Suchergebnisse

This paper provides an analysis of the lockdown politics implemented in Greece during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021. It argues that Greece's pandemic politics deepened the crisis of the familistic social model that resulted from the austerity policies of the last decade. Although caring for the family became a high priority during the pandemic, resources for families and households did not increase. Likewise, while "essential" workers were much praised by officials, their wages and working conditions hardly improved. The COVID-19 pandemic crisis management in Greece has two peculiarities: First, the country entered the pandemic after a painful decade of austerity, interrupting the fragile, long-awaited economic recovery. Second, given the inadequate state of the public healthcare system after a decade of austerity, the lockdowns in Greece were among the strictest in Europe. Rather than being the result of state preparedness, these lockdowns can be interpreted as an acknowledgment of state failure.

This paper examines the effects of the transformations and the changing notions of the national and international security, especially by the European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) in Greek policies. In this frame, it discusses the debate over "new wars", as one that incorporates the rhetoric of globalization, the increasing role of information technologies, as well as the "preemptive wars" as response to "new threats". Furthermore, this paper discusses the development of the ESDP and categorizes different sets of arguments that focus on the relationship between ESPD and the nation state. These sets of arguments refer to the EU as an emerging global superpower, as an agent of governmentality in agendas of "good governance" and "humanitarian intervention", as a response to the decline of nation states in the frame of globalization and also, as a coalition where the nation state remains predominant and operates as a reference level for the EU. As far as Greece is concerned, this paper summarizes its basic foreign policy features, the problem of its high defence expenditure, its participation to several ESDP-institutions, police missions and peace- keeping operations, as well as problems that concern both the EU and Greece as a border and transition country, such as the migration from belligerent countries. ; peer-reviewed