When the global financial crisis spread to Europe and its weak periphery through the banking sector, few contemplated that the real causes of the crisis did not reside only in the faulty architectures of globalisation and European integration but also in a pronounced power-shift to the ‘global East’. In Greece, Financialization and the EU: The Political Economy of Debt and Destruction Vassilis K. Fouskas and Constantine Dimoulas provide an excellent overview of historical facts & empirical data pertaining to Greece’s debt problem and present an intricate political economic analysis which moves away from the basic stereotypes populating both media and economic accounts of the Greek crisis.

Moreover, this lucid and creative book connect the ‘local’ with the ‘global’, and the ‘local’ with the ‘European’. In this context, the authors scrutinize the financial, geopolitical and historical underpinnings of the current Greek debt crisis that threatens not just the cohesion of the European Union, but the entire security architecture of the Euro-Atlantic world. By identifying the ‘debt problem’ as being one of the ‘birthmarks’ of Greece passed by the country’s one hegemonic master onto another, they challenge the current half-truths about the contemporary debt crisis in Greece and the Euro-zone.
With a broad theoretical framework putting forward
a crisis theory of financialization and geo-politics drawn from Marx’s theory of value and making extensive and critical use of the works of David Harvey, Robert Brenner and Giovanni Arrighi, the authors narrate the drama of the Greek people caused by unprecedented neo-liberal policies of austerity.

Open access to Foreword by Donald Sassoon, Timeline of main events in Greece and Europe from October 2009 to March 2013, Notes and to Contents and the Introduction chapter