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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.

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.

This chapter theorises the Internet in Greece by placing it at the centre of Greek media offering a political economy which recasts it in a culturalist fashion. To achieve this, it critically addresses the country's alleged lag in cyberspace and asks why the Internet's hegemonic role in the advance of neoliberal policies and technoliberalism worldwide was never performed in Greece. It places the countrywide disdain for the technoliberal subject at the core of understanding of why the web mediations where so neatly denied over three decades across industry, policy and research. It centres around Internet remediations to argue that the Internet in Greece has been conceptualised as a nonmedia through the idea of lagging behind, essentially a construct veiling neoliberalism at work. It situates the advent of the web in Greece's media boom to argue that media power, as articulated in Greece, necessarily excluded the web, fetishising terrestrial broadcasting on the way to the neoliberal dismantling of culture, the media and everyday life, way before the Troika.

In the last two decades, the region of Southeast Europe, Republic of Macedonian included, has been marked by a politics based on the pronounced primacy of the issue of national identity over other socio-political questions. National identity as an issue per se entails material, cultural and academic processes aiming at the construction and fixing of an idea and a sense of a collective. Ample evidence in terms of material culture (the architectural project Skopje 2014) and recorded public discourse supports the claim that the question of national identity determines the course of politics, nationally and internationally.

The main focus of this chapter is to examine the different discourses regarding national identity, and the multicultural and cultural policies, formulated against the backdrop of the conditions set by the EU. Through a discursive analysis of some of the speeches and texts of Macedonian and Albanian political officials, this chapter will trace the various (re)constructions of national identity vis-à-vis Europe and Macedonia’s aspirations for European Union (EU) accession. Additionally, Macedonia’s complicated interethnic relations are analysed through the country’s struggle with the name dispute with Greece and, through what is seen as a lack of loyalty from the Albanian political parties and citizens, which push for the change of the name for a faster EU accession. This further complicates the picture of the Macedonian EU integration and creates a triangulation of discourses: one stemming from the EU requirements, and two more, stemming from the two major ethnic groups and political parties in Macedonia, namely the Macedonian and the Albanian.

Greece's slow recovery from the severe economic depression caused by the great global financial and economic crisis that erupted in late 2000s was interrupted by the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on economic activity. This chapter looks into the factors shaping Greece's competitive position and discusses the potential to achieve a V-shaped recovery at the end of the pandemic.

This chapter explains how SYRIZA managed to build international support up to the January 2015 election with very limited resources, and against mainstream coverage, by relying essentially on grassroots movements and social media. It also shows how, approaching to power, SYRIZA's political, but also communication strategy, became more institutionalised and relied less on grassroots campaigning. Methodologically, our research is based on the following research techniques: First, interviews with activists and members of the party as well as observations inside its social media team. Second, the study of online content and data from 2006 to 2015. Overall, this chapter shows that SYRIZA's campaign on the Internet relied mainly on alternative media activists who acquired a specific savoir faire and developed international networks during the intense antiausterity social movement that took place in Greece between 2010 and 2013. The campaign was also supported by young experts from the private sector that contributed on a voluntary basis. Nevertheless, its success was mainly due to the European political context and the opportunities it offered to the radical Left, rather than the communication strategy, which in any case suffered from a lack of means and from a somewhat chaotic (non) organisation.