Clientelism and Economic Policy: Greece and the Crisis by Aris Trantidis (review)

Abstract

The outbreak of the Greek sovereign debt crisis in 2009 caught much of the world by surprise. Up to that point the prevailing view was that the country had joined the club of wealthy democracies, as it was part of the euro regime, posted relatively strong rates of economic growth, and had a relatively high standard of living. No one was more startled than Greece’s Balkan neighbors, which, with the exception of Turkey, were struggling after four or more decades of communist rule. To them, Greece was a prosperous, stable, democratic, peaceful, and wellrespected country — an example to emulate. The outbreak of the crisis stimulated numerous analyses seeking to explain the causes and consequences of the country’s prolonged and pervasive economic malaise and its impact on the future of the European Union. In general, the works on the Greek crisis can be divided in to three categories: descriptive analyses, insiders’ accounts, and more scholarly treatises. The first category includes an avalanche of mass media articles and several booklength publications describing the texture of, the players involved in, and the impact of the crisis. Jason Manolopoulos’s Greece’s ‘Odious’ Debt is a good example. A more recent variant encompasses a few accounts by insiders or would-be insiders. The memoirs of George Papaconstantinou, finance minister in the first phase of the crisis (October 2009 to June 2011), titled Game Over: The Inside Story of the Greek Crisis, is by far the most authoritative in this category. Books by Yanis Varoufakis, finance minister in the leftist