Introduction: Identifying Greece

Identifying ‘Greece’ has often challenged scholars from different disciplines. Modern Greece has been equated with Europe’s south, the Balkans, or the Near East, whilst the weight of its historical inheritance has more generally placed it at the very core of understandings of what constitutes ‘Europe’ or, indeed, the ‘West’. It has been a case to define the divisions of the Cold War and, latterly, the vulnerabilities of the ‘eurozone’. Defining it from within or from without has elicited contestation. So, how might Greece be identified in the present? To introduce the volume, this chapter adopts a broad, comparative perspective. Firstly, it briefly outlines why Greece is of a wider interest to scholars, highlighting aspects of its history where it has appeared of larger significance than its size might normally warrant. Secondly, it proceeds to identify Greece’s development along a set of dimensions that serve to place it within comparative frames, addressing the question, ‘What type of case is Greece?’. To draw these different aspects together, the third section attempts to identify ‘imbalances’ within the Greek system that give it its distinctive character and to sketch how these aspects are, in fact, interlinked. Their complementarities sustain a set of constraints that structure the system’s developmental path. The latter has been of continuing international interest: its capacity to reform and to exit the recent debt crisis has been the subject of much debate. The Conclusion reflects on this comparative perspective for future research on Greece.