Sergio Tzotzes: The Case of Greece: Labour Market Reforms as Neoliberal Discipline in the European Periphery

This paper examines the dismantling of labour market institutions in Greece along neoliberal imperatives that was explicitly imposed by the loan conditionality of the IMF/EU/ECB adjustment programme. The mainstream public and academic discourse presents Greece as an exceptional isolated incident or a Greek disease where harsh adjustment was required to save the country from bankruptcy. Failing, to elucidate the structural aspects and the contradictions underlying the capitalist crisis, mainstream accounts also obscure the true nature, the aims and the implications of the labour market restructuring ongoing in Greece. More

Özge Yaka: Limits of the Core-­‐Periphery Model in the Analysis of the Contemporary Political Environment

The core periphery model, which belongs to the language of the pre 1980 era, has recently returned to the academic and political language in the context of the Euro‐zone-crisis. The model, which was originally developed against the modernisation school and Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantages, was aiming to reveal the structural processes and mechanisms which consistently disfavour primary producer countries of the periphery against the industrial western core. More

Ivan Berend: Globalization and its Impact on Core-Periphery Relations

Globalization is probably the most often used term in social sciences nowadays. Several colleagues, however, maintain that there is nothing new in globalization. The entire early modern and modern history were periods of permanent development of globalization, especially after the discoveries, building colonial empires, later railroads, and establishing laissez-fair system an the international gold standard. The world, no doubt about it, became more international, if you want global all the time. More

Vassilis K. Fouskas: Sovereign Debt Crisis and Peripheral Capitalism

This article calls on the need for scholarly studies to compare and contrast the failure of neo-liberal policies in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the 1990s in view of the sovereign debt crises in the periphery states of the EU today. It explores the way(s) in which “shock therapy” financial statecraft in former Yugoslavia and elsewhere did not alleviate the debt problem but, quite the opposite, augmented it. The international mechanism in operation in the past, as well as today, has not been and is not real development, modernisation More