Towards a New Social Contract in a Debt-Ridden Southern Economy? The City of Athens Perspective

While the question of whether cities can change the world feeds passionate debates and initiatives around the world, the challenge for Greece’s capital city is rather less ambitious. How can Athens cope with the social impact of the economic crisis in a sustainable way? Indeed, this is a crucial question when one bears in mind the severity of the crisis, on the one hand, and, on the other, the metropolitan size of Athens, which gathers approximately 660,000 registered residents. The fact is that Athens, Greece’s administrative and economic center, has symmetrically suffered from the socioeconomic decline. All these happen in a country where, admittedly, family solidarity can smoothen the crisis’ social impact in rural areas, but not so much in big urban centers, like Athens.

Transnational social space between Greece and Germany

The theories about transnationalism are since twenty years a new attempt to approach migration and diasporic phenomena. The intention to explore different kind of transnational relationships, contacts and ties, which cross the lines from the nation-states and to focus on the transnational agents, networks and organizations, are the primary research field of the transnational migration studies. In continental Europe these field is developing in the last 10 years.

The conditions of the Greek migration to Germany in the sixties allowed the establishment of a transnational social space between the two nation states. This space nurtured not only by the bidirectional mobility of the Greek migrants in this period, but mainly through compatible and comparable sociopolitical developments between the two countries. This allowed the emergence of social and political issues and concerns in the transnational social space, which could be capitalized and were transferable between the two countries.