A thorough look into the state-market divide: depoliticisation of privatisation in post-crisis Greece

ABSTRACT

Privatisation is a strategic policy restructuring the relationship between the state and the market, the public and the private, and hence, the political and the economic. It opens non-capitalist spaces to capital accumulation and creates new markets for international competition. Privatisation alters a society’s relationship to public goods, services and rights by commodification practices, and turns into a highly controversial reform in economic restructuring. This paper discusses how privatisation gained priority in Greece with the economic crisis. It incorporates the concept of depoliticisation to offer a new perspective on the analysis of the economic plans, programmes and documents that Greece signed with international creditors for the sake of its economic recovery. It claims that depoliticisation functioned as a strategy for putting privatisation policies onto the agenda by simply reproducing the elusive separation between the political and the economic. The paper argues that introducing extensive privatisation policies through internationally agreed-upon documents confirms the attempt to erode the political character of the process in order to (i) present such policies as a technical, economic imperative, (ii) externalise political decisions, and (iii) limit public discontent. The depoliticisation and privatisation processes reinforce each other in widening the state-market divide.

KEYWORDS:

• depoliticisation
• economic crisis
• eurozone
• Greece
• privatisation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a comparative analysis of adjustment programmes in bailout countries, please see Kaelberer 2014; Talani 2015; Sarımehmet Duman 2020.

2. The number of strikes increased from 268 in 1984 to 497 in the year the Stabilisation Programme was published, and then decreased to 288 in 1987 (Ioannou 1999). The total number of strike hours was around 9.8 million in 1984 and around 21.8 million in 1987 (Ioannou 1999). The number of working days lost to strikes between 1984 and 1993 was notably higher than that of the OECD countries (Close 2002, 176–7). The number of strikers also significantly increased, particularly in 1987 and 1990.

3. The number of strikers reached 114,000 and the total number of hours in strike reached 918,000 just before the crisis (EIROnline 2008).

4. An analysis of public debt in the Euro area in the period 1998–2009 indicates that the rate of Greek public debt compared to Euro area-16 was 130% in 1998, 152% in 2001, 154% in 2006 and 160% in 2009 (Bukowski 2011, 281).

5. According to the data provided by Global Competitiveness Report 2010–2011, Greece has experienced a continuous loss of competitiveness in the Eurozone (Schwab 2010). It had high levels of government debt with increased public debt (Bukowski 2011, 281) and current account deficit (Eurostat 2016b), and low levels of labour productivity (Eurostat 2016a) and high levels of unit labour cost (OECD 2016). In 2008 and 2009, government debt increased to a total of €56 billion (Christodoulakis 2010, 90). The rate of government deficit to GDP was calculated as 13.6% in April 2010 (Pagoulatos and Triantopoulos 2009, 36; Monastiriotis 2011, 325; Featherstone 2011, 199). The government then announced that the level of government debt tripled (Featherstone 2011, 199).

6. The financial interconnectedness of Greece was comparatively loose – the total of financial transactions remained significantly low: only €603,223 million in the period of 2001–2009 (Eurostat 2010). The Greek banking system was not involved in rigorous connection with the international banking system prior to the emergence of the economic crisis; the loan levels were low, the mortgage market was only at a developing stage, and heavily leveraged products were yet unknown (Pettifer 2010, 1).

7. By March 2010, ‘the budgetary deficit amounted 12.7% of GDP (€30 billion); the debt of the central government exceeded 120% of GDP; … the debt of the general government exceeded 113% of GDP; annual expenditure on interest exceeded €12 billion; and the primary regular budget expenditure increased … by 50% (€20 billion)’ (EIROnline 2010).

8. For further discussions on this, see Featherstone 2011; Monastiriotis 2011; Kakouli 2013; Ladi 2014; Koutroukis 2017.

9. The number of strikes fluctuated with a general trend of decline – it was reported 232 in 2012, 160 in 2013, 142 in 2014, 97 in 2015, also 97 in 2016, and 119 in 2017 (Eurofound 2020).