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THE CRISIS OF INFORMAL WELFARE IN
GREECE
THEODOROS KARYOTIS
PhD Researcher, Department of Conflict and Development Studies, Faculty of Political and Social
Sciences, University of Ghent
Abstract
Owing to its particular sociopolitical history and its status as a semi-peripheral country, Greece has
followed a pattern of economic and urban development radically different to that of most northern
European countries. A main characteristic of that pattern is informality. This paper consists of two parts.
In the first part, I examine the origins of informality and its functions in recent Greek history: sustaining
a high rate of growth with minimal costs for the state and employers, and maintaining social peace in
the context of the familistic welfare system. Parting from an understanding of informality not as
spontaneity or absence of state control, but as an alternative normativity that stems from deliberate
state action or inaction, I approach informality not as an anomaly peculiar to the Greek political
formation, but as an extra-institutional mechanism of redistribution, which has served to incorporate
the population in the mainstream of social life. In this light, I examine the four main pillars of informal
welfare in Greece: clientelism, the informal sector, familialism and homeownership. In the second part
of the paper, I offer an interpretation of the institutional reforms that followed the sovereign debt crisis
and the concomitant bailout programs starting in 2010 as a concerted attempt to dismantle this
informal system of redistribution and to extend the reach of the state in previously informalized areas
of social and economic life, without, however, reinforcing a formal system of guarantees, such as the
welfare state.
272
There is a long-standing debate among Greek political economists in regard to the evolution and
character of the Greek capitalist formation. On the one hand, some scholars propose an
“underdevelopment” thesis and posit that Greek capitalism has maintained a relationship of
dependence with other industrialised nations (see, e.g. Mouzelis 1978). For these thinkers, the Greek
capitalist class has been predominantly a comprador class, more interested in promoting the interests
of foreign investors and multinational corporations, than in developing the productive forces within the
country. The result is a belated industrialisation, which affects all institutional aspects. On the other
hand, there are those that reject the delayed industrialisation thesis and minimize the differences with
other developed countries. These theorists focus on class relations within Greece rather than the
relation of Greek capitalism with the West and stress Greek capitalism’s own hegemonic position within
the Balkan peninsula (see, e.g. Μηλιός 2010, 2000).
In this paper, I will borrow elements from both sets of approaches, to propose a specific differentiated
mode of development for Greek capitalism, without however espousing the underdevelopment thesis.
Rather, I will argue that the informal practices that are a constitutive element of the Greek sociopolitical
formation are not a precapitalist remnant or a sign of underdevelopment, but rather, stemming from
a specific sociohistorical context, they constitute patterns of dynamic adaptation, which have allowed
the country to integrate into and compete within European and global economies.
This paper consists of two parts. In the first part, I examine the origins of informality and its functions
in recent Greek history: sustaining a high rate of growth with minimal costs for the state and employers,
and maintaining social peace in the context of the familistic welfare system. Parting from an
understanding of informality not as spontaneity or absence of state control, but as an alternative
normativity that stems from deliberate state action or inaction, I approach informality not as an
anomaly peculiar to the Greek political formation, but as an extra-institutional mechanism of
redistribution, which has served to incorporate the population in the mainstream of social life. In this
light, I examine the four main pillars of informal welfare in Greece: clientelism, the informal sector,
familialism and homeownership.
In the second part of the paper, I offer an interpretation of the institutional reforms that followed the
sovereign debt crisis and the concomitant bailout programs starting in 2010 as a concerted attempt to
dismantle this informal system of redistribution and to extend the reach of the state in previously
informalized areas of social and economic life, without, however, reinforcing a formal system of
guarantees, such as the welfare state.
PART I
The origins and functions of informality
A prominent characteristic of the Greek social formation is the continued existence of a sizable petit-
bourgeois class. The emergence of a “middle” class in Greece can be seen as the result of deliberate
state policies, and specifically the land redistribution schemes of successive governments in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Λύτρας 2010). The class of small peasants emerging out of
the redistribution and sustained through protectionist policies, gave way to an urban petit-bourgeois
class of professionals and merchants in the second half of the twentieth century, which has had a
central role in Greek politics. Small family businesses have constituted the backbone of the Greek
economy until recent times.
According to some accounts, the presence of a sizable “middle” class and the concomitant
fragmentation and individualization of the subservient classes prevented the transformation of the
273
state into an effective site of class antagonism. Although the parliamentary system is one of the oldest
in Europe, it was not the product of a class struggle to formalize and institutionalize rights and
privileges. Rather, it was a vehicle to translate the local power and influence of notables into votes,
thus ensuring their capture of the state apparatus. This laid the foundations of the clientelist system
(Χαραλάμπης 1996).
In this view, rules and democratic procedures have not been as important as familial ties, personal
acquaintances and networks of patronage, resulting in individualistic attitudes and a weak civil society,
where notions of the common good are secondary to the maximization of benefit for oneself and one’s
family. This individualism, along with the lack of a homogenous working class as an agent of struggle
and change, has prevented the full development of a formal system of guarantees, such as the welfare
states of northern Europe. The necessary consensus of the subservient classes was not created within
the institutions of the state as a field of political and class struggle, but extra-institutionally, in the
networks of patronage and personal relationships (Χαραλάμπης 1996).
In this line of reasoning, then, the state has remained lopsided in its operation: it has not so much been
an arbiter of class struggle and a mechanism of redistribution, as it has been an instrument of
authoritarian imposition. Indeed, since the victory of the nationalist side in the Civil War, a “feeble”
democratic regime was imposed (Νικολακόπουλος 2001), which aimed to prevent all working-class
demands from being institutionalised. When sectors of the subservient classes rose dangerously close
to political power in 1967, the regime did not hesitate to abolish the Constitution and switch to outright
military dictatorship.
Throughout this period, as integration of the working classes through formal avenues was out of the
question, redistribution had been taking place in an arbitrary manner through a spoils system, whereby
the resources of the state – notably, public sector jobs – were the spoils to be distributed among the
patronage networks of the elite that was victorious in the polls at any time (Allen et al. 2004 : 105). The
state only had a marginal role in ensuring social reproduction, mainly through a corporatist pension
system.
Although it has empirical grounding, this conception of clientelism easily lends itself to a
“developmentalist” worldview, according to which Greek capitalism only has to shed its pre-capitalist
vestiges (clientelism, informality, etc.) in order to “catch up” with the advanced capitalisms of northern
Europe. Contrary to that view, I propose here that informality, rather than being a remnant of the past,
has been precisely a strategy of adaptation that has allowed Greek capitalism to develop and compete
within its specific historical context.
The pillars of informal welfare
It is important to note that informality in this sense is not the same as spontaneity. It does not denote
the absence of planning or regulation on behalf of the state; rather, informality constitutes an
alternative normativity that is also a product of state action or inaction: “The planning and legal
apparatus of the state has the power to determine when to enact [the] suspension [of its own
sovereignty], to determine what is informal and what is not, and to determine which forms of
informality will thrive and which will disappear” (Roy 2005 : 149). Informality may be seen as a
deliberate strategy of development that is chosen by the dominant elites when it confers some
competitive advantage. Rather than denoting a failure of the state, informality has been a tool at the
state’s disposal, contributing to many of its successes.
274
The idea of “informal welfare” builds on the debate about the existence of a separate southern
European welfare state model, to complement Esping-Andersen’s (1990) typology of three welfare
regime types: liberal, conservative and social-democratic. While some theorists have described the
welfare system of Spain, Portugal and Greece as a “discount edition of the continental model”
(Katrougalos 1996 : 43), which differs from other conservative welfare regimes in quantity but not in
quality, there is a broad body of literature supporting the existence of a separate southern European
model (Ferrera 1996; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis 2013; Hespanha et al. 2018). This literature parts
from a criticism of Esping-Andersen’s conceptualisation of the three regimes, particularly of his narrow
definition of welfare as state-sponsored income maintenance schemes and of his exclusive focus on
state – market interaction, which sidelines other agents of welfare, especially the family. For Allen et
al. (2004 : 103 ff) welfare provision within the southern European welfare system is shaped by three
features: clientelism in the context of civil administration, a large informal sector, and familialism.
As mentioned above, clientelism is a particularistic and highly inequitable system of redistribution, in
which access to privileges relating to the civil administration are exchanged for political support. In
Greece, it has acted as a central mechanism of legitimation of state power, allowing common citizens
some degree of influence on political matters through their patrons. Moreover, in a context of
perpetual scarcity of well-remunerated jobs in the private sector and of a corporatist welfare state that
afforded public servants good pensions and other privileges, a job in the public sector obtained through
university education and/or clientelist relations became a central mechanism of social mobility (Bratsis
2010).
A large informal sector is generally characteristic of corporatist welfare models, in which the traditional
privileges of specific core sectors are safeguarded at the expense of precarious and underpaid sectors
in a dualistic labour market. Employers and workers have incentives to establish informal labour
relations, and thus circumvent social security contributions and other costs (Allen et al. 2004 : 108).
Furthermore, in Greece, given the prevalence of small family firms and self-employment, tax evasion
can be seen as an informal avenue of redistribution for families, in the absence of other welfare
provision schemes (Lyberaki and Tinios 2014 : 196; Papadopoulos and Roumpakis 2020 : 186). Similarly,
low barriers to market entry for the self-employed, afforded by tax and contribution evasion or by
circumvention of other overhead costs, can be seen as a mechanism to counteract the inadequacy of
formal protection against unemployment. In its turn, the existence of a large informal labour sec-
tor is a factor that promotes investment in homeownership as an alternative pension scheme, as
formal pension privileges do not apply to uninsured informal sector workers (Allen et al. 2004 : 111).
Finally, while all welfare regimes may be conceived as “qualitatively different arrangements between
state, market, and the family” (Esping-Andersen 1990 : 26), in the southern European context,
familialism is a way to conceptualise the prevalence of primary solidarities in the provision of social
protection. In Greece, the family – defined as the extended kinship group composed of various
generations and spread across many households – plays a central role in providing welfare to its
members and constitutes the main cell of social, political and economic reproduction (Papadopoulos
and Roumpakis 2013 : 204). To achieve this, the extended family acts as an agent of decommodification
– a safe haven from the vicissitudes of the market – by pooling monetary resources, non-market goods
and services, employment opportunities, favours, political patronage connections, and, importantly,
real estate assets, and redistributing them among its members according to custom or need. This model
presupposes the existence of at least one, typically male, breadwinner employed in the formal sector,
with all the associated benefits and advantages, with women doing extensive unpaid care work at home
or seeking employment in the informal sector (Papadopoulos and Roumpakis 2013 : 206–208).
The above three pillars of informal welfare operate alongside a rudimentary corporatist welfare state,
whose main mechanisms of redistribution are the pension system and an incompletely implemented
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universalist healthcare system. It is important to note that not only are formal welfare mechanisms
layered on top of informal and familialist ones, but they also largely take their continuous operation for
granted, in the context of a “hybrid” welfare state (Lyberaki and Tinios 2014 : 195). For Papadopoulos
and Roumpakis, informal and familialist practices “were not exemptions or idiosyncratic problems of
the Greek political economy but norms that were in accordance with the reproduction of the Greek
familistic political economy and its corresponding welfare regime” (2013 : 206). That is, they were
specific adaptations of a semi-peripheral economy largely dependent on a “low-wage, low-productivity,
and low-investment in skills and technologies economic strategy” whose “economic competitiveness
was politically translated in a continuous attempt, on behalf of both employers and the state, to
minimise their responsibility for social reproduction” (2013 : 209). The largely informal welfare model
was not a manifestation of dysfunction or lack of development, but an outcome of the Greek economy’s
insertion into and competition within European and global economies.
There is another important element of informal welfare in Greece, which has to be added to the
abovementioned three pillars: homeownership, promoted by the state through a specific mode of
urbanism.
Informal urbanism
After WWII and the ensuing Civil War, internal migration and a damaged housing stock aggravated
housing problems. Contrary to the strategy of northern European states, the Greek state did not take
an active part in reconstruction through public urban development schemes and housing policies.
Rather, as part of the Marshall plan and under the supervision of US consultants, it fomented informal
urbanization through self-construction, or “Assisted Self-Help Housing”. This consisted in aiding
residents to construct their own house, with the state providing the blueprints and/or raw materials
(Κάλφα 2019).
The aims of the state and its foreign consultants were largely political/pedagogical: they aimed to infuse
new values and attitudes, such as individualism and self-reliance, in a population still scarred by the
civil conflict, and to avoid the emergence of a universalist welfare state, which appeared to them
socialist in its forms and functions. The prevalence of small property in Greece should be examined
within this context.
Self-constructed houses were completed through the mobilization of family and friends, usually
designed and erected by unqualified contractors. This strategy required a lax enforcement of planning
regulations, as most homes were built on land designated as agricultural, and irregularly used for
residential settlements. However, in contrast to informal urbanism in the Global South, in
Mediterranean cities self-construction was based “on illegal use, not illegal occupation, of land. Houses
are built on land illegally subdivided into plots, but duly sold to the settlers” (Leontidou 1990). Despite
the housing emergency and the informality and illegality of construction, the sanctity of property rights
was not violated, and squatting was a marginal or temporary phenomenon. Illegally built homes were
later legalized by a series of relevant laws that reach to the present. Legalization of illegally built homes
was leveraged by political parties to gain sympathy and votes among the population.
Informality in urbanization, therefore, rather than denoting the absence of regulation, signifies a
parallel system of unwritten norms that governs the use of space and makes possible new forms of
social and political power.
The system of assisted self-construction later evolved into the land-for-flats swap system (antiparochi),
whereby property owners would swap their plot of land or their old house for a number of apartments
276
in a multi-story building (polykatoikia) built by small-scale contractors. Eventually, the construction
sector became not only a basic pillar of the economy, creating jobs and growth over several decades,
but also the main agent of spatial planning and administration (Dragonas 2014).
The first two comprehensive pieces of urban policy came in the late 1970s and early 1980s respectively,
when the aforementioned informal development model had run its course and had all but determined
the character of Greek cities (Hastaoglou et al. 1987). The incursion of banks and large constructors in
the housing sector in the 1990s weakened but did not fully eliminate informal urbanism.
While it may be enticing to theorise this model of urbanisation as spontaneous and informal, taking
place despite the state or in its margins, some scholars insist that this kind of development is in fact
“the result of a meticulously detailed regulatory structure that evolved strategically through time“
(Issaias 2014 : xxii). Scholars such as Issaias (2014) and Dragonas (2014) argue that the ruling classes
used informal access to the property ladder as a way to contain and appease the burgeoning working
class in post-War years.
In this view, the construction of the home-owning subject through the promotion of the ideology of
property and its attendant social values was integral to the operation of Greek capitalism. Proletarians
were thus integrated into the social mainstream by being turned into small property owners. Real
estate property was reasserted as a central social imaginary signification: it signified at the same time
a ticket to the middle class, a factor of egalitarianism and a means of value accumulation. Real estate
assets become a guarantee of welfare and financial security for the family unit, to compensate for the
precarity of the labour market and the absence of state welfare. Out of the class strife of the previous
decades, a new “middle-class” subject was born, hard-working, self-reliant and disciplined, demanding
not collective social change, but individual – or rather, familial – social mobility.
We can thus argue that informal welfare administered through its four pillars – clientelism, the informal
sector, familialism and homeownership – was not a side-effect or a malfunction, but a constitutive
element in the evolution of Greek capitalism. Informal provision allowed Greek capitalism to maintain
its competitiveness by keeping wages low, while the state could avoid the fiscal pressures of welfare
provision and safely ignore calls for reform without jeopardizing social peace (Lyberaki and Tinios 2014
: 199). This arrangement permitted the Greek “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960, with rates of
growth higher than most OECD countries.
PART II
The dismantling of informal welfare
Three broad periods can be distinguished in the development of informal welfare in Greece
(Papadopoulos and Roumpakis 2013 : 209 ff). In the first period, from the 1950s until the early 1990s,
Greek families used the four informal welfare pillars described above along with prudent, low-risk, low-
debt economic management to maximise family wealth and real estate assets, which were passed along
to the next generations. Social mobility was pursued through homeownership and university education
for younger family members. To ensure social peace, the state allowed the benefits of clientelism to
trickle down to the lower strata and turned a blind eye to many informal and semi-formal practices,
such as tax evasion, building without a planning permission, and an extensive submerged economy
sector.
In the second period, starting in the mid-1990s all the way to 2010, the goal of joining the European
Monetary Union imposed fiscal discipline on the Greek state, and thus the spoils to be distributed by
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clientelist networks were significantly reduced. The incipient adjustment programme dictated
economic deregulation, labour flexibilisation and a restructuring of pensions and welfare provision. The
Greek family saw its model of wealth accumulation entering a period of instability, and turned to
market mechanisms to maintain its standard of living, namely by using bank loans to maintain its
consumption levels and by investing in high-risk financial products. Rising indebtedness and labour
precarity started to threaten the role of the family unit as a source of welfare for its members.
In the third period, following the eruption of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010, through successive waves
of austerity measures linked to three major bailout agreements, wages, benefits and pensions were
drastically cut, the labour market was further flexibilised, and a series of regressive taxes were imposed.
A recessionary spiral brought down the GDP by about 30% and pushed unemployment up. To reduce
government deficit, the state further retreated from its obligation to provide welfare and externalised
the costs of the crisis to the family. Increased social needs and limited resources caused the formal
welfare mechanisms to overflow, but their residual could not anymore be attended by the informal
welfare system, as all of its pillars has been undermined: Clientelist networks were dismantled, not only
because fiscal consolidation meant there was no spoils to distribute, but also because a profound
political legitimation crisis destabilised the two-party system (Teperoglou and Tsatsanis 2014). In the
context of the restructuring, there was a strong drive for formalisation of labour and curbing of tax
evasion, especially for the self-employed, in order to enlarge the tax base and increase state revenue
(Koutsogeorgopoulou et al. 2014 : 38). The capacity of the family to mobilise and redistribute resources
was drastically curtailed by reduced incomes, unemployment, odious taxation and unsustainable levels
of private debt (Papadopoulos and Roumpakis 2013 : 215). Finally, homeownership was challenged, as
non-performing mortgages shot through the roof, and property taxes sextupled over the course of a
few years, thus turning real estate from an asset into a liability (Alexandri and Janoschka 2018). This
shift caused the hybrid system to collapse, thus signalling a welfare crisis. Austerity policies served as
“an abrupt attempt at formalization, which Greece’s society cannot afford” (Rakopoulos 2015 : 97).
The logic of economic restructuring
The relationship of informal welfare provision with neoliberal restructuring is contradictory. It is well
documented that the family is seen as an inexpensive provider of welfare that can absorb the
externalities of neoliberal cuts in social spending. Even in countries without a familialist tradition, such
as the USA, through private debt and asset-based welfare, the family is increasingly burdened with
maintaining the standard of living of its members while stimulating demand in the wider economy. This
expanded function for the family is accompanied by a resurgence of conservative family values (Cooper
2017).
The formal justification for Greece’s radical restructuring program is to address four structural
problems of the Greek economy: increase its competitiveness, curb the rise in external debt, flexibilise
labour and product markets and strengthen the banking sector (European Commission, Directorate
General for Economic and Financial Affairs 2010). By all accounts, the adjustment program has failed in
bringing about the desired changes (Papadatos 2014; Pagoulatos 2018). Specifically, not only the
internal devaluation did not increase competitiveness, but falling domestic demand destroyed small
capitals and thus exacerbated unemployment, in a vicious circle that shrunk the tax base and state
revenue, rendering fiscal consolidation impossible and leading to an increase in external debt.
What we have seen in the case of Greece is a complete disconnection of the reproduction of capital
from the reproduction of society. While the restructuring aimed to increase the competitiveness of the
Greek economy and facilitate investment, no attention was paid to the immense increase in poverty
278
and the drastic drop in the population’s standard of living. In effect, the welfare state, while overall
retaining its corporatist structure, it residualised all welfare provisions addressed at the lower strata,
thereby aiming not to ensure general welfare, but to prevent the most extreme and visible forms of
poverty (Papanastasiou and Papatheodorou 2019). However, as I argue above, the decisive factor in
social collapse was the dismantling of informal welfare.
The social collapse was accompanied by a delegitimation of the post-dictatorship political consensus
and the two-party system (Teperoglou and Tsatsanis 2014), and engendered a period of prolonged
political instability and unrest. The response of the Greek state was largely authoritarian, with the
systematic violent suppression of all expressions of popular outrage and further disciplining of workers
(Doulos 2020). It is reasonable to ask, why would the Greek political class and its European allies put in
motion such a plan, that would not only have disastrous economic effects, but would also undermine
their own legitimacy and credibility, and erode their hegemony?
One possible answer is that this was a miscalculation of on the part of political elites, which misread
the situation and destabilised the whole political system and thus their own hegemony. Repeated
errors on the part of the IMF in predicting the magnitude of the GDP drop brought about by public
spending cuts (Pagoulatos 2018 : 15) would throw the country into a destructive recessionary spiral.
Moreover, a deficient conceptualisation of the welfare system in Greece, whereby the weight of
informal social security provision was all but overlooked (see, e.g., Katrougalos and Lazaridis 2003)
would allow the adoption of a modernisation discourse that ended up dismantling all sources of
welfare.
However, I will argue here that the disastrous social effects of austerity were not simply the result of
miscalculations, but the direct outcome of the logic of neoliberal restructuring. The strategic goals of
the adjustment were only secondary to the wider objectives of the project of European integration.
To grasp the nature of neoliberal reforms, let us here engage with the thought of Loïc Wacquant on
neoliberalism as a quintessentially political project. Wacquant (2012) criticises neo-Marxist approaches
that conceive neoliberalism as “market rule”, a combination of deregulation, privatisation and
withdrawal of the state. He also rejects neo-Foucauldian “governmentality” approaches that conceive
neoliberalism as a “generalised normativity”, and focus on the micro-level reshaping of institutions and
subjects along the lines of competition, efficiency and utility. Rather, he proposes that neoliberalism
entails not the dismantling but the reengineering of the state: its penal and repressive functions are
reinforced, while its redistributive functions are curtailed, resulting in what he calls a “centaur state”,
which “purports to enshrine markets and embrace liberty, but in reality reserves liberalism and its
benefits for those at the top while it enforces punitive paternalism upon those at the bottom” (2012 :
76).
I believe that Wacquant’s conceptualisation of neoliberalism as “an articulation of state, market, and
citizenship that harnesses the first to impose the stamp of the second onto the third“ (2012 : 71) does
not invalidate the “marketization” and “governmentality” approaches, but it adds a very important
additional layer, which helps explicate the increased and transformed powers afforded to the state by
neoliberal structural adjustment. This is in line with Werner Bonefeld’s (2013) conception of political
authority as a central element in ordoliberal thought, and thus in the project of European Integration,
which is a political, rather than an economic, project: “ordo-liberal social policy presupposes an ever-
vigilant state that governs with strong state authority to secure the capacity of society to cope with
economic shocks in the manner of the entrepreneur” (Bonefeld 2013 : 109). The neoliberal state thus,
is not the non-interventionist state, but the state that actively suppresses the politicization of the lower
classes and imposes “order” on the system.
279
We can thus approach the dismantling of informality in Greece. The concern of the institutions was not
that the state was too strong, but rather that the state was too weak, too vulnerable to the influence
of special interests, and thus not wholeheartedly dedicated to facilitating the penetration of capital. To
exemplify this, we can turn to the analysis that Bratsis (2003) offers of the fight against corruption in
Greece. This was framed in the language of “transparency”, that is, it was not an attempt to disentangle
private interests from public matters, but to make their entanglement more predictable and calculable.
That is, informal clientelist networks articulating small and medium-sized players would have to be
dismantled to give way to a formal lobbying system that favours international capital.
Informality, then, is conceived as an encroachment of the masses on the state and by extension on the
market mentality that the latter tries to impose on society. The decommodification and informal
redistribution afforded by informal welfare are seen as hurdles in the effort to discipline workers and
imprint a mentality of competitiveness and self-sufficiency in them. Moreover, a system relying on
extra-institutional arrangements and particularistic rules is obscure and incomprehensible for foreign
capital, and thus unconducive for investment.
Conclusion
It is important to stress that in this paper I do not take a normative stance regarding the operation of
the Greek welfare state and the necessity of its reform. Concluding that the structural adjustment has
produced social collapse does not constitute a defence of the pre-crisis welfare system in Greece. The
lopsidedly informal welfare system was lacking in universalism and served to perpetuate traditional
inequalities, including patriarchal power and labour abuses. At the same time, however, it constituted
the Greek economy’s own path to modernity, and it permitted the social inclusion of large parts of the
population in a context of minimal state welfare.
My argument, rather, is that the conception of informal practices as hurdles to capitalist expansion or
as signs of underdevelopment, rather than as elements of welfare, has permitted the outright
dismantling of informal welfare without its substitution with a formal system of guarantees, and has
thus exacerbated inequality and created a sizable surplus population with dismal life prospects.
This stems from a conceptualisation of the Greek social system as a “deviation” from the norm set by
northern European states, which rests on a “quasi-orientalist” discourse (Leontidou 2014) that treats
Mediterranean cultures as underdeveloped “others” in Europe, and thus legitimates violent
restructuring policies that aim to help these countries “catch up” with their northern counterparts.
Greece’s “different, and spatially unequal, development path is most probably one of the reasons why
austerity policies and memoranda provisions since 2010 have proven so utterly destructive not only in
economic terms but, perhaps more importantly, socially and culturally” (Vaiou 2018).
This paper was written in the context the project “Property and Democratic Citizenship”, funded by the
European Research Council.
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