C. Iordanoglou & M. Matsaganis

ABSTRACT - Grexit was narrowly averted in summer 2015. Nevertheless, the view that Greece might be better off outside the Euro area has never really gone away. Moreover, although Marine Le Pen’s bid for the French presidency was frustrated in May 2017, in Italy a disparate coalition, encompassing Beppe Grillo’s Movimento Cinque Stelle as well as Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord, has called for a referendum on exiting the Euro. In this context, our argument that Grexit cannot save Greece may be of some relevance to national debates elsewhere in Europe. The paper examines the case for Grexit by offering a detailed account of its likely effects. Its structure is as follows. Section 2 analyses the transition, with the two currencies (old and new) coexisting. Section 3 charts the challenges facing the Greek economy in the short term, after the new national currency has become legal tender. Section 4 assesses prospects in the medium term, with Grexit complete and the new currency drastically devalued. Section 5 reviews the underlying weaknesses of Greece’s growth regime and explains why these are unrelated to the nominal exchange rate. Section 6 discusses the conditions for an investment-led recovery, and shows why tackling them would be more difficult outside the Euro area. Section 7 sums up and concludes.

Between September and November 2016 the REScEU project conducted a cross-country public opinion survey in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The main purpose of the REScEU Mass Survey is to observe EU citizens’ positioning on four lines of conflict around which the politics of social Europe is mostly structured. These lines of tension deal with the ultimate EU mission, the principle of interstate solidarity in the EU, the free movement within the EU and the divide between integration and autonomy.

Furthermore, the REScEU Mass Survey investigates the respondents’ propensity to voice their aversion towards certain EU political decisions and their opinion on the role of the EU during the crisis as well as its future. Considering the outcome of the “Brexit” referendum of 23 June 2016, the questionnaire administered to British respondents mainly focused on their attitudes towards the referendum and potential post-Brexit scenarios.

Read the main findings on the REScEU mass survey in the attached document

The REScEU project is looking for an University/Institution/Private company to subcontract the management of an élite survey and a mass survey, that falls withbin the scope of the project, in six European countries, i.e. France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United Kingdom. For the details of the surveys please consult the Document of Work you may find in the webpage dedicated to the "project". The content of the questionnaire will be provided by the REScEU team. With the results of the surveys, the REScEU team will produce reports and papers, maintaining the intellectual property of the results. The surveys must be conducted between September and December 2016.

ELITE SURVEY: The target groups for the elite survey are national MPs and former MPs in the six countries. A total of n=70 interviews need to be conducted in each country (total 420 interviews). The questionnaire's lenght is estimated in 20 minutes.

MASS SURVEY: The mass survey comprises 1,250 respondents per country (total 7,500 interviews) interviewed using a mixed-mode approach (CATI-CAWI). The questionnaire's lenght is estimated in 20 minutes.

Please send your request for offer by 8 July 2016 to Maurizio Ferrera at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. , stating that the cost estimation is for project REScEU, Reconciling Economic and Social Europe ERC grant n. 340534.

In your offer, please specify:

• whether the offer covers the mass survey, the élite survey, or both surveys.
• description of your services and of the personnel devoted to the REScEU surveys
• methodology for the mass survey
• methodology for the élite survey
• cost for the mass survey
• cost for the élite survey
• any other cost associated to the survey
• timeline of the work
• payment method

Please note that REScEU project is subject to VAT exemption.

For any doubts please write to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The latest EuVisions article by Giulia Bistagnino and Carlo Burelli, on the brexit issue is featured on Linkiesta

On 24 May Maurizio Ferrera gives a public lecture at The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. 

Since Italy’s entry into the ERM in 1978, the strategic goal of the country’s center-left elites has been to firmly anchor Italy’s unstable and weak political economy within “Europe.” Pursuing this goal has been a balancing act: molding an external constraint in Brussels to make it domestically “manageable”; forcing compliance at home through structural and institutional reform. Admission into the EMU with the first group of countries in 1998 was an emblematic sign of success: Italy was able to become a “pupil” of the top league of Europe. But it remained an (increasingly) bad pupil, especially under Berlusconi. When the crisis hit in 2008, Italy’s political economy quickly became a shambles again. The risk of being downgraded to a “program country” under Troika surveillance loomed on the horizon. As in the early 1990s, a technocratic government, led this time by Monti, adopted a harsh reform package and tied the country’s hands with a much stricter external constraint: the Fiscal Compact. In 2014, Italy exited the EU’s EDP and MIP procedures: back to the classroom. Under Letta and, more openly, under Renzi, Italy has also become more assertive, in an attempt to re-mold the external constraint in a more favorable direction. It remains to be seen whether the country’s political economy will be able to fully overcome the crisis and sustain the European political ambitions of the Renzi government.

Rotta di Collisione. Euro contro welfare? is the new book by Maurizio Ferrera.

ABSTRACT: The Europe of constraints and sanctions has exceeded the limit. We need new ideas to reconcile economic integration and the European social model. Is the EU weakening the social status of its member countries? Why is it so hard to bring together national solidarity and European economic integration? These questions spring from the decisions taken in recent years by the EU supranational authorities, which especially affect young people and the most vulnerable sections of the population. The reconciliation between welfare and Europe is no "mission impossible". However, it requires an ambitious intellectualand political effort. Maurizio Ferrera proposes concrete ideas to move in this direction and urges the national elites and the Brussels authorities to engage to strengthen the EU and improve its ability to ensure social protection and external security. That is the only way for the European project to produce widespread benefits and regain the lost legitimacy.

The REScEU team is delighted to introduce you to EuVisions, a new online observatory and

data collection project on social Europe that has recently been launched as part of

my ERC-funded project REScEU(Reconciling Economic and Social Europe).

We invite you to log into the EuVisions website, where you will be able to

read an already wide array of articles and briefings from our observatory, and have

a first look at the methodological setup of our data section, which will be phased

in during the next few months.

We also invite you to subscribe to the EuVisions newsletter, containing the

latest news and analyses in the area of social Europe, and to follow EuVisions on

its Facebook and Twitter pages.

Finally, if you wish to be updated on the progresses of REScEU, you can subscribe to

the RSS feeds you find on this website. 

Curious about how social Europe is perceived in the media? The EUvisions observatory is the place to look!

A new section is available on the website. It is called Ideas Monitor, and it presents regular overviews of the public intellectual debate on social Europe, as it emerges from traditional media outlets, such as newspapers and magazines, as well as online publications and the wider blogosphere.  

More new sections will soon be available on the EUvisions observatory, stay tuned!

J. Hien, ABSTRACT - There has been much talk about ordoliberalism recently. Scholars and the press identify it as the dominant economic instruction sheet for Germany’s European crisis politics. However, by analyzing ordoliberalism only as an economic theory, the debate downplays that ordoliberalism is also an ethical theory, with strong roots in protestant social thought. It is this rooting in protestant social thought that makes ordoliberalism so incompatible with the socio economic ethics of most of the European crisis countries, because their ethics originate in catholic and orthodox social thought. This paper argues that it is the divergence and incompatibility of ordoliberal and southern European social ethics is what makes the European rescue policies so conflictual, and will ultimately render them redundant.

M. Ferrera,

ABSTRACT - The nation-based welfare state (NBWS) and the European Union (EU) are two precious legacies of the XX century. Their mutual relationship is however fraught by unresolved tensions (and a potential “clash”), which the recent crisis has been markedly exacerbating. When, how and why did the original “elective affinity” between the WS and the EU spheres start to weaken? Is “reconciliation” possible and how? These questions lie at the centre of current academic and public debates. The WS serves essential economic, social and political functions. But the financing of its programmes strains public budgets and raises sustainability challenges, especially in the wake of growing demographic ageing. The EU (EMU in particular) is in its turn is essential for growth, jobs and macro-economic stability, but tends to undermine the WS’s very institutional foundation: the sovereign right of the state to determine the boundaries, forms and extent of national solidarity. The aim of this paper is to cast new light on such issues by focussing on the intellectual and political logics which have guided WS-building, on the one hand, and EU-building, on the other, and by highlighting the responsibility of these two logics in generating the clash. Drawing on Weber’s insights on the relationship between values, ideas, and politics, the building blocks of a new analytical framework will be briefly sketched, aimed at reconnecting these three elements in the explanation of the current predicament.

The paper is organised as follows. The next section presents the topic and summarizes the state of the art of the debate. I will then revisit some key Weberian concepts and theoretical propositions which promise to cast new light on the “clash” problem, moving beyond contemporary neo-institutional approaches. In the subsequent two sections, first the intellectual and then the political logics which have guided the development of the welfare state at the national level and the process of supranational economic integration will be illustrated, with brief historical surveys. The fourth section will offer a re-interpretation of the euro crisis in neo-Weberian terms and will hint at some possible ways out. The conclusion wraps up.