Southern European Pathways across the Great Recession

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to define a typology of individual and collective reactions to the Great Recession, which is affecting southern European societies from 2010. Building on A. O. Hirschman's attempt to frame individual and collective behaviors in response to a condition of decline, the paper maintains that they can be understood mostly in terms of a number of pathways based on different attitudesexit, voice, loyalty, and neglect. In addition, R. K. Merton's social strain theory is used to clarify some aspects of the complex relationships between societal and cultural macrodynamics and micro reactions.

Untitled

“…Many young Italians leave Italy mainly because they want to escape the crisis the country has been going through for many years (Maddaloni 2016). For them, therefore, expatriation can be seen as an exit solution (Maddaloni 2017) to the persistent problems of economic stagnation and cultural backwardness of Italian society, problems now shared as much by the South as by the North of the country.…”

Not only for work: Italian migrants in the Athens area

“…Even more so in the context of the European Union, in which the weakening of state borders and the creation of a common citizenship have greatly increased opportunities for both temporary and long‐term mobility, thus strongly contributing to an emerging common European identity (Favell and Recchi, 2009; Recchi, 2015). Other perspectives, however, have been focusing on the crisis of the southern European development model, the more immediate impact of the latest post‐2008 severe economic recession and the consequent choice of emigration as an “exit” solution to this state of general crisis (Maddaloni, 2017). From this point of view, the economic crisis of 2008 and the individualized attempts to cope with it may be considered as the main factors in the recent growth of migration flows from southern European countries.…”