[Peace] Thu 2/24 5:30: "Greece in Crisis / The New Sick Man of Europe?"

[Stuart Levy]

A talk by Iason Athanasiadis: Internationally Acclaimed Writer, Photographer & TV Producer
Thursday Feb. 24th, 5:30pm - 8:30pm
Lucy Ellis Lounge, Foreign Languages Building, 707 S. Mathews, U.

The talk charts Greece’s decline and offers suggestions of where the country
might go next, both economically & politically. It ties in with the rise of
Turkey across the Aegean and strikes a contrast between two very different
economies: a moribund Greece stripped of most economic production and an
industrial Turkey exporting high tech goods and cultural values.

Sponsored by:
European Union Center*
Hellenic Students Association
Program in Modern Greek Studies
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

(Mr. Athanasiadis was also in Egypt during its recent revolution.)

More here, in a similar talk he gave at Harvard:
    http://www.hks.harvard.edu/kokkalis/events_pages/2011_athanasiadis.html

    The title formerly held by the Ottoman Empire can now be claimed by one of its
    former provinces. Even as the Turkish Republic, the inheritor of the Ottoman
    Empire, boasts 8 percent annual economic growth, the former Ottoman province
    across the Aegean is suffering a stunning collapse.

    Greece’s malaise was long fuelled by a sclerotic patriarchy that kept down a
    better-educated younger generation (dubbed the 700 euro generation after the
    low monthly salary a university graduate could expect to earn) and rioted for a
    week on the streets of Athens in December 2008.

    But since the scale of Greece’s fiscal deception was revealed and loans from
    the international markets dried up, Greece has been shaken by social crises,
    the simultaneous acceleration of the activities of xenophobic and anarchist
    groups, and a wave of economic migrants heading for the exits.

    [...]