Grexit and Brexit: Incidents, accidents and wake-up calls on the bumpy road of European (dis)integration

Abstract

Almost 30 years since the Maastricht Treaty and 20 years since the introduction of the euro, it is clear that the European Union (EU) has lost its appeal to wider constituencies and citizen groups that realize that the promises for convergence and prosperity have not been delivered. Rising dissatisfaction and Euroscepticism (expressed both in the ballot box and in Eurobarometer reports) is evident even in traditional pro-EU countries of the European core. As this long decade comes to an end, incidents (or accidents) like these ones, either in the form of open discontent, or in the form of rising populism, will exert pressure on the EU policy agenda that will either increase the frequency of deadlocks and inefficiency in policy making or will eventually lead to an honest effort to address the roots of these phenomena. This paper examines the drivers behind these two incidents (and the ones that may follow) and the limits of the current market and policy integration arrangements in the EU, arguing that a new policy agenda addressing the real weaknesses of the Union is inevitable if disintegration is to be avoided. Luckily enough, some elements of this new policy agenda may already be here.

European Borderlands, Beyond Britain and Brexit

“…This dissatisfaction has been intensified by the recent jolts to European integration delivered by the migration crisis, the COVID pandemic, and Brexit, which overall have greatly endangered many national and transnational notions of solidarity and democracy (Hadjimichalis 2021). This distancing from the people, centers and tenets of European integration has obviously exacerbated some longstanding opposition to EU membership to be found in some more recent member states since their accession, such as in Bulgaria (Ilieva and Wilson 2011), and in longer serving members, as may be witnessed in Greek moves to leave the EU in their own version of 'Grexit' (Petrakos and Sotiriou 2021), and in the current (October 2021) row between the EU and Poland. The "exititis" about which Hayden (2020) cautions us all may be catching, in the Brexit political pandemic that has drawn many peoples and governments back to the perceived necessity of harder borders and even harder national regimes.…”

Introduction: the interplay among inequalities, wellbeing and space

“…The resurgence of spatial inequalities is, therefore, pushing new challenges for development and social policy and collective action in order to tackle their multiple sources and their socioeconomic and political consequences and to move beyond pure and simplistic redistribution logics and mechanisms (Dijkstra et al, 2020;McCann, 2020;Petrakos and Sotiriou, 2021;Los et al, 2017).…”

Europe and/or the UK: Post-Brexit urban and regional development futures – A special issue

“…Indeed, for several contributors (Hadjimichalis, Hudson, Petrakos and Sotiriou), it has been the inability and failure of European policy frameworks to manage the deep seated and continuing processes of uneven development in the European Union that has sowed the seeds of disintegration (Christiansen, 2020; Dijkstra et al, 2020). Reminding us that it was the Greek referendum of July 2015 against the bailout conditions set by the EU and International Monetary Fund (IMF) that first raised the significant spectre of European disintegration (Grexit), Petrakos and Sotiriou (2020) argue that a new policy agenda addressing the real weaknesses of the Union is inevitable if disintegration is to be avoided. Positively, they go on to argue that some elements of this new policy agenda for Europe (a Post-Covid-19 Recovery Plan?)…”