Maria Kontos und Evangelia Tastsoglou | The Breakdown of Normality and the Negotiation of Exit: Greece after 2010

Maria Kontos, Evangelia Tastsoglou
The Breakdown of Normality and the Negotiation of Exit: Greece after 2010
IfS Working Paper #10

The starting point of this paper is that the profound economic and social crisis in Greece has lead to a »breakdown of normality«. The aim of the paper is to analyse the impact of this crisis on subjectivation processes of the Greek middle classes. Analysing the contributions of readers to an online forum following a commentary on social unrest in an online daily Greek newspaper, we reconstruct some lay theories about the crisis, the negotiation of coping strategies along the concepts of »exit and voice« as well as the transformation processes in self-understanding and identity.
Considering the online forum as a virtual »group discussion«, we utilize for the analysis the interpretative method developed in this field. The key topics in the forum commen-tary are: the crisis of the clientelistic state as the main context of the upcoming social violence, emigration as a favoured exit strategy accompanied by the negotiation of legitimacy, the construction of the crisis as a civil war, and the revival of self hate within the framework of an attempt to explain the crisis as an outcome of domestic structures and mentalities, ignoring its European and global dimensions.