Dimitrios' World

When the angry twenty-four-year-old who tells me that the Social Contract between the state and its citizens is broken, is my son, I take notice and listen. Alejandro is an angry young man representative of many of his generation. He is well educated and travelled, he speaks many foreign languages yet insecurity pervades as to what the world has in store for him and his generation as job security becomes more scarce, as stable political systems try to reinvent themselves to cope with growing governance issues, and as mass protests have become the norm across Europe. He also represents the epitome of European integration and its emphasis on diversity. On the other hand, with a Greek father and a Spanish mother, his two countries have been among the most severely hit by the decade-long economic crisis with the highest rates of youth unemployment in the EU, standing at nearly 40% in Greece and 33% in Spain as per July 2018. The ongoing “yellow vests” protests in France are...

With his State of the European Union speech today at the European Parliament, Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the European Commission, has sought to remind us all of the indispensable role of the European Commission as the unifier and pacifier of the European project. It was a remarkable speech that was quite visionary in some of the proposals that Juncker made.  He sought simultaneously to put the accent on the European construct by stating his intention to defend his office and be part of the triumvirate together with Merkel and Macron that will lead to process of transformation (in other words, he sends the message that Merkel and Macron cannot and should not lead alone). His “all together” approach is bound to win him friends among the small and very small states that comprise the the bulk of the Union's member states that are concerned by the multispeed preferences of some of the bigger states. He also reminds small states that the attempts by some of them to disr...

With the start of the new round of talks in Crans Montana on 28 June regarding the future of Cyprus, all the bets are on as to whether these will lead to a deal or be another part in a long process of reconciliation but not enough to cross the finish line. Although the momentum that was evident at the beginning of the year has significantly stalled, the United Nations through its good offices has managed to get the leaders of the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities, the representatives of the three guarantor powers – Greece, Turkey, and the United Kingdom, and the representative of the interested party – the European Union, to return to the negotiating table. The stakes are a historic deal in the making and the implications of a non-deal should the talks fail to yield positive results with the chances evenly divided for either outcome to prevail.   The optimistic scenario stems from the fact that the leaders of the two communities – Nicos Anastasiades and Mustafa Aki...

We live in an interesting world at an interesting time in history where universal access to information makes for complex deciphering of its trends and challenges. We live in a world where a country like Greece which accounts for 0,15% of the world’s population (ranked 78 th ) and 0,30% of the world’s GDP can still grab the world’s attention because of internal political and economic dynamics. Being part of the European Union, the world’s largest economy, and a member of the Eurozone, with the Euro being the world’s second most powerful currency, explains this discrepancy between the relative power of a Greece on its own and that of Greece as a midsize and longstanding member of the European Union. As a result, the current electoral campaign which will culminate on Sunday, 25 January has all the makings of making or breaking the country’s global standing with the almost certain victory of SYRIZA, the anti-establishment radical left party. On its own, a victory of the left would r...