Event Highlights: Can Greece and the Eurozone Live with Each Other? with Kevin Featherstone
Greece and the Eurozone were the subjects of Kevin Featherstone’s luncheon discussion at the Center for the Study of Europe on Tuesday, November 13. Featherstone, who is Eleftherios Venizelos Professor of Contemporary Greek Studies and Director of the Hellenic Observatory in the European Institute at the London School of Economics, is author of The Limits of Europeanization: Reform Capacity and Policy Conflict in Greece (with D. Papadimitriou) (2008); The Last Ottomans: The Muslim Minority of Greece, 1940-49 (with D. Papadimitriou, A. Mamarelis, and G. Niarchos), and the forthcoming The Emperor has no clothes! Greek Prime Ministers and the Challenges of Governance.
In his talk, Featherstone argued that the crisis in the eurozone has brought a number of issues to the fore, not least of which is the challenge of managing a heterogeneous currency union. The euro, he said, was always primarily a political project, with governance problems and vulnerable legitimacy. If there is a lesson in the Greek crisis, it is namely that market discipline did not work–by 2013, Greece will be in its fifth continuous year of recession. The Greek case warns of the dangers of the EU imposing unremitting austerity, when growth is a shared interest, raising the question of what “Europe” was for.
See also Kevin Featherston on The Maastricht Roots of the Greek Crisis.