At the Eye of the Cyclone: The Greek Crisis in Global Media

Abstract

Using discourse analysis, this chapter offers an in-depth investigation of the discourse on the Greek economic crisis in important European and international newspapers. The aim of the chapter is to analyse the manner in which the public discourse of different countries and global regions attended to the Greek economic crisis, and to assess the impact that this had on how Greece is viewed ‘from the outside’. The findings point to the generation and consolidation of very negative attitudes towards Greece. During the 14-month period of examination, Greece evolved from an ‘object of critique’ to a ‘negative reference point’. In some sense, Greece has been (re)constructed in the international press as the (corrupted) other of the (rational) western society.

This chapter draws from a large research project that was conducted by the Athens Centre for International Political Economy at the Institute of International Relations in Athens. The complete results are available in Greek at the following electronic address: http://www.idis.gr/acipe/#5. The author would like to thank all the trainee researchers involved in the project. Thanks are also due to the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex and the Hellenic Observatory at the London School of Economics for their valuable research support.