The Eurozone crisis is now widely seen as a threshold for Greek politics, society and state structures. While there has been heightened attention in Greece and internationally on the impact of the crisis across a range of policy areas, there has been less attention on the impact of the crisis on Greek foreign policy

Chryssogelos, Angelos

This working paper examines tendencies in Greek foreign policy during the Eurozone crisis. Existing analyses of the impact of the crisis on Greek foreign policy have focused primarily on its fiscal/economic effects. Here I shift the focus to the question whether the Europeanisation of Greek foreign policy has been affected by the crisis. Given that the EU has been the main strategic anchor of Greek foreign policy since the late-1990s, and that the Eurozone crisis put into question the overall alignment of Greece with Europe, the question of foreign policy Europeanization under conditions of a major crisis of EU governance remains surprisingly understudied. Apart from the mainstream foreign policy Europeanization literature, I also draw on critical works that view Europeanization as a process that de-politicizes state-society relations in Europe and insulates policymakers from public scrutiny. In this framework, I conceptualize the Eurozone crisis as a factor of re-politicization, opening policymaking (incl. in foreign policy) to contestation by mobilized political communities. I apply this conceptualization to the study of Greece’s Balkan and energy security policy between 2010 and 2015. The findings point to contradictory effects of the crisis on Greek foreign policy. Pro-EU governments in this period largely maintained the EU framework as their reference, but sought to project more forcefully national interests within it to demonstrate the usefulness of the EU for Greek goals and deflect public pressure. An anti-austerity coalition that came to power in early 2015 sought more forcefully to re-politicize some aspects of Greek foreign policy as part of its efforts to ‘renegotiate’ Greece’s relationship with the Eurozone. At the same time however, the overall image of Europeanized Greek foreign policy remained largely unaltered under the Syriza-ANEL coalition, and continuity was even more emphatic after it signed a new bailout agreement with the EU in the summer of 2015. The overall image then is one of continuity that however emerged out of a period of contestation that revealed deep tensions in what had always been an imperfect and instrumental embedding of Greek foreign policy in the EU framework. A de-Europeanization and re-politicization effect in 2010-15 crisis gave place to a renewed foreign policy practice within the EU framework, one however that is even more transparently than during the pre-crisis era the outcome of instrumental and national interest calculations. Europe remains the most effective and most readily available tool of Greek foreign policy, albeit one burdened with even more contradictions than in the past

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Still Europeanised? Greek Foreign Policy During the Eurozone Crisis

Blog Admin 2016-2-24Still Europeanized? Greek Foreign Policy during theEurozone Crisisblogs.lse.ac.uk /greeceatlse/2016/02/24/still-europeanized-greek-foreign-policy-during-the-eurozone-crisis/By Angelos ChryssogelosThe Eurozone crisis is now widely seen as a threshold for Greek politics, society andstate structures. While there has been heightened attention in Greece andinternationally on the impact of the crisis across a range of policy areas, there has beenless attention on the impact of the crisis on Greek foreign policy.The published research that exists on this topic makes valuable contributions to ourunderstanding of how the economic crisis has affected Greek foreign policy. Scholarshave identified various shifts with regards to, among others, the growing relevance ofeconomic concerns in Greek foreign policy objectives, and the development orrecalibration of various bilateral and regional relations (e.g. with Russia and the Gulf countries) of Greece.It is striking however that there has been far less emphasis on the meaning of the economic crisis for therelationship between Greek foreign policy and the EU. This is striking because a) the economic crisis has severelyupset the broad pro-EU consensus in Greek society and politics, and b) the EU had been for almost a decade priorto the crisis the point of reference for Greek foreign policy.According to the literature on Europeanization of foreign policy there had been prior to the crisis a process ofconvergence between national policies, with regards especially to the style and approach of foreign policymaking,the reference to European norms and values (e.g. peace and human rights), and the reflex among diplomats andpolicymakers to debate foreign policy issues in a European setting.Conceptualizations of national interests remained grounded in traditional strategic considerations in most member-states, and the engagement with the European framework was in most cases instrumental. But long-held processesof interaction and the broadening of national foreign policy agendas to issues of global importance and novel policyareas made recourse to the EU framework a permanent feature of national foreign policymaking in Europe.Much the same applied to the case of Greece, whose foreign policy approached the EU from the late-1990sonwards. Greece decided then to embed its major foreign policy considerations (Turkey, Cyprus, FYROM name-issue) to the European framework. It decided to pursue these goals via EU institutions and policies, and toreformulate them with reference to EU’s normative international goals (peace, stability, rule-based internationalpolitics). At the core of Greek foreign policy remained instrumental considerations, i.e. to use the EU for the moreeffective pursuit of national goals. But a process of reliance on the EU framework and the socialization of pro-European elites also brought about a subtle adjustment to, if not full internalization of, EU priorities as part ofnational foreign policy considerations.The Eurozone crisis can be seen as a severe challenge to the pre-existing equilibrium between national and EUforeign policies. Indeed, the Eurozone crisis signals a full-scale crisis of intergovernmental governance in the EU.The inability to formulate solutions on the supranational level meant that tackling the crisis relied on externallysanctioned and supervised national adjustment and coordination of economic policies. As a result, relationsbetween EU countries were severely affected and this spilled over in other arenas of intergovernmental interactionsuch as foreign policy.One can identify specific pathways of how the Eurozone crisis can affect EU foreign policy. First, one can expectnational foreign policies to become much more geared towards the pursuit of national interests, given the1/3challenging economic climate. This will make it harder for national foreign policies to take account of EU normativeconsiderations and will increase unilateral policies outside of the EU. Second, common EU positions will becomeweaker (a ‘lower common denominator’), leaving member-states with fewer leads from the EU framework to directtheir foreign policies. Third, the crisis has upset in most countries the domestic political context. As Europeanizationliterature has long acknowledged the importance of national politics for the ways Europe’s influence is absorbed,one should expect this to significantly influence the tendency of member-states towards more autonomous foreignpolicies.One can see how these pathways of influence are present in the case of Greece. The rapid deterioration of theeconomic climate has made it imperative for Greece to seek economic benefits in its foreign policy, while its oncestable pro-European two-party system has crumbled under the pressure of anti-austerity Eurosceptic parties. Thequestion is whether these developments have had any bearing on how Greek foreign policy engages and views theEU framework.One way to examine this question is by looking into policy areas of increasing salience and flux in recent years. Twosuch areas for Greek and EU foreign policy are energy security and migration and border control. In both casesGreek foreign policy was already in tension with EU priorities well before the crisis. Already since 2008 Greece wastrying to Europeanize border and migration control by asking from the EU to consider Greek borders in the Aegeanas ‘European borders’. The EU’s priority however was to externalize migration control on the Greek islands. On theother hand, Greece’s effort to become an ‘energy hub’ ran against the EU’s pipeline politics in the Balkans and theBlack Sea.During the crisis the instrumental dimension became more prevalent in Greek foreign policy considerations.National geopolitical considerations in energy and security considerations in border control trumped the EU’snormative sensibilities in these areas (that were anyway very little considered prior to the crisis). This did not meanhowever automatic alignment with EU’s strategic goals. Even under pro-European governments Greece continuedto engage Russia in energy matters, while efforts to multilateralize the mounting migration problem in the Aegeanonly elicited limited technical support from the EU.The most important effect of the crisis was the polarization between two different instrumental views of Europe inforeign policy that closely reflected patterns of political opposition domestically. For the pro-European partiesimplementing austerity while in government in 2010-2015, maintaining the image of alignment of Greek foreignpolicy interests with EU priorities was essential to support the narrative of Greece’s strategic alignment with Europe,upon which lay a major justification for difficult economic reforms. Reference to Europe took place even in the faceof major inconsistencies (e.g. the simultaneous support of the TAP and South Stream pipelines).The anti-austerity SYRIZA-ANEL government that came to power in 2015 took a different view of linkage betweenforeign policy and economic issues. Its goal was to effect a recalibration of Greece’s relationship with the Eurozone,and to this end foreign policy issues were seen as parts of tradeoffs and bargains. Tsipras’ visit to Moscow in April2015 and the signing of the Turkish Stream pipeline agreement, and his government’s posturing during the migrationcrisis (emphasizing Greece’s identification with European humanitarian values despite the burden it faces, butevading strong-armed responses as prompted by various circles in the EU) can be seen in this light.Identifying the independent effect of specific factors is always a tricky exercise in foreign policy, including in studiesof foreign policy Europeanization. The crisis has had subtle effects on Greek foreign policy and its use of theEuropean framework.What the crisis has done however is to reveal two different instrumental viewpoints of Europe and of how foreignpolicy goals relate to the economy and the EU. For pro-European parties, presenting the EU as congruent withGreek national interests corresponds to their strategy of presenting economic reform as a question of Greece’sgeopolitical orientation. For anti-austerity parties on the other hand, misfits between Greek and EU foreign policypriorities are an opportunity to highlight the need to recalibrate the Greek-EU relationship, especially with regards to2/3economic policy. In this context, foreign policy goals can be reformulated, transformed or downplayed in the searchfor tradeoffs and bargains.3/3

Still Europeanized? Greek foreign policy during the Eurozone crisis

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