Debt, dignity, and defiance: why Greece went to the brink

Reinhard Wolf

Review of International Political Economy, 2018, vol. 25, issue 6, 829-853

Abstract: Early in 2015, the new Greek government, led by the left-wing SYRIZA party, refused to complete the second bailout program and insisted on further debt relief. This defiant stance entails a puzzle for rational-choice explanations that focus on expected economic utility: when SYRIZA came to power, the Greek economy had resumed modest growth, while its foreign creditors had extended debt maturities and hinted at the possibility of more debt restructuring in the future. Hence, there seemed no immediate need to force the issue. Furthermore, it appeared very likely that the incoming administration's demands would be rejected by some of the creditors, each of whom wielded effective veto power. In fact, weeks before the final showdown, George Tsebelis, a leading expert in the field of EU governance, had correctly predicted that Athens was set for a dramatic climb-down. This article argues that the Greek government's bargaining tactics were neither a rational answer to the country's economic predicament nor a necessary response to domestic constraints. Instead, moral emotions and status sentiments played a decisive role. The administration's overconfident defiance was strongly influenced by anger at Greece's alleged humiliation at the hand of its creditors.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09692290.2018.1490331 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:rripxx:v:25:y:2018:i:6:p:829-853

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rrip20

DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2018.1490331

Access Statistics for this article

Review of International Political Economy is currently edited by Gregory Chin, Juliet Johnson, Daniel Mügge, Kevin Gallagher, Ilene Grabel and Cornelia Woll

More articles in Review of International Political Economy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().