Abstract
International organisations have considered national unity a necessary prerequisite to maintaining political stability and restoring economic growth in countries facing severe economic crisis. The European Union and the International Monetary Fund promoted such unity in Greece when making stabilisation packages available during the country's sovereign debt crisis in 2011–2012. Focused on the conditions under which diverse political groups can credibly coordinate their economic and political strategies, this article examines domestic and international factors that impact the prospect of political unity in Greece and small European economies. Anchored in the historical institutionalism tradition, it finds that political unity in small European economies has been consolidated during periods of economic growth and when complementary international institutions existed, but has regularly been undermined in countries experiencing the opposite conditions, including Greece. National unity in Greece over the long term requires domestic reforms, but such reforms will not be sustainable without external economic growth and a multilateral architecture that incentivises economic groups to share the benefits and costs of structural reform. Since the latter conditions are not ones that a small country itself can produce, sustained political unity rests as much with the actions of big economies as it does with Greece overcoming the historic legacies of its particular model of capitalism.
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Notes
Calculations based on sovereign debt data from The Economist's Global Debt Clock (http://www.economist.com/content/global_debt_clock), and Economy Watches’ Economic Statistics and Indicators Database (http://www.economywatch.com/economic-statistics/); accessed 15 October 2011. In the context of the European Union’s twenty-seven member states, the corresponding figures are 3.3 per cent (debt) and 1.8 per cent (GDP). In the context of industrialized countries, the OECD reports that Greece’s share of OECD debt is 2 per cent and that its economy makes up about 0.8 per cent of total GDP.
Figures in this section are the author's calculations based on data in the Parliament and Government Composition Database (Döring and Manow, 2011). The author is deeply grateful to Holger Döring and Phillip Manow for introducing new codings to capture nuances in the nature of government cabinets.
Corporatism, understood as the active coordination of organized social and economic interest groups, with or without the active involvement of the state, comes in many varieties. An overview is found in Molina and Rhodes, 2002.
In a worldwide sample from 2000 on government effectiveness, Greece is placed in the 74th percentile while France is in the 90th percentile. A decade later, Greece had fallen to the 68th percentile (Kauffmann et al, 2012).
Trust in Greek governments declined from 43 per cent in 2005 to 16 per cent in 2011 and distrust in parliament rose from 42 per cent to 82 per cent in the same period (European Commission, 2012).
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Acknowledgements
Originally prepared for a roundtable, ‘Small States and the Global Economic Crisis’, at the European Consortium for Political Research General Conference, 24–27 August 2011, Reykjavik, Iceland. I am grateful to Holger Döring and Philip Manow for generously sharing details from their Parliament and Government Composition Database. For constructive engagement and feedback, I thank Erik Jones, Lucy Goodhart, Dan Kelemen, Kimberly Morgan, Alexander Reisenbichler, Herman Schwartz, Baldur Thorhallsson, Amy Verdun, Cornelia Woll, especially Jonathon Moses, and seminar participants at George Washington University and Princeton University.
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fioretos, o. Origins of Embedded Orthodoxy: International Cooperation and Political Unity in Greece. Eur Polit Sci 12, 305–319 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.36
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/eps.2012.36