Recovery, resilience and growth regimes under overlapping EU conditionalities: the case of Greece

This paper attempts to weigh into the debate on whether and if so, to what extent the policy response to the pandemic of the EU, most notably among others, the Recovery and Resilience Fund of the Next Generation EU, its conditionality, and the response of the ECB, marks a qualitative change rather than echoing the legacies of the previous crisis by looking into the case of Greece. According to the third-generation comparative capitalism literature, EU economic integration has been favouring export-led growth models over domestic-demand led ones through several channels, which included fiscal rules, financial support conditionality and monetary policy. During the pandemic, there have been apparent shifts in some of these channels. Greece has entered the pandemic with vulnerabilities from previous economic adjustment programmes it had to follow, large enough to warrant ‘enhanced surveillance’ by the European Commission, as well as challenging fiscal conditionality to secure some preferential treatment by its Eurozone partners/lenders of its public debt, to improve its fragile sustainability. This article assesses the risks that the Greek Recovery and Resilience Plan may face, given the economic, social and political legacies of and the lingering conditionality from the previous crisis. It thus illustrates how the implementation of the EU response to the pandemic in Greece is constrained by the legacy of the previous crisis despite shifts in policy channels through which the EU economic integration has been shaping national capitalisms.