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The purpose of this paper is to present a methodology to reveal complex events structures in events’ occurrences by analyzing event databases, targeting to systematizing events’ analysis and surpassing the need for idiographic approaches.

A process-oriented point of view is enabled by purposeful data transformations, and higher-order dependencies are discovered and exploited to capture the flows among the events.

Political events do not follow a linear movement that is implied by a sequence, but they occur in varying patterns that cannot be reflected accurately when assuming only first-order dependencies.

The methodology suggests a novel way to look and to analyze raw event data and it offers an accessible, practicable and supplementary tool as it does not disturb any of the established relevant research designs, and it does not require any additional data to be applied.

For Leftists engaged in the study of political economy during the 1960s and 1970s, Cuba and China held particular promise as postrevolutionary states working to construct systems of production and distribution which were predicated on solidarity and mutuality, rather than on the exploited and alienated labor upon which capitalism depended. Against the claim that the desire for individual material gain was irreducibly a part of the human experience, China and Cuba offered the possibility of – in the parlance of the time – a “new man”: a political subject whose motivations were in alignment with a socialist economy rather than a capitalist one.

Based on research in multiple archives, this paper explores efforts on the part of radical economists in the United States – including the Marxists at Monthly Review, the young academics who founded the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE), and a handful of older Left-Keynesians – to witness Third World experiments in nonmaterial incentives firsthand. What have often been dismissed as pseudo-religious “pilgrimages” were, in reality, voyages of discovery, where radicals searched for the keys to develop a sustainable, rational, and moral political economy.

While many of the answers that radicals found in Cuba and China were ultimately unsatisfying, Third-World experiments in moral incentives serve as a powerful example of “solidarity in circulation” during the “long 1960s,” and as an important reminder that attempts to keep social science research free of political contamination serve to reify disciplinary norms which are themselves the product of the political culture in which they were formed.

The purpose of this study is to examine the odious debt concept in Greece. In Greece, the odious debt concept received high attention during recent financial crisis and Greek or Hellenic Parliament decided to establish a Special Committee.

The Greek Parliament Truth Committee on Public Debt investigated the public debt in Greece, and the main findings are: increase of debt was related to the growth in interest payments, high public spending in defence expenditures associated with corruption scandals, falsification of public deficit and debt statistical data and illicit capital outflows and adopting the euro led to a drastic increase in private debt.

Based on above the third Memoranda of Understanding (MoU) and the August 2015 loan agreement, according to Greek Parliament Truth Committee on Public Debt are illegal, illegitimate and odious because they fail to recognize the odious character of Greece’s existing debt, and the nature of the instruments by which this debt was financed from 2010 until early 2015. The Third MoU and the August 2015 loan agreement violate the fundamental human rights of the Greek people (both civil and political as well as socio-economic rights) as set out in the Greek Constitution and under international law (treaty-based and customary).

On the other side of results, Greece was a democratic regime during the time it contracted the vast majority of its loans and membership into the Eurozone, which benefitted country by gaining the highly low interest rates that euro currency involved. Also, substantial borrowing for Greece spent directly on the people via social welfare and public sector wages and infrastructure development.

Therefore, Greece, instead of the odious debt doctrine, should resort to other debt solutions such as simple debt repayment, restructuring or “haircut” of the debt (principal and interest) or declare bankruptcy without invoking the odious debt doctrine. Although this recourse avoids the dangerous precedent-setting risks of the odious debt doctrine, it also involves numerous other complexities and policy problems because with default, the banking system would collapse.

It is the first study examining the topic of odious public debt in Greece.

EU membership has been for the greater part of the post-authoritarian period (1974–2010) an important element of the Greek national consensus. Europe was commonly associated in public discourse with geopolitical security, democratic institutions and economic prosperity. Moreover, accession to the European Monetary Union in 2001 was celebrated as proof of a successful national course and as promise for economic growth. Nevertheless, challenges to pro-Europeanism both from the left and from the extreme right have risen in the context of the economic crisis (2010–2015). While Euro-sceptical attitudes are still a minority within Greek society – but significantly increased in relation to past trends – the discursive negotiation of Europe in the Greek public debate is characterized by ambiguity and has acquired various negative connotations (e.g. austerity policies, authoritarianism, German hegemony, democratic deficit in decision-making). In the highly-polarized Greek political debate, a new cleavage has emerged based on the acceptance or rejection of the loan agreements and the austerity policies associated with them (the so-called pro- vs. anti-memorandum cleavage) which have also transformed traditional Left vs. Right cleavage thus allowing for political alliances between left-ward and right-ward parties. It remains to be seen whether the new cleavage will take the form of a clash between pro-Europeanists vs. Euroscepticists as it is often argued in the context of Grexit scenarios. While this new dichotomy can be misleading especially if it is unambiguously interpreted in cultural terms, it describes a newly formed social and political tension that is under process. A special chapter in this respect is the currency debate; the dilemma between the euro and the drachma represents distinct ideological paradigms and power structures. The present chapter explores the discursive negotiation of Europe in the context of the Greek public debate analysing discourses produced both by political elites and mass media with special focus on the 2015 referendum campaign and the implications of the July 2015 Greece-EU agreement.