This article engages in the ongoing anthropological discussion on the concept of ‘moral economy’ and opts for its multileveled use. It affirms the concept’s suitability for grasping class-specific sets of moral values and considerations on the economy, as well as universalized moral frameworks through which the economy is commonly addressed by both dominated and dominant classes. In dealing with such universalized moral economies, it is suggested that our analysis should critically address the symbolic construction of the economy as an essentially moral process. The value of such a focus lies in analyzing and historicizing the recurrence of epistemologies that deny the centrality of structural oppositions in capitalism and, rather, place emphasis on moral categories, such as fairness, intentionality, and obligation. This multileveled understanding and use of the concept of moral economy can help us to further comprehend the delineation of neoliberalism in European space and the moral reformulation of the political economy of capitalism-in-crisis. The article is based on ethnographic material addressing the course of action taken by Greek technocrats specialized in the policies and cohesion funds of the European Union.

This article focuses on the representations of Greek-Turkish relations among local political elites in the Greek border region of Evros. The transition from competitive nationalism to Greek-Turkish rapprochement in the late 1990s created a new context for political action and led to a readjustment of public practices. This process reflected an interplay of national and European policies and global normative discourses. Nonetheless, changing discourses should be critically examined, as fieldwork in Evros revealed ambivalent representations that point to the reproduction of nationalism and the state, a condition that is becoming salient anew in the context of the recent economic crisis.

This article retraces the permutations of Greek nationalism from the early 1990s up to the late 2000s using the example of the World Thracian Congresseslocalized public events of ostentatious nationalist display that were organized from the early 1990s in the Greek border region of Thrace. New discourses on a 'Powerful Greece' and flexible geopolitics reflect the particular ways in which Greek nationalism and neoliberalism were configured among local and national elites. By understanding the ways in which aspirations of national grandeur, rationality, and accountability have been constructed for the last twenty years, we can begin to develop a deeper insight into the dilemmas of Greek nationalism during the economic crisis of the early 2010s.

In this article, I seek to explore the political and epistemological implications of European Union developmental funds in settings of policymaking in Greece. Building on fieldwork with specialized technocrats in Athens and with political personnel in Evros, I initially posit that the discourse on European funds has functioned as a recurrent argument for the justification of a coherent liberal idealist paradigm starting in the 1980s. Notwithstanding the ideological usage of European funds, I suggest that its increasing relevance in the practices and worldview of these social agents also pertains to a broader relocation of political and analytical focus onto the ethical conduct and qualitative features of dominated classes. Most evidently, the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece reactualized the precept of moral and cultural introspection as well as its interrelation with the discourse of past benefaction. Ιn this sense, the recent crisis also made evident the pertinence of Michel Foucault's “hermeneutics of the self” to understand the delineation of class hegemony in capitalism. I argue that the discourse of European funds has been conducive to the consolidation of the “hermeneutics of the self” as an overarching political imperative in Greek society over the last decades.

No abstract