Introduction: A Crisis of Stateness and a Challenge to Political Participation

Abstract

Since 2009 Greece has undergone a process of change, involving a far-reaching metamorphosis in some areas, an acute crisis and tremendous depletion of resources in others, and many instances of successful resistance by die-hard supporters of the old ways. This collection of essays on Greeks politics and policy aims to focus more on the development of processes and institutions. It addresses (mostly directly, on occasion also indirectly) issues of policy change and - more generally - of stateness in crisis. In 'stateness' political scientists and international relations experts recognize a concept that has actually travelled a lot since it was first introduced in its modern incarnation in the 1960s by Nettl in a rightly famous article on "stateness as a conceptual variable" (Nettl, 1968), and was taken over more recently by scholars like Fukuyama. Stateness is again, as it used to be in the past, a fascinating concept with which to approach the problems in today's Europe; it is a concept that involves a combination of a number of different dimensions of actual state practice and state behavior. It involves the proactive, the coercive, as well as infrastructural aspects of states’ existence and behavior and the main question therefore is: what has the European integration project done to stateness - what is the impact of EU integration on stateness? Not just on particular states, say on France or Germany or Italy or Greece but on stateness as such in today's Union (see Lavdas 2015 and the references therein).