the integration of financial assistance capacity in the eurozone, which was meant to remedy institutional shortcomings and mitigate the distributional implications of financial support in the European Monetary Union (EMU), has instead contributed to a deepening of the existing political cleavages and the creation of new ones. This dysfunctional effect reflects the empowerment of some national parliaments in decisions on financial assistance. These arguments are tested against the empirical examination of the negotiations of the three adjustment programmes for Greece. Specifically, the article shows that negotiations moved towards the radicalization of creditors’ positions and increased divisions between creditors in conjunction with the development of financial assistance capacity. While advancing its theses, the article strikes a note of caution regarding the argument that the empowerment of national parliaments in EU policymaking is one of the most powerful antidotes to its legitimacy deficit and thus a safeguard for the integration project.

A Crisis Beyond Law, or a Crisis of Law? Reflections on the European Economic Crisis

A Crisis Beyond Law, or a Crisis of Law?, 2000

This paper attempts to locate the place of law in debates on the economic crisis. It suggests that law is the meeting point of politics and economics, not simply the background to market operations. It is suggested therefore that the law should be seen as the conduit of popular will through political decision making onto economic systems and processes. The paper argues that the crisis can be seen as being the consequence of the dis-embedding of the political from the economic, and it is this distance that causes legal frameworks to operate in unsatisfactory ways. With this theoretical basis the paper examines the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. The European debt crisis in general and the plight of Greece in particular show why plasticity in policy making is necessary, and also reveal why current orthodox solutions to economic calamities fail. The inflexibility of the neoclassical understanding of the state-market relationship does not allow for avenues out of crisis that are both theoretically coherent and politically welcome. Such realizations form the basis of the examination of the rules framing the Eurozone. This paper after conducting an investigation of exit points from the Eurozone condemns the current institutional framework of the EU, and especially the EMU as inflexible and inadequate to deal with the stress being placed on Europe by the crisis.

GREECE, THE EUROZONE CRISIS AND THE MEDIA: THE SOLUTION IS THE PROBLEM

By October 2009, Greece faced a sovereign debt crisis and a borrowing crisis and it was said to be putting the Eurozone at risk. After much delay, the EU Commission together with the European Central Bank (ECB) and the IMF formed a hybrid tripartite entity, the so called " Troika, " to deal with the indebted country. This act raised the stakes since it converted the crisis to an issue of intense global media attention, infl uence and spin. The Greek people entered thus into the epicentre of a ferocious global publicness. This article analyses the Eurozone/Greek fi nancial crisis, assessing critically the way that it was dealt with politically by national, European Union (EU) and Eurozone authorities. The author traces the modes that the eruption of the crisis was reported about, emphasising its crucial initial phase and exploring how crisis-management-policies were presented and discussed in transnational public spheres. She scrutinises the role of national and transnational media in framing this aff air and key political communication manifestations or absence thereof. Moreover, the article examines the underlying material conditions and political economy motives of biased or " abnormal " reporting modalities. In terms of impacts, it elaborates on de-legitimation and polarisation of politics and in political communication of Greece as a consequence of " crisis management. " The article explores EU power relations and the tangle of socioeconomic and political reactions/ events that evolved from a controversial " crisis management " model and their impacts to date.