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Corruption Discourses & Practices as an Instrument for Dismantling the State in Contemporary Greece

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Vortragende: Rania Astrinaki, Panteion University, Athens

Received ideas of corruption consider it as a dysfunction of the modern state and/or discuss it in terms of legality/illegality and morality/immorality of social-political actors, or even incomplete statehood. However, recent approaches to both state and corruption have complicated these ideas. It is in line with these approaches that I will discuss corruption in contemporary Greece. I will attempt to show that corruption has constituted a mode of governance in Greece since the late 80’s. Although by far unequally practiced between the ruling political classes and the ruled, corruption has been peculiarly ‘democratised’, at least at a phanticised level, and has been widely accepted, tying thus rulers and large segments of the ruled in a tacit pact of mutual benefits. This pact largely delegitimised the social state, the public institutions and, more generally, the idea of the public good; it paved the way for large-scale opaque privatisations to the benefit of a private sector feeding on public assets; yet it also established a conception of the state as a plunder among large segments of the citizenry. When the debt-crisis erupted in 2009, and the violent neoliberal ‘restructuring’ of the state was promoted as the ‘remedy’, allegations of corruption were mobilised, in order to legitimize this ‘restructuring’. State-corruption was strategically instrumentalised by the same political classes that had established it, in order to manufacture consent, compliance or at least indifference towards the dramatic dismantling of the already delegitimised social state and public goods, which were the real targets of this ‘restructuring’. And this was achieved by forceful, highly moralising discourses that did not target public institutions so much as people working in the public sector, holding them responsible for the ‘crisis’ and turning those working in the private sector against them.

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