Date:
Location:
"Unlikely Friends: Greece and West Germany from Marshall Plan to Common Market"
Speaker:
Christos Tsakas, Visiting Scholar (2019-2020), Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Contact:
Ilana Freedman
ifreedman@g.harvard.edu
Abstract:
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 paper 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 paper, 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 along prehistory in the modernization strategies both countries embarked upon as early as the 1950s.
Chairs:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Department of the Classics; Professor of Comparative Literature, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Department of Anthropology, and the Humanities Center, The Johns Hopkins University.
