Poros, Greece, 7-10 July 2011

This year we host the 8th Annual European Seminar of ELIAMEP on the island of Poros, from 7 to 10 July, 2011. The theme of this year’s seminar is:  Adjusting to the Crisis: Policy Choices and Politics in Europe.

In our annual European seminars, we bring together a group of 40-50 leading thinkers and practitioners from different countries. The emphasis is on an interdisciplinary exchange of views with a strong policy orientation.

This year, the discussion concerns the broader consequences of the economic crisis and the policy choices facing individual countries and the EU as whole. We start with a general discussion of the global and European dimensions of the crisis, its different national manifestations and the corresponding policy responses, in the context of the widening of economic divergence inside Europe. Then discussion turns to the political economy of adjustment, concentrating on internal disparities and the creation of winners and losers within countries. The rise of populism and the effects of the crisis on the old division between Left and Right is the topic of the first session of the second day of the seminar, followed by a discussion of the role of the economic crisis as a catalyst for further integration in Europe. The programme concludes with a panel discussion that will try to pull loose threads together.

The programme of the seminar can be viewed here.

The list of participants can be viewed here.

The List of Participants’ biographical Notes can be found here.

European democracies and decision-making in times of crisis

Poros, 8 July 2011

Thank you very much for inviting me to address this conference in Poros. I would like to speak about a very topical theme: the capacity of democracies to take difficult and pressing decisions in critical times. The sovereign debt crisis has brought this issue to the fore in both creditor and debtor countries in Europe. Recent experience has shown that tough decisions are often taken only on the brink of the abyss, when the fateful consequences of not taking such decisions become all too evident to governments and to those they govern. This creates at least five highly undesirable outcomes, in particular within the European context.

First, it increases uncertainty in financial markets about the course that will ultimately be followed.