Costis Hadjimichalis

Uneven geographical development and socio-spatial justice and solidarity: European regions after the 2009 financial crisis

The paper discusses certain issues of regional development theory in combination with long-forgotten conditions of uneven geographical development in the context of the current financial and debt crisis in the eurozone. The dominant explanations of the crisis are mainly macroeconomic and financial but this paper argues for its geographical components/foundations. After a short descriptive comment about the current debt crisis in the eurozone and particularly in Southern Europe as part of the wider global crisis of over-accumulation, an alternative interpretation is provided based on uneven geographical/regional development among Euro-regions, especially since the introduction of the euro. The paper also discusses the shift towards what we may call the neoliberal urban and regional development discourse, which is responsible for a de-politicized shift in regional theory and hence downplaying or simply overlooking questions of socio-spatial justice. The discussion about justice and solidarity goes beyond the controversial rescue plan introduced by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, which was supposedly designed to help one of the so-called – in a typical colonial way – PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain), namely Greece.

Contemporary Crisis Across Europe and the Crisis of Regional Development Theories

Hadjimichalis C. and Hudson R. Contemporary crisis across Europe and the crisis of regional development theories, Regional Studies. This paper explores the prima facie puzzling issue of why so much contemporary theory in economic geography and regional planning – specifically New Economic Geography (NEG) and New Regionalism (NR) – has so little to say about the causes of the current post-2007 crisis and its geography globally and in Europe. It is argued here that this reflects its obsession with the regional ‘success stories’ of the 1970s and 1980s, its failure to appreciate the onset of crisis and the reasons for it in these regions in the 1990s, and its failure to appreciate the nature of capitalism as a crisis prone social system of combined and uneven development. Thus, the current economic crisis pushed dominant regional development theories into a homologous deep theoretical crisis. It is concluded that the time is ripe for a paradigm shift in theory and that this should involve a reconsideration of earlier theoretical approaches that fell out of fashion for a variety of intellectual and political reasons and of current radical social movements.

Rethinking Local and Regional Development: Implications for Radical Political Practice in Europe

This article focuses upon the practicalities of what people actually do and can do in the present era of neo-liberal globalization to build more progressive local and regional development strategies in Europe. To do so, we introduce three examples ofalternative local and regional development activities in Europe: (a) social economy projects to tackle problems of localized social inequalities and local development; (b) public sector procurement and related intiatives to create healthier diets; and (c) participatory municipal budgets as a means to make radical participatory democracy a practical proposition. We discuss the issues that arise from them in terms of a radical local and regional development strategy and how they help to re-formulate our theoretical agendas and research practice. Unlike many uncritical studies of `successful places that then seek mechanistically to transplant the bases of `success as `off the shelf blueprints to be applied in and to other places we instead see these examples as providing an alternative framework for thinking about local and regional development that adapts more general principles (such as those of equity, accountability and democracy) to the specifics and local and regioanl circumstances.

The Changing Geography of Europe: A Balkan and Southern European View

Three key issues are identified describing the changing geography of Europe from a Balkan and Southern European perspective: (a) international migration flows are directed these days mainly towards Southern Europe and are becoming major geopolitical and cultural themes; (b) uneven sociospatial development remains a major problem in the area, attracting, however, less attention from national governments and the European Commission; (c) military interventions are being used again in the Balkans as a policy option with wider negative effects on the European integration project.

Kosovo, 82 Days of an Undeclared and Unjust War: A Geopolitical Comment

This is an angry and scared comment on the undeclared war in Yugoslavia and its geopolitics, written shortly after its end. Ray Hudson, during his short visit to Athens at the beginning of May 1999, encouraged me to write it, as many of the issues discussed below seem to remain unknown or undiscussed among radical geographers and planners in the West. It is also an invitation for debate, as I still have many unanswered questions. So, what is behind this war? I have some thoughts which I will elaborate below. Before doing this, however, let me position myself. You may blame me because I don’t have a ‘neutral’ and ‘distanced’ position. I can’t, and I have three good reasons for this. First, I was ‘physically’ very close to this war, as I was in Bosnia a few years ago. Pristina and Belgrade are only a few hours from Thessaloniki and I have many friends there. Northern Greece (particularly Makedonia and Thraki) has already suffered war damage to its economy (a decrease of 0.5% in GNP, all routes to central Europe closed and destroyed) and its environment (pollution spread from bombed chemical factories plus unknown effects from ‘soft’ nuclear bombs; see Figure 1). Now that the war is over, the USA still does not provide information about the number and location of soft uranium bombs deployed over the territories of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) and neighbouring regions of Bulgaria. Soft uranium will have catastrophic effects on the Balkan people and the environment for years to come and remains an important reason for the delay to ground operations (to avoid the ‘Gulf syndrome’ cancers affecting thousands of US and British soldiers). KFOR personnel in Kosovo still wear special clothes and masks in certain regions, while local people and returned refugees remain uninformed. Second, I am ‘culturally and politically’ very close, being part of both the troubled Eastern Mediterranean region and the troubled Balkan peninsula. People in the West, having begun to address their ethnic, religious and state-formation problems in the 17th and 18th centuries (with similar ethnic cleansing, we have to remember), know little about the ‘Eastern Question’, or the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries. The ‘Great Powers’ of the time (the same ones as today but without the USA) introduced the term ‘Balkanization’, the establishment of many, very small and weak nation-states, so that they could control them as protectorates. This is exactly what they do today in the former Yugoslavia. Third, I belong to the first generation of Greeks after the Greek Civil War (1945–9), and memories of foreign interventions (by the British and Americans) using all kind of ‘humanitarian’ and ‘ethical’ arguments are still very much alive, together with their victims. I therefore have difficulty in accepting the NATO arguments of today, because I have suffered from them during seven years of dictatorship in Greece (1967–74), of which NATO and the USA were the prime supporters. This does not mean, however, that I accept Milosevic’s ethnic cleansing policies, nor do I give ‘carte blanche’ to the Serbs, something quite difficult to argue these days, since NATO spokesmen and western media have equated all war critics with Milosevic supporters. I agree with Slvoj Zizeck (1999: 79), who argued: ‘what if one should reject this double blackmail – if you are against NATO strikes, you are for Milosevic’s proto-fascist regime and if you are against Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order?’

Book review symposium: Crisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe, Costis HadjimichalisHadjimichalisCostisCrisis Spaces: Structures, Struggles and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London: Routledge, 2018. xiii + 217 pp. ISBN: 9781138184503£105.00

This is quite a remarkable book, a product of years of careful and original research into the question of uneven and combined development in southern Europe (SE), informed by a sophisticated Marxian political economy perspective – one in which the influence of Antonio Gramsci and an emphasis on the cultural and political constitution and consequences of the capitalist economy is always prominent. Hadjimichalis combines a breadth and depth of evidence from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources drawn from across Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain with a rare political and theoretical sophistication, drawing on a deep knowledge of cross-disciplinary and multi-lingual literatures. I find it difficult to imagine anyone else being able to do this, and certainly not with the depth of scholarship and political insight that he reveals. The book is a rare achievement, one that should be widely read, both by academics interested in questions of uneven development and the future of Europe and by European Union (EU) politicians and policy-makers as they grapple with the task of finding a way forward out of post-austerity Europe and onto a socially more progressive development trajectory. As Hadjimichalis explains, there are good, sound reasons for focusing upon SE. Greece, Portugal and Spain all made the transition from dictatorships to democracy in the 1970s and became members of the European Community (EC, as it was then) in the 1980s. Italy was in a sense the ‘odd one out’ of the original six member states of the EC, although like its southern European neighbours it also had its own earlier history of profoundly uneven development and a transition from dictatorship to democracy. Furthermore, by the 1980s all four had broadly similar economic and social structures – certainly not identical and with differences among them but with enough commonality to distinguish them from the other member states of the EU. In addition, by 2009/2010 all four were in the grip of severe economic and financial crises. While these are issues on which he had been working for many years (for example, see Hadjimichalis, 1987), as Hadjimichalis explains the immediate stimulus for writing this book was an Book review symposium

Encounters with Ray Hudson: A very personal note

I have known Ray Hudson since 1980 and we have kept regular academic contact, going to conferences together, undertaking joint research and publishing, plus family visits and vacations in Athens, Thessaloniki, Copenhagen, Naxos, Syros, Mytilene and Durham. A fruitful friendship and scientific collaboration started at this period and extended in different directions based on our common belief that Marxist political economy is the best entry point to study economic and political geography and to analyze the complicated relationships between policies, institutions and local societies.

Book Review: R.K. Ray, A.T. Denzau and T.D.Willett (eds) NEOLIBERALISM: NATIONAL AND REGIONAL EXPERIMENTS WITH GLOBAL IDEAS Routledge, London, 2007, 346 pp., £75.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415700900

needs of the poor is mostly unfulfilled around the world, with the notable exception of Argentina. In the UK the New Labour Government expressed deep enthusiasm about LETS around 1998 but eventually failed to adopt it. North suggests that this is partially due to the fact that there is a notable discrepancy between the limited appeal of the scheme in practice and the large claims made about it in theory. This is the same reason that members in search of an alternative, green lifestyle fail to attract larger audiences. They successfully connect people with similar political beliefs, but they repel the poor and unemployed seeking a livelihood. In other words, they become stronger within while weaker outside. Again, it is a conclusion perhaps transferable to other alternative economic schemes.