** Event Location: Please note that this event is not held at CES. Consult the Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives seminar page and details above for the correct location. **
This talk explores the postwar German–Greek relations in the context of European integration from the first major bilateral agreements in the early 1950s to Greece’s entry into the European Community in 1981.
By addressing this three-decade story of contested continuity, the seminar questions conventional wisdom about Greece’s path to Europe and challenges the way the so-called North–South divide and its moralist connotations were advanced to explain the recent euro-crisis.
Much of the available political science and diplomatic history scholarship has argued that the Greek entry into the European Community was the combined result of domestic political and international security factors in the 1970s, despite poor economic performance.
By contrast, this talk, highlighting Germany’s role in the shaping of the Greek development paradigm and focusing on the German–Greek business networks, demonstrates that Greece’s EC-membership had a long prehistory in the modernization strategies both countries embarked upon as early as the 1950s.
