Crisis and democracy – the democracy in crisis: social anthropological perspectives on the fragility of the social contract

摘要

A number of authors and commentators on the Greek crisis have pointed out that the Greek financial predicament is a byproduct of a deep and chronic political crisis. I propose that we view this political crisis as a crisis of the Social Contract, which generated multiple spheres of economic, civil and civic exclusion, engendering specific public concerns with sovereignty, democracy and asymmetrical relations of power (cf. Thodossopoulos 2014; Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2010). An anthropological approach to the analysis of crisis and democracy in Greece allows us to document local patterns of accountability, historical and political causality and to analyze them in context. The power of indigenous etiology – how people make sense of political affairs – provides us with unique insights into their preferred avenues of claiming and exercising political agency and participation. The qualitative characteristics of Greek politics and governance – especially after 1974 – have been discussed in the literature under the inclusive terms ‘clientelism’, ‘populism’, ‘corruption’, ‘statism’, and they have been deemed responsible for the inefficiency of the Greek state, the lack of competitiveness of the country as a whole, and ultimately for the lack of fiscal discipline that led to the present financial meltdown.