Superficial Social Democracy: PASOK, the State and the Shipwreck of the Greek Economy

Abstract

Τhis chapter links the Greek debt crisis and the failure to establish an efficient state in Greece to critical distinguishing features of PASOK’s (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) ideology and policies. It focuses on the first two governmental periods (1981–1989 and 1993–2004) of the Greek Socialists and examines PASOK’s fiscal policies as well as its policy regarding the state and the institution-building reforms it carried out. PASOK’s contribution to Greece’s fiscal collapse was decisive because it did not promote a coherent social democratic economic and state model, whether left-wing, in the Andreas Papandreou period (1981–1996), or “social-liberal”, in the more ideologically coherent period of the modernizer Costas Simitis (1996–2004). The chapter’s central thesis is that PASOK, which lacked a social democratic history and culture, was a superficial, fundamentally inconsistent social democratic party. In the history of post-WWII European social democracy it would be difficult to find a party whose own political choices and practices have undermined each other to such a high degree. PASOK was simultaneously the spearhead of social democratisation and modernisation of Greek society and the principal obstacle to them.