The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics

Leiden : Brill, 2019.

Mylonas Y.

he “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics, critically analyses the publicity of the Greek debt crisis, by studying Greek, Danish and German mainstream media during the crisis’ early years (2009-2015). Mass media everywhere reproduced a sensualistic “Greek crisis” spectacle, while iterating neoliberal and occidentalist ideological myths. Overall, the Greek people were deemed guilty of a systemic crisis, supposedly enjoying lavish lifestyles on the EU’s expense. Using concrete examples, the study foregrounds neoorientalist, neoracist and classist stereotypes deployed in the construction and media coverage of the Greek crisis. These media practices are connected to the “soft politics” of the crisis, which produce public consensus over neoliberal reforms such as austerity and privatizations, and secure debt repayment from democratic interventions.

Chapters

Introduction: the Study of the Greek Economic Crisis in Europe through the Media

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 1 P. 1–47.

As is generally known, the latest major economic crisis of global proportions started in the usa with the credit crunch of 2007–8. Ten years later, in 2018, critics note that the crisis is far from fully resolved, with a new – and potential-ly more serious – one pending (Roos, 2018b). Along with the economic crisis, ...

Added: March 16, 2021

Greek Crisis, Eurozone Crisis, Global Capitalist Crisis

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 2 P. 48–86.

The economic crisis in Greece is in its 9th year in 2018. Along with it, an un-precedented and polyvalent socio-political crisis has also emerged (Tziovas, 2017). Estimations show that austerity may last for more than fifty years; the repayment of Greece’s growing debt may take much longer. In 2017, after eight years of neoliberal austerity ...

Added: March 16, 2021

The “Greek Crisis” in the Media: Hegemony, Spectacle and Propaganda

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 3 P. 87–112.

This chapter presents an account of the political role of the media. The discus-sion of media and politics begins with the notion of the public sphere and its critical conceptualisation as a field colonised by the strategic economic in-terests and ideological premises of capital and the upper classes (Dean, 2002, 2009, 2017; Negt & Kluge, ...

Added: April 13, 2021

A Cultural Failure: Reification, Orientalism, Nationalism

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 4 P. 113–152.

In this chapter, I draw on the critical theories of race and racism, discussed in Chapter 1, that problematise the uses of the concept of culture today in the West. Culture is often deployed to explain issues like poverty and civic dis-empowerment as well as economic crisis, state bankruptcy and corruption, in a rather depoliticised ...

Added: April 13, 2021

Under a Middle-Class Gaze

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 5 P. 153–182.

Departing from Bourdieu’s (2010) seminal text Distinction, scholars (Ben-nett, 2013; Eriksson, 2015) argue that mass media organise their representa-tional frames on social affairs under a middle-class gaze, which suggests to audiences the preferred ways of looking at things. The media’s middle-class positioning affirms core bourgeois values shared and aspired to by the middle-class. The middle-class ...

Added: April 13, 2021

Exceptionalising the Crisis, Normalising Austerity

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 6 P. 182–212.

Chapters 4 and 5 presented the cultural and moral construction of the Greek crisis in the European mainstream media. Both dimensions are interrelated and stem from authoritative political and economic institutions and estab-lishments. The technocratic expertise of neoliberal economists in particular, outlines the economic crisis in a seemingly depoliticised manner. Acts of de-politicisation though are ...

Added: April 13, 2021

Conclusions: Context, Politics, Negativity

Mylonas Y., , in: The “Greek Crisis” in Europe: Race, Class and Politics.: Leiden: Brill, 2019. Ch. 7 P. 213–227.

The reintroduction of a critical vocabulary that was made redundant by postmodernism and the subsequent hegemony of neoliberalism as a post-historical project can demonstrate the systemic and structural aspects of the crisis and among them, the values and the social relations naturalising capital-ism. This way, critical theory can estrange and defamiliarise (Shklovsky, 2015: 163) what ...

Added: April 13, 2021

Keywords: Eurozone crisis, critical theory, Critique of Orientalism, Austerity