Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou present their latest book in conversation with Elias Dinas, Kristin Fabbe, Kalypso Nicolaidis and George Papaconstantinou.
The Florence School of Transnational Governance and the EUI Department of Political and Social Sciences are pleased to welcome Dimitris Papadimitriou, Political Science Professor and Faculty of Humanities Vice Dean at Manchester University, and Kevin Featherstone, EUI Emeritus Professor and Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE Hellenic Observatory, as they tour Europe presenting their latest book, Greek Prime Ministers in the Eye of the Storm: Crisis Management and Institutional Change.
The book inserts itself in a vast and prestigious series of books and articles on Greek politics, EU public policy and EU external relations, centring around a core question: how and when may crises overcome the fragmentation of a core executive and facilitate a centralised management response? Using Greece’s three bailout programmes (2010-18) as case studies, the authors draw on several literatures and on an extensive range of elite interviews – with, among others, all the four Prime Ministers who led Greece during the crisis – to ascertain the nodality of the Crisis Response Networks (CRNs) employed to deal with the country’s creditors and oversee the implementation of bailout conditionality at home.
It traces the interplay between PM agency and key players within the government and the CRN during different stages of the crisis and assesses the extent to which the ‘bailout years’ challenged the underlying modus operandi at the heart of the Greek government.
The book directly connects to ongoing debates on executive empowerment in the US and the dynamics of crisis management in Europe and the Middle East, becoming a must-read for those who see in the recognition of patterns the chance to prevent past errors.
Introduction: George Papaconstantinou (STG)
Presentation: Kevin Featherstone and Dimitris Papadimitriou
Discussion panel: Elias Dinas (SPS), Kristin Fabbe (STG) and Kalypso Nicolaidis (STG)
This event will also take place online via zoom. Please register to receive the connection details.