Chania Conclusions on the Crisis

The business of predicting the future course of the present eurozone financial crisis is a risky one, with developments occurring with a frequency and irregularity that leave one constantly uncertain what will happen next. However, sufficient time may have passed to venture a number of tentative predictions as to what the outcome of the crisis will be.

Europe and neo-liberalism

From the mid-1980s onwards, the European Union (EU) pursued a path of neo-liberal restructuring internally around the Internal Market programme and Economic and Monetary Union as well as externally in several enlargement rounds and its Global Europe free trade strategy (Bieler 2012). The Eurozone crisis, however, has shown the internal contradictions of this strategy. Neo-liberal restructuring in Europe has reached its limits.

In 1985,the EU embarked upon a radical strategy of neo-liberal restructuring. The Internal Market programme, institutionalised in the Single European Act of 1987, established the free movement of goods, services, capital and people by deregulating and liberalising national economies. Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) as part of the Treaty of Maastricht in 1991 further consolidated the neo-liberal course. In order to qualify for the Euro, countries had to comply with the convergence criteria including strict limits on budget deficits and national debt levels leading to a range of austerity budgets across Europe during the 1990s. The European Central Bank (ECB), in turn, was given the primary task of safe-guarding price stability, with a focus on economic growth being relegated to a secondary place at best. The Social Dimension, initially perceived by many as a potential counter-weight to economic restructuring, turned into an instrument of market building.

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.