Post-war Greco-German Relations, 1953–1981: Economic Development, Business Interests and European Integration

This book explores the post-war Greco-German relationship and asks how this relationship fits into, and changes, the narrative of European integration. The book highlights West Germany’s role in shaping Greece’s development model and argues that Greece's accession to the Community in 1981 had a long back story in the modernization strategies adopted by the two countries as early as the 1950s. The success, not the failure, of those strategies lies at the root of Greece's lingering balance of payments problems: the ever-widening trade deficit with Germany, the country’s main trading partner, was the price of Greek economic growth in the decades following the war. By addressing this three-decade story of uneasy continuity, the book offers new insights into core-periphery relations in Europe, questions the conventional wisdom about Greece’s path to Europe, and challenges the way the so-called North-South divide has been adduced to explain the recent euro crisis. In doing so, the authorcalls attention to past cooperation between leading political and business circles in Greece and Germany, making this a useful and insightful read for historians and political scientists alike.

Christos Tsakas is a historian and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the EUI. He has previously held fellowships in Berlin, Florence, Princeton, Harvard, and Athens.