Kostas A. Lavdas - Böcker

An original analysis of the integration of Greece into the European Union, assessing the impact of EU membership on different sectors of the Greek economy. The book focusses on interest politics and shows how Greek sectoral corporatism has been transformed, largely as a result of EU membership.

This book examines the present crisis of Greece’s political economy as a crisis of stateness, tackling the domestic as well as the international dimensions. It represents the first attempt by Greek academics to put forward a theoretically-informed, interdisciplinary analysis of Greece’s fiscal, economic, and political crisis. The approach aims to fill a major gap, combining insights from comparative politics, political economy, international relations theory, and legal-institutional analysis, in a theoretically informed account of the Greek case in comparative and theoretical perspective. The book tackles the issue of the possible next steps for the EU under the influence of the crisis of the eurozone, including a thorough analysis of national sovereignty seen from a domestic and an international point of view, focusing on critical processes in the international arena such as interdependency and dependency, while a legal-institutional chapter demonstrates the erratic way in which Greek government dealt with sovereign debt.The project comes at the right time in order to address a highly contentious chapter in the political development of the Greek state and of the European South. As the crisis in the eurozone’s weaker periphery unfolds, Lavdas, Litsas, and Skiadas use the Greek crisis in order to address a much larger and critical issue: the role and predicament of stateness in the developing EU.

A Republic of Europeans looks at the changing routes and conditions of the European polity from a liberal republican angle, proposing an innovative regulative ideal for Europe's future. The book assesses the prospects for uniting diverse publics into a composite polity with its own sense of 'demos-hood'. It also places Europe's normative evolution in the wider context of an ordered global plurality made up of highly interrelated actors. In examining whether the European Union has reached a point which might be telling of an end state, the book offers a depiction of the whole as an 'organized synarchy' of entwined sovereignties, arguing that the envisaged transition from a synarchy of co-sovereigns to a self-identifying citizenry requires the constitution of a 'Republic of Europeans'. A polity which, corresponding to the liberal republican vision of 'many peoples, one demos', regulates contemporary forms of pluralism, which the authors approach as instances of a 'civic polyculturalism'. Offering new understandings on Europe's normative evolution, this book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in politics, Government, European studies, international relations, international organization and political theory. Doctoral students, postdoctoral and advanced researchers, as well as policy makers in government and international organizations, will also find much to interest them in this book. Contents: Preface; 1. The Global Plurality; 2. Retheorizing Europe; 3. 'One Great Republic'?; 4. Reflective Projections; 5. Postscript: Directions; References; Index