The Balkan Prospect

Abstract

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the very meaning of Europe has been opened up and is in the process of being redefined. European states and societies are wrestling with the expansion of NATO and the European Union and with new streams of immigration, while a renewed and reinvigorated cultural engagement has emerged between East and West. But the fast-paced transformations of the last 15 years also have deeper historical roots. The reconfiguring of contemporary Europe is entwined with the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century, two world wars, the Holocaust, and with the processes of modernity that, since the eighteenth century, have shaped Europe and its engagement with the rest of the world.Studies in European Culture and History is dedicated to publishing books that explore major issues in Europe's past and present from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives. The works in the series are interdisciplinary; they focus on culture and society and deal with significant developments in Western and Eastern Europe from the eighteenth century to the present within a social historical context. With its broad span of topics, geography, and chronology, the series aims to publish the most interesting and innovative work on modern Europe.

European Funds and the Hermeneutics of the Capitalist Crisis: Insights from within the Greek State

“…Within this context, by establishing a putative causal relation between conduct and the possibility of generalized capitalist prosperity, the narrative and analytical trope of European aid has been a constitutive part of an overall moral or “cultural turn” (Calotychos ) in the Greek state and mainstream politics of the last thirty years. In fact, the dissemination of highly idealized narratives of aid can also be seen in conjunction with an inverse preoccupation with practices of “corruption,” the latter often presented as the supposed causative factor of capitalist failure or dysfunctionality.…”

“…This gradual rehabilitation of the conservative theme of a “crisis of values” can probably be paired with similar, broader ideological processes in the European space, among which is the formulation of bourgeois self‐images in terms of a dichotomy between moral elites and cynical masses (Friedman ). Indeed, one can locate a persistent recourse of Greek dominant classes to similar dichotomies between (Western‐like) idealists and (oriental) cynics (Calotychos ; Xenakis )…”

“…It is no coincidence that the recent manifestation of the capitalist crisis in Greece has been largely dealt with through the semantic registry of morality and culture. The peculiar and ambivalent traits of Greeks, and their causal relationship to the semiperipheral position of Greek capitalism, have been privileged themes, especially since Greece's introduction into the European Union (EU) in 1981 (Calotychos , 18–19; Xenakis , 173) . Readings of this sort have conditioned the recent delineation of the politics of the capitalist crisis around the motif of Greek cultural particularities and moral accountabilities (Peter Bratsis, quoted in Lapavitsas , 302; Mylonas ).…”

“…The relative unimportance of disemic practices among my Athenian informants over the last years can be contrasted to previous periods or different social settings, for example, during the ambiguous configuration of Greek capitalism and Greece–West relations in the 1970s and 1980s or among lower‐ranked personnel in Evros. In fact, through contextualizing the concept of disemia, I invite readers to reflect on the persisting disemic practices of Greek dominant classes in regard to other loci of power relations, in which their material interests and geopolitical strategies did not necessarily coincide with the enchanted narrative of European idealism; most notably, this is the case with the Greek state's realpolitik toward Balkan or non‐European countries (Calotychos ; Gkintidis ; Mavroudeas ).…”