ELIAMEP

This policy paper will argue that, after the collapse of the junta in 1974, civil-military relations in Greece primarily involved the consolidation of democratic rule. In that respect, Greece resembled many other countries which failed in their post-authoritarian phase to engage in second-generation reforms that would focus on improving the efficiency of their Armed Forces and their ability to fulfil the missions mandated by democratic rule. In the case of Greece, partisanship in officer promotions, the lack of a sophisticated civilian technocracy in the Ministry of National Defence, and insufficient oversight by Parliament and civil society, among other factors, have resulted in timid reforms of the nation’s Armed Forces. While the post-fiscal-crisis policy environment has catalysed positive changes in Greece’s civil-military relations, much still remains to be done before civil-military relations can be relied upon to meet the country’s significant national security challenges.

• This policy paper will evaluate Greece’s civil-military relations from the perspective of the transition to democratic rule subsequent to the collapse of the military junta fifty years ago.
• A comparative perspective will be adopted as, over the same fifty-year period, civil-military relations in many countries in Latin America, Central Europe and Asia evolved in a similar fashion to those of Greece.
• A closer examination of the Greek case will underline similarities as well as differences: the former in areas such as conscription and joint operations, the latter in areas including participation in high-risk multilateral military operations.
• Progress in civil-military relations in Greece will be noted, particularly in the post-fiscal-crisis period, in terms of civil society engagement with the issue of Armed Forces reform, the civilianisation of defence-related innovation, and the participation of the Greek Armed Forces in high-risk, high-return multilateral military operations.
• Policy recommendations will address those domains in civil-military relations where, as in other comparative country case studies, there has been no appreciable improvement.
• These domains are the quality of parliamentary oversight of national defence policy, the lack of a sophisticated civilian technocracy within the Greek Ministry of National Defence, and the absence of defence studies in Greece’s leading state universities.

Read here in pdf the Policy Paper by Antonis Kamaras, ELIAMEP Research Associate.

Introduction

This year, Greece celebrated the 50th anniversary of the collapse of the military junta and the restoration of democracy. Yet the voluminous reflections and analyses generated by the anniversary have paid scant attention to the junta’s failure in the one domain in which the military was supposedly superior to civilian leadership: the efficiency of the Greek Armed Forces. Significantly, this is also the domain that catalysed the junta’s fall via the military defeat inflicted on it in Cyprus by the invading Turkish Armed Forces[1]. In addition, no commentary has been offered on the state of civil-military relations over the following fifty years from the point of view of creating and sustaining effective Armed Forces.

Whether Greece’s fifty-year post-junta democratic regime has actually done a better job at preparing and evolving the nation’s Armed Forces for defending the country’s territorial integrity and sovereign rights is not a question that has been asked or answered by Greece’s academic community. Press reports on the 50th anniversary of the restoration of democratic rule have instead limited themselves by and large to the first months of democratic transition, and in particular to the deft way in which the first post-junta Prime Minister, Konstantinos Karamanlis, defanged the military so it would not threaten Greek democracy again. This lack of curiosity is even more remarkable considering that, over the last four years, Greece has been confronted by an increasingly assertive Turkey, which most knowledgeable international observers consider a card-carrying member of the aggressively revisionist powers seeking to overturn the western law-based international order. Likewise, past crises that have brought Greece to the brink of war with Turkey, revealing serious deficiencies in the preparation of the Greek Armed Forces, and most prominently the Imia islets crisis of 1996, have failed to elicit sustained scholarly scrutiny or to lead to a fundamental reordering of civil-military relations based on sound and sophisticated policy analysis.

This scholarly failure to examine Greece’s civil-military relations, and the outcomes it produces in terms of the common good of national defence, should be contextualised with reference both to theconditions preceding the Greek fiscal crisis and the post-crisis economic policy regime. Why Greece has topped the table within NATO and the EU in defence spending relative to its GDP, but failed to use that spending to catalyse a robust defence technological industrial base (DTIB), should have generated an informed public and policy discourse. This is so for two critically important reasons: first, a weak DTIB has undermined the efficiency of the Greek Armed Forces in terms of the cost-efficient maintenance of its weapon systems; and second, a weak DTIB has contributed to the Greek economy’s lack of international competitiveness, as it has neither created positive spillovers into the civilian economy or generated a noteworthy export performance.

Instead, the only subject that has been systematically written about and reflected on within Greece’s policy and intellectual elites is the now historical post-1974 consolidation of civilian supremacy over the country’s Armed Forces[2]. While this was clearly a momentous event, the literature on civil-military relations has long since established that while it is a necessary condition of healthy civil-military relations, the sufficient condition are those second-generation reforms that can best ensure that a democratic polity’s Armed Forces can execute their mission, as this is defined by its civilian masters, given the inevitable resource constraints. It is even more illuminating of this state of affairs that the only significant exception to this rule, the magisterial treatment of civil-military relations from the perspective of the Greek constitution by Greece’s leading constitutional scholar, Nikos Alivizatos, has been all but ignored by Greece’s civilian expert community on defence, such as it is[3]. And this, despite the analysis in this publication remaining highly relevant to many issues that are vital to the efficacy of the Greek Armed Forces, as we will note below.

Considering the above, this policy paper will seek to answer, albeit in a preliminary fashion, the question of what kind of civil-military relations Greece needs to enable its Armed Forces to fulfil their mission in the foreseeable future, in a new century that has already witnessed the return of a major interstate war of territorial conquest on the European continent, as well as the emergence of the European Union as a collective security provider.

In order to achieve this aim, the policy paper will proceed as follows:

The first section will provide a discussion, in summary form, of the international literature on second-generation reforms in civil-military relations—that is, reforms that seek to improve the effectiveness of the Armed Forces.

The second section will highlight constraints that have been identified in the implementation of second-generation reforms, as well as such other obstacles to effective civil-military relations as are pertinent to our investigation.

The third section will explore the junta’s legacy in post-junta democratic civil-military relations in Greece. It will do so by examining certain features of civil-military relations in the post-junta period and putting these features into a comparative context. As such, it will look at how civil-military relations in Greece have circumscribed jointness in the Greek Armed Forces, inhibited participation in the high-risk component of peacekeeping or stabilisation operations, and failed to render conscription effective.

The fourth section will utilise comparative lenses to illuminate the defining characteristics of civil-military relations that make the Greek case similar to, or distinct from, other comparator cases.

The fifth section will assess the ways in which Greece’s fiscal crisis catalysed certain changes in civil-military relations, inter alia invigorating civil society engagement in defence policy and increasing the need for technocratic management in all public policy domains including national defence.

The sixth section will examine the present government’s ‘Agenda 2030’ reforms and argue they represent a significant evolution in Greek civil-military relations, while also exploring how ‘Agenda 2030’’s declared objectives can be served by further progress in Greek civil-military relations.

The policy paper will conclude with three recommendations that emerge from the analysis.

Second-Generation Reforms: Ministries, Parliaments, Civil Societies

One pertinent strand in the literature on civil-military relations, for the Greek case, focuses on states that have transitioned from authoritarian rule, backed up or initiated by military force, to democratic rule[4]. This is so for two reasons. First, because a democratic transition entails a time lag between the need to impose civilian supremacy over the Armed Forces and the need to ensure that civil-military relations are such that they can produce effective Armed Forces capable of fulfilling their democratically determined mission, whatever this may be. Second, because there are features that characterise this transition from authoritarian to democratic rule that go on to shape and/or hinder the effort to configure civil-military relations optimally, given the resource constraints in place, to produce the Armed Forces the democratic polity determines that it needs. Arguing for the need for a more expansive treatment of civil-military relations as a means of evaluating the degree of democratic control over an Armed Forces, it has been noted that: “Most of the literature before the third wave of democratisation implicitly defined civilian control as the absence of military coups and military rule…Yet such a view is flawed as it reduces the complexity of civil-military relations to a single partial aspect, establishing the most extreme form of military intervention as a bench mark for whether civilian control exists or not”[5].

Taxonomically, the comparator peer group of Greek civil-military relations includes the democratising polities of Southern Europe in the 1970s (Portugal and Spain), Latin American states (such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile) in the 1980s and 1990s, East Asian states (such as Korea and Taiwan) in the 1990s and 2000s, and Central Eastern European states in the 1990s. Importantly, the South and Central Eastern European democratic transitions have democratic lock-in in common with Greece, due to their joint EU and NATO membership and receding fears that authoritarianism led or supported by military force may yet return. This lock-in warrants deeper reflection on why second-generation reforms in these countries has stalled decades after their democratic transition had been securely anchored.

Another discussion in the literature on civil-military relations which is relevant to Greece focuses on the growing involvement of parliaments in the articulation and execution of defence policy, primarily in Europe, due to the rise of expeditionary peacekeeping operations after the collapse of the Berlin Wall[6]. This development, enabled by US supremacy and US allies’ need to maintain a measure of influence with the sole remaining superpower, resulted in an expansion of the notion of defence and security beyond national territorial defence to engaging in casualty-inducing wars of choice, thus engendering the need for parliamentary debate and approval. While this discussion mostly involves the parliaments of countries which have been historically consolidated democracies since at least the end of World War II (e.g. Germany), and in many cases long before it (e.g. the UK), the analytical perspectives it has generated pose illuminating questions for the cohort of more recently democratised countries such as Greece.

As we seek to shift the debate from the supremacy of civilian rule over the Armed Forces of a democratic polity to whether such a polity can attain the Armed Forces it needs, our starting point is the assumption that defence is a public good for whose effectiveness the civilian leadership, and the democratic polity at large, is ultimately responsible. Given this assumption, there are three key interacting domains in which civil-military relations need to be regrounded if the democratic polity is to attain the Armed Forces it needs: Ministries of Defence, Parliaments, which we mentioned above, and civil societies.

Ministries of Defence are meant to institutionalise civilian leadership of the Armed Forces[7]. Specifically: “The Purpose of the defence ministry if to prepare the Armed Forces to serve the policy goals of government and act as a buffer zone between [the civilian executive] and the service branches. Should active or retired military officers occupy too many top positions within the defence sector, they may exhibit divided loyalties, exert undue influence, dominate defence and security policy-making, and crowd out alternative viewpoints”[8]. For a Ministry of Defence (MoD) to fulfil this role, it needs to secure a critical mass of civilian personnel with the requisite expertise, domain responsibility and authority. Only thus can the civilian leadership of a MoD meaningfully curtail if not totally eliminate the information asymmetry, which the leadership of the Armed Forces enjoys due to its military expertise, and thus make informed decisions with regard to the full range of MoD responsibilities, from weapons procurement to training and from operations to jointness and so forth.

As to why the civilian leadership of the MoD cannot simply rely on the advice of the military leadership it selects and supervises, there are a variety of critical reasons, including:

1. a) The Armed Forces themselves are not monolithic, with each of the main service branches (Army, Air Force, Navy) having its own strong views and preferences. Thus, a civilian leadership kept suitably informed by a civilian technocracy which is not vested in any one Service Branch is indispensable for adjudicating between contesting Service Branch priorities and representing the overarching interest in establishing effective joint operations that straddle all three branches. For adjudication of this sort is core to the mission of an adequately civilianised MoD[9]. Just to be clear, the literature on civilian technocracies’ role does not suggest that civilian technocrats will lay down the law to Armed Forces leaderships, but rather that they will confer on the future directions to be taken with an Armed Forces’ leadership, or even support the more reform-minded leaders of an officer corps when no consensus exists on the way forward within that corps.
2. b) The Armed Forces, representing as it does a sizeable chunk of the state’s payroll, is a powerful interest group[10]. Consequently, the civilian leadership of the MoD needs the technocratic support of civilian experts to take the decisions that serve the cause of creating effective Armed Forces, even if these decisions hurt the corporate interests of the Officer Corps.
3. c) Armed Forces operations are profoundly political, so the civilian leadership needs to rely on expert civilian advice and support to ensure that operations can serve the political ends they are meant to. This is not to say, however, that high-ranking officers should have no awareness of, or provide input to, the civilian leadership on the political implications of the military operations they are charged with designing and executing.

On the basis of this brief outline, MoDs which are effectively civilianised demonstrate certain features: First and foremost, civilian staff are not restricted to such supporting functions as legal affairs, financial management and personnel affairs. Rather they occupy leadership positions, backed up by formal authority, in such front-line domains as defence planning and defence strategy, officer education and weapons procurement. Civilian staff in civilianised MoDs possess expertise in defence matters, and even when they do not enjoy knowledge parity with the military officers they interact with, they are sufficiently knowledgeable to support the civilian leadership’s ability to set and implement defence policy[11]. Again, nobody suggests that a dysfunctional and ultimately unsustainable ‘us versus them’ relationship is being established. Rather, a diversity of perspectives is institutionalised through such civilian staff, in addition to which an MoD’s civilian leadership can access expertise that will allow them to agree or disagree with the military leadership with a good understanding of the available policy choices.

As with any other executive function, the quality of the parliamentary accountability to which an MoD is subject is an important issue[12]. First and foremost, parliaments can debate defence policy and Armed Forces operations[13]. Parliaments pass the budget that determines the resources allocated for a country’s Armed Forces. Specialised parliamentary committees (dealing with  defence matters and/or international affairs) can request additional information relating to national defence on the public’s behalf, they can conduct official inquiries into Armed Forces operations, inviting official testimony and the opinion of non-government experts.  Importantly, in the case of defence, parliamentary committees are uniquely placed to negotiate what belongs in the classified and non-classified domains, and under what conditions Parliament can access the latter category. Deliberations of this sort create the evidence base on the basis of which democratic scrutiny and deliberation can take place.

The three key components that are required for a parliament to exercise meaningful oversight are “the ability to oversee, the willingness to exercise those abilities to actually gather the information in question, and the power to use that information in a way that impacts the military, the executive or both. Oversight over operations, procurement and personnel issues arguably are the most important issues to focus on because they represent the riskiest endeavours, the greatest expenses, and the values embodied by the military”[14].

The question of authorities and resources is critical to this parliamentary role[15]. Does a parliamentary Defence Committee have the power to call on uniformed and non-uniformed personnel to give testimony under oath? Can a Parliament request and receive information it deems necessary for its oversight role over the MoD or other ministries relevant to defence, such as the Ministry of Finance? Does Parliament enjoy the power to veto the authorisation of the nation’s Armed Forces to participate in military operations abroad? Is the MoD obliged to submit a National Defence Doctrine and Force Structure Plan to Parliament at regular—usually four-yearly—intervals? Is the parliamentary Committee on Defence supported by permanent staff who possess the expertise required for its oversight role?

The Parliament’s role in national defence is integral to the issue of military effectiveness. Parliamentary scrutiny can act as a deterrent to corruption in weapons procurement, which can result in the waste of scarce resources as well as suboptimal choices in military equipment[16]. Parliamentary debates and votes can confer legitimacy on changes in national defence policy, both at the elite and mass public levels, making such changes both politically feasible and long-lasting, to the benefit of national defence[17]. Informed deliberations on national defence with the participation of non-government experts can interrogate national defence doctrine and thinking, and thus help to expand and redefine the agenda for armed services reform. Critically, a Parliament that is informed about and able to act effectively on matters of national defence provides an alternative source of information and analysis on national defence. This makes  the media commensurably less dependent on the MoD, and thus freer to perform its own function of critically scrutinising national defence policy.

Both MoDs and parliaments exist in a wider societal context, which can contribute or not to successful civil-military relations. Does this societal context produce saliency or indifference with regard to defence policy? Is there a vibrant civil society, supported by a generally affluent populace, capable of supporting programmatic interest in defence policy through the funding of think tanks specialising in defence? Or does the dominance of patronage politics, in overall conditions of material deprivation, render defence policy of interest only to insiders with vested interests?

A vibrant civil society can have a symbiotic relationship with Parliament, political parties and/or the press[18]. Indicatively, it can advocate for improved conditions pertaining to the welfare of military personnel, from the quality of army barracks to the effectiveness of equipment necessary for survival on the battlefield; it can fight legal battles in pursuit of Armed Forces modernisation, as in the inclusion of women in an ever broader range of combat positions, or it can deter corruption in weapons procurement. Wider societal trends facilitative of civic engagement, such as the social media explosion, can enhance the critical scrutiny of national defence by accelerating information sharing on national defence and promoting interaction between the expert community and engaged members of the public[19].

Opportunities and Constraints pertinent to effective civil-military relations

Transitions to democratic rule often entail considerable political attention being paid to the challenge of establishing civilian supremacy and, relatedly, of eliminating a tradition of abusing military authority whose primary victims were conscripts : i.e. citizen-soldiers.

The former effort entails governments legitimated by the popular vote employing their mandate to dominate the military and keep it within the bounds of its professional tasks and constitutionally enshrined mission.

The latter effort may extend to non-governmental political mobilisation, civil society and the press combined questioning the military’s authority and competence to convert citizens into soldiers. In this case, due the political dynamics of the democratic transition, efforts to eliminate abusive behaviour may ultimately strip the Armed Forces of the professional authority needed to convert civilians into an effective conscript force.

What is often missing in such transitions is the development of civilian expertise in military affairs, most prominently in universities, so that the democratically elected executive can utilise this civilian expertise to close the information asymmetry gap with the officer corps and put itself in a position to develop and implement defence policy. Across a number of countries as far afield as Latin America, the European South and East Asia, past abuses of military-led authoritarianism contaminate the legitimacy of defence studies as an academic discipline after the democratic transition has taken place[20]. Consequently, defence and the Armed Forces tend to be the public policy domain that is least studied, with only a miniscule expert community vested in it. This is the case, regardless of the importance Armed Forces may still have in the democratisation period—either due to their role in internal security and civilian emergencies and/or due to their role in territorial defence and the defence of sovereign rights—and the substantial fiscal commitments such roles may engender.

Notwithstanding the transition to democratic rule, this absence of civilian expertise actually leads to excessive militarisation within a democratic polity. It results in civilians, up to and including democratically elected civilian leaderships, being perceived as incapable of exercising judgement on matters of Armed Forces organisation, major weapon procurement selection and so forth. This, coupled with shortcomings in the overall performance of democratic governance, sees Armed Forces claw back their prestige with the public, in the light of their hierarchical structure and discipline, and coming to enjoy a high degree of trust in opinion polls. This high level of trust can undermine the ability of their civilian masters to design and implement reforms that may still be necessary for the effectiveness and democratically-mandated mission requirements of the Armed Forces, but which harm parochial Armed Forces interests[21].

That being said, undue civilian deference to the Armed Forces has also been observed in consolidated democracies which employ an ample pool of highly expert civilian technocrats at their MoDs to support the supreme civilian leadership in a national security council staff capacity and in the legislature. The most prominent is the US[22]. There are a variety of reasons why this may be the case: Civilian leaders may want to ‘pass the buck’ to the Armed Forces in the case of military operations entailing casualties. They may also want to appropriate the superior status of the officer corps and credibility of the Armed Forces leadership for their own policy choices in national defence. Alternatively, they may want to avoid being on the losing side in a policy disagreement with an Armed Forces leadership which, through press leaks or in testimony to the legislature, may reveal policy preferences different from those of their civilian masters. Finally, civilian leaders may want to defer to their Armed Forces leadership in one policy domain of national defence in order to buy their acquiescence in another policy domain. The case of the US demonstrates, in a nutshell, that while the availability of civilian expertise may be a necessary condition for healthy civil-military relations, it is not a sufficient one.

As we move on to the issue of the parliamentary oversight of national defence, we note that debate on the roles of such oversight, but also the constraints upon it, has been generated primarily, albeit not exclusively, by case studies of mature and wealthy democracies demonstrating a high degree of civil liberties consolidation. As mentioned above, following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and a rise in their participation in expeditionary operations – essentially wars of choice entailing the prospect and actuality of casualties – such countries, primarily in Western Europe, have seen parliaments play a growing role debating and deciding on national defence under conditions of growing transparency[23]. Additionally, the expansion of the notion of security to involve terrorism and various civil emergencies ranging from natural disasters to pandemics, has further diluted the historically distinct area of national defence as a domain in which the executive enjoyed prerogatives of secrecy and discretion in decision-making[24].

The extent to which a parliament is willing to exercise control over the executive in the case of authorising military missions is multivariable, as is the willingness of executive civilian leaderships to impose their will on their Armed Forces’ leadership; it therefore does not hinge purely on whether a Parliament has the nominal authority to do so[25].

Executives, leaders of governments and/or their MoDs have asked Parliaments to authorise expeditionary operations, even when this was not required by law. They have done this so that responsibility will be shared with the Opposition, in the light either of lukewarm public support for a military expedition or the prospect of casualties[26]. Political pressures and imperatives can impair parliamentary scrutiny even under near ideal circumstances. A strong tradition of parliamentary scrutiny in Germany, which is the most prominent example for historical reasons, means that the German executive and German Armed Forces, the Bundeswehr, are habituated to formulating decisions in such a way that they can pass muster in the German Parliament. Nonetheless, tight parliamentary schedules coupled with partisan considerations may mean that wider considerations and critical non-government expertise in the operational area in which the Bundeswehr has been called upon to operate, are inadequately solicited. Instead, Parliament’s focus is restricted to the terms and conditions of the German participation, rather than on the wisdom and efficacy of the wider mission; this was the case of Mali[27]. On the other hand, even in countries with a robust post-WWII tradition of expeditionary warfare and no constitutional requirement to consult Parliament—the UK, for example—the seeking of parliamentary consent and its denial on occasions by Parliament, as in the case of intervention in Syria, has created a strong precedent for seeking parliamentary authorisation.

Parliaments have also been involved in debating national security strategy documents, or drafting them themselves, generally on a four-yearly basis in response to a need that arose out of the shift in national defence doctrines and practices. Such as shift may have entailed the professionalisation of Armed Forces via the abolition of conscription, their participation in missions other than territorial defence, and the assumption of alliance commitments. This latter shift has included, most prominently, the dilution of strong traditions of neutrality, as in the case of the Partnership for Peace connecting Sweden and Finland with NATO along with the Common Security and Defence Policy which connects these two countries to the EU’s collectively determined foreign policy and defence priorities[28]. In the case of multiparty coalition governments, such documents may receive only perfunctory scrutiny, as they are the outcome of coalition deliberations and Parliament is simply rubberstamping them. In other cases, they can generate robust parliamentary debate in which the Opposition invokes a long tradition of non-alignment to argue against this sort of formalised shift in national defence doctrine and the changes it entails for manpower systems and operations.

Parliaments have also scrutinised the procurement of major weapon systems. Here, unsurprisingly, the lack of expert staff support in their defence committees or supporting audit bodies, either within or outside Parliament, as in the case of national audit offices, has led to such scrutiny falling well short of requirements. This was the case with the Belgian government’s decision to acquire F35 fifth-generation aircraft, when the members of the relevant committees in Belgium’s Federal Parliament had to resort to seeking information from the media or a purported whistleblower report which subsequently proved to be fake[29].

Turning to civil society, we would argue that a combination of legitimacy and resources is a necessary condition for civil society actors to meaningfully contribute to healthy civil-military relations. Does the political culture allow for voices other than those of electorally legitimated partisanship in an issue as vital as national defence? Is a society affluent enough, the rule of law strong enough, the fiscal treatment of donations to non-profit organisations supportive enough for non-governmental, non-partisan initiatives which can exercise critical scrutiny on matters relating to national defence, and invest in expertise to do so, to be established and grow? And to do so without fear of attracting the ire of an arbitrary government, or punishment at the level of the individual or corporate donor entity, be it philanthropic or commercial?

At a more general level, the point has been made that the accountability structure is inevitably weak in democratic polities where patronage politics dominate, since public goods, and the programmatic commitments that shape their delivery, have less value to the electorate[30]. Citizens align themselves on the basis of the benefits to be derived according to their party affiliation, while their political representatives pursue strategies of polarisation and grandstanding which are designed to secure power and access to its spoils. Inevitably, an accountability structure of this sort restricts the interaction between civil society and parliamentary oversight. In effect, under such conditions, there is no politically meaningful constituency for objective expertise and the reforms that such expertise may recommend for the Armed Forces.

The Junta’s legacy for Greek civil-military relations

Both the defeat of Greek arms in Cyprus in 1974, resulting in a major loss of territory by the Republic of Cyprus to Turkey, and the shambolic mobilisation that followed discredited any demands the Armed Forces could make about running their own affairs free of civilian interference in the post-junta period. Nonetheless, the seven years of military dictatorship cast a long shadow, compromising the quest of civil-military relations that would enable Greece’s restored democratic rule to consistently produce the best Armed Forces its resource constraints could provide.

One of the main casualties of the junta’s legacy would be the establishment, in what would soon be a member country of the European Economic Community, of a depoliticised and meritocratically selected corps of state officials in the Armed Forces as much as elsewhere in the machinery of state. As the premier scholar of upper-level state functionaries, Dimitris Sotiropoulos has established, particularly following the coming to power of the leftist-populist PASOK party in 1983, the bureaucracy was considered a major obstacle to democratic emancipation due to its conflation with the post WW II authoritarian state, up to an including the junta’s seven-year suspension of democracy. As a result, upper-level state functionaries were replaced by political appointees and demands that competence be employed as a criterion for promotion were dismissed as elitist and anti-democratic[31]. In the Armed Forces, this translated into partisan affiliation being used as a criterion for promotion to the upper ranks, especially under PASOK, given its politicians’ suspicion that the officer corps would lean historically to the right.

We stress that this did not entail a process of the ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ type, as the junta’s own failures illuminated its own form of patronage in officer selection, up to and including the selection of officers at ELDYK, the Greek military units stationed on Cyprus during the 1974 invasion[32]. Rather, in the name of the sovereignty of the democratic mandate, the restored democratic polity failed to take its cues from its Western European peers and modernise the state machinery on the dual basis of professional competence and non-partisanship and meritocratic selection. This failure, as Sotiropoulos notes, had the unintended consequence of undermining the legitimacy of democratic rule, given that a state machinery of this sort inevitably and recurrently fails to adequately serve the public good. While technocratic management has gradually been reinforced through the public sector as a whole in the decades that followed, it would seem the legacy of the absolute dominance over the selection of high-level state functionaries left behind by the democratic transition is still operative in the Armed Forces, giving political space to the civilian leadership to ride roughshod over the Armed Forces’ selection and promotion processes. This seems to have been especially true during the years of fiscal crisis, which witnessed high as much as arbitrary turnover in the upper levels of the country’s military leadership, at the behest of every government during that period[33].

Reinforcing this structural element of underperformance has been the lack of evidence-based policy and public scrutiny. The deeply entrenched perception in Greek Universities of the Armed Forces as illegitimate – the junta used enforced conscription as a tool to discipline university students rebelling against its rule, Military Police personnel actually tortured such students, and Greek armour units bloodily suppressed the 1973 rebellion at the Athens Polytechnic[34] – meant that defence studies have never established themselves as an academic discipline in Greek higher education. And this despite the fact that, over the entirety of what is now 50 years of democratic rule, the Greek-Turkish strategic rivalry has been considered a prime example of such rivalry in the international literature,[35] and Greece has consistently been a top spender on defence in relation to its GDP within NATO. Consequently, neither the media nor the Opposition—or, indeed, ruling party policy-makers—could rely on a steady stream of policy-relevant academic research to arrive at an informed judgement on the state of the Armed Forces. Arguably, with the exception of the last several years (more on which later), Greek media throughout this period was reduced to the ‘groundhog day’-like periodical reproduction of comparisons of the main weapon platforms (aircraft, main battle tanks, surface ships, submarines etc.) of the Greek and Turkish Armed Forces. As we will see immediately below, the only topic that attracted the interest of investigative journalism were the conditions pertaining to conscription service.

This lack of commitment on the part of the academic community also explains why there has been no take up of the need to redress the information asymmetry between the officer corps and the civilian leadership of the Greek Ministry of National Defence (MND). Nikos Alivizatos, in his analysis of this issue[36], points out that the Government Council of Foreign Affairs and Defence (Κυβερνητικό Συμβούλιο Εξωτερικών και Άμυνας – ΚΥΣΕΑ), the main interministerial body charged with managing defence issues on which the Chief of the Hellenic National Defence General Staff (HNDGS) also sat, could not mitigate this asymmetry, as the Minister of National Defence did not possess access to civilian expertise that would allow him to evaluate the advice of the military leadership.

Furthermore, he highlights that legislation on Armed Forces passed as early as 1977, three years after the collapse of the junta, recognised this need by enabling the Minister of National Defence to form expert committees on issues of defence policy with the participation of civilian experts. Parliamentarians from both the ruling party at the time, New Democracy (ND), and the Opposition, PASOK, also raised this issue, with an ND MP advocating the creation of a defence think tank that would institutionalise the generation of civilian expertise. Other MPs fell back on the idea that each Service Branch should have its own civilian Deputy Minister of National Defence – reviving the pre-WWII institutional arrangement of one Ministry for the Land Army and one for the Navy – in order to ensure informed civilian control. This was an understandable response, considering the underdeveloped awareness of the 1970s and the lack of clear templates internationally for employing civilian experts highly proficient in defence matters as permanent staff at a MoD.

Greek universities, by failing to establish defence studies departments or research institutes, have de facto refused to satisfy this need articulated by politicians nearly fifty years ago. This inaction on their part has also, we would argue, ensured there is no pressure within the system to seek out civilian expertise, or acceptance for such a policy, either through the convening of expert committees as provided for by the 1977 legislation or by staffing key MND divisions with both civilian and military experts, as is standard practice today in MoDs worldwide. It is no coincidence that this author has failed to identify an analysis produced by Greek defence experts on the information asymmetry obtaining between the civilian and military leadership that is anything like as lucid, comprehensive and penetrating as the treatment of the issue by Nikos Alivizatos—who is, we underline, a constitutional scholar and not a defence expert— in his seminal study from 1987, a work that is now 37 years old!

The junta’s legacy has also meant that Greece’s national defence has a tendency to become either overly civilianised or, ironically, excessively militarised, with both acting to the detriment of the Armed Forces’ ability to fulfil their mission of defending Greece’s territorial integrity and sovereign rights.

The prime example of excessive civilianisation is conscript service, a pillar of Greece’s defence doctrine, whose main mission is to defend the country’s territorial integrity. This is a labour-intensive mission for any Armed Forces, but still more so for Greece, given both its land border with its primary threat, Turkey, and the extensive Greek island complex adjacent to Turkey’s Aegean coastline. Essentially, due to the way the junta treated Greek youth both within and outside conscription service, the democratic transition period found the Armed Forces bereft of the trust it needed to convert civilian youth into effective conscript soldiers through rigorous training. The de facto arbiter of conscript training became extra-military, composed of the Opposition of the day and media keen to conflate rigorous training with a return ‘to the bad old days’[37]. A typical example of this state of affairs was the column in the now defunct leftist-populist Eleftherotypia newspaper entitled ‘Conscript, where are you heading?’ (‘Φαντάρε που πας’ in Greek), which relied on a steady stream of conscript allegations about conditions pertaining to their service in terms of living conditions, demands placed on them by training, and so on. It is illuminating of the tenor of the times that this newspaper never promoted an informed agenda in favour of the effectiveness of the Greek Armed Forces, despite the bellicose, even jingoistic, stance it took in its analysis of Greek-Turkish relations.

On the other hand, the MND has provided a prime example of excessive militarisation in Greece, with no high-level civilian staff employed there to deal with issues of defence policy, Armed Forces modernisation and weapons procurement policy, even though civilian representation of this sort is considered a best practice in democratic states with strong and effective militaries.

As we pointed out above, the Greek academic community’s lack of interest in defence studies[38] has resulted in a state of affairs in which the civilian leadership of the MND can neither draw high-level civilian functionaries from a deep pool of expertise inhering in the academic community or emanating from it, nor indeed justify such an infusion of civilian expertise, given the impression this excessive militarisation has formed with both the public and elites that only uniformed personnel are fit to formulate and execute policy relating to the country’s Armed Forces[39]. A specific domain in which this excessive militarisation is felt most keenly is in the lack of development of joint operations in the Greek Armed Forces, where there is no separation between the HNDGS and the theatre command in the eastern part of the country. Thus, in essence, a nominally all-powerful HNDGS Chief is supposed both to oversee the totality of the Armed Forces and to execute jointness in the event of a military conflict with Turkey. The Minister of National Defence cannot rely on a sophisticated civilian staff working in alignment with reform-minded officers to drive and implement, through operational arrangements and procurement choices, a jointness agenda that is bound to be resisted by parochial interests, or at any rate interests unique to each Branch of the Armed Forces[40]. This centralisation and personalisation of authority has been criticised by retired high-ranking officers for failing to integrate the point of views of the individual service branches, never mind for its inability to institutionalise sophisticated joint operations[41].

An event which crystallised some of the main shortcomings identified here was the 1996 Imia islet crisis, which demonstrated variable officer quality as well as poor inter-Branch coordination. The crisis eventually led the Greek government, which was, of course, ultimately responsible for this state of affairs, to request US adjudication, so Turkish troops would leave the Imia islet they had landed on and a broader crisis could be averted. Such adjudication, being imposed by a third party, emboldened Turkish challenges of Greek sovereignty over the Imia islets and other islets like it. We would argue that Imia provided a real-life example of the process  Sotiropoulos has previously identified: namely, that of a democratic mandate—translated into an absence of meritocracy as much as a lack of systemic state reform—ultimately delegitimising democratic rule. It is no coincidence that this style of post-junta democratic rule bequeathed an Armed Forces that necessitated US intervention. In effect, the very event which PASOK defined itself against was engendered by PASOK’s management of the country’s Armed Forces. Which is to say that the dynamics of the civil-military relations identified above rendered any resolution of the crisis—or its deterrence—through the judicious use of a well-run Armed Forces by the sovereign democratic polity (which is surely the supreme manifestation of national will), impossible. We must stress that, as we see it, the Imia incident does not call into question the professionalism, competence and valour of individual members of the Armed Forces who participated in it, from the Chief of the HNDGS down to the lowest-ranking sailor; rather, it reveals the impossibility of such individual professionalism, competence and valour making up for the systemic failings produced by a decisively subpar civil-military relationship, which by 1996 had already been two decades in the making.

We must add here that the Imia crisis did not lead to an ambitious reform effort on the part of the Armed Forces[42]. Specifically, other than the strengthening of Special Forces units in training and equipment, so they could intervene more effectively in another Imia-like situation, and the drafting of rules of engagement for the Armed Forces in various conflict scenarios, no steps were taken to advance joint operations, which was surely one of the major lessons learned from Imia and highly applicable to a future crisis of a different nature or larger scale than Imia. Parliament did not conduct an official inquiry on Imia, though this would have been customary in many democratic polities so that lessons would be learned, codified and serve as the basis for wide-ranging Armed Forces reform. The government of the day did, in the light of Imia, allocate significant resources to upgrading key weapon systems in all branches, with the procurement choices made by and large involving reliable, highly advanced weapon systems manufactured by Greece’s key allies: the US, France and Germany. However, the reformist PM, Costas Simitis, did not engage directly or indirectly with Armed Forces reform, not least due to an ideological alienation originating in the post WW II authoritarianism that culminated in the junta regime[43], with Simitis himself being active in opposition to the junta. Instead, Simitis gave the MND portfolio to his key antagonist, Akis Tsohatzopoulos, the leader of PASOK’s traditionalist faction and a typical patronage politician who was subsequently indicted and jailed on the basis of corruption charges involving the post-Imia weapons procurement programme.

An international perspective on Greek civil-military relations

When we compare the state of Greek civil-military relations in the post-junta period with those of other democratic polities, we cannot but highlight some very strong similarities.

Democratic polities, whether due to features of the transition process from authoritarian to democratic rule or to other factors, often neglect to develop expertise and/or utilise civilian expertise in defence. In Brazil, authoritarian rule led to national security becoming a dirty word expunged from official documents. Despite the military subsequently being invited by the country’s civilian rulers to participate in issues of domestic security, in particular, the MoD has remained militarised and efforts to develop jointness have failed, with each Branch retaining its fiefdom and determining its own procurement priorities[44]. The growing maturity of defence studies scholarship has been encouraging but has yet to translate into an impact on Armed Forces policy-making in Brazil. EU democracies with an authoritarian past, which include states as wide-ranging as Poland and Spain, also demonstrate minimal civilian participation in defence policy-making and thus a correspondingly circumscribed ability on the part of the civilian Ministers of Defence to define and execute defence policy[45]. In the Ministry of Defence of India, civilian staff seconded from other ministries focus on managing the finances of the Ministry, without however being experts in defence. Shortcomings revealed, as in the case of Greece, in several conflict instances, most prominently during operations against Pakistan at Kargill and the peacekeeping operation in Sri Lanka, exposed the limitations of the Indian Armed Forces when, in the absence of a robust jointness framework, the service branches operate on an ad hoc coordination model in a conflict situation[46]. It seems that India’s civilian masters have abrogated responsibility, at least in part, to the Armed Forces and the constituent service branches in how to run their affairs—not least so that, if things go awry, they can shift the blame onto the military side.

Greece exhibits some similarities with the Indian case in this respect, in that a persisting information asymmetry between civilian masters and military officers, shortcomings in the efficiency of the Armed Forces, and the inherent high-risk nature of any conflict situation have resulted in the Chief of the HNDGS emerging as an all-powerful micromanager of the Armed Forces[47]. We would describe this state of affairs as ‘deferment to the military because of civilian incompetence’, in contrast with the US situation of ‘deferment to the military despite civilian competence’. In such cases, aware that their own accumulated reform shortcomings mean they do not have the Armed Forces at their disposal that they and the country need, the country’s civilian rulers confer excessive authority and status on the Chief of the HNDGS, who can therefore be used as a scapegoat if and when these shortcomings come to light. The all-encompassing authority of the Chief of the HNDGS, particularly in wartime, originates in Greece’s authoritarian past, in the 1940s and even earlier when the King assumed command of the nation’s Armed Forces in the first quarter of the 20th century. In addition, as has rightly been pointed out, it reflects the insecurities of Greece’s civilian leadership with regard to their ability to bear the ultimate responsibility for wartime leadership[48]. As we have argued, this insecurity stems at least in part from the lack of civilian expert advice on national defence. It is worth noting in this regard that contemporary scholarship has challenged the premise that war is best prosecuted by the military high command alone, with no decisive input from the civilian leadership, on the basis of the historical evidence[49].

Excessive civilianisation, as in the case of conscription, is prominent during democratic transitions in several countries. Nothing analogous has been noted in post-WWII democratic polities which have not experienced authoritarian rule and which have utilised conscription as a pillar of their territorial defence. Examples of the latter range from Finland, which has not engaged in military conflict during this period, to Israel, whose mixed Armed Forces of professionals, conscripts and reserves have been recurrently engaged in multiple conflicts.

In Taiwan, conscription was also instrumentalised by the country’s authoritarian regime for domestic purposes, as a result of which the military lost the benefit of the doubt, as it did in Greece, in terms of its ability to convert citizens into soldiers[50]. The death of a conscript following the democratic transition led to the wholesale transfer of the military justice system to civilian courts. Conscription service was progressively cut to 4 months, with training becoming perfunctory despite the country facing an existential challenge in the form of the determination of the People’s Republic of China to achieve unification by hook or by crook (conscription service has now been restored to 12 months, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which validated the case for conscription as core to territorial defence while highlighting the real risks Taiwan faces in terms of maintaining its independence).

Argentina also mirrors Greece in this respect: as the country shifted to democratic rule, an apparatus of antimilitarism involving civil society organisations, political parties and the media shaped the ‘political weather’ regarding perceptions of maltreatment by the Armed Forces of conscripted soldiers[51]. As in Taiwan, the death of a conscript as a result of mistreatment was enough to catalyse radical change, which in this case led to the abolition of conscription service altogether, with no informed policy debate whatsoever on whether conscription served the country’s national security needs or not.

In sum, the common civil society thread running through these three cases of countries transitioning to democracy is setting the conditions of conscript service over the professional judgement of the Armed Forces[52]. It is structurally incurious about, or even hostile to, issues relating to the effectiveness of the Armed Forces, not least because such an interest is at conflict with efforts to civilianise the experience of conscription.

Where Greece represents a distinct case within its NATO and more largely European peer cohort, is that it has operated under the strictest of caveats, to avoid suffering any casualties at all in post-Cold War out-of-area missions. Not only did Greece not send troops during the occupation phase in Iraq, it also suffered no casualties – unlike any only NATO member country with substantial Armed Forces – during its participation in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, due to its Kabul-only caveat. Although there has been no systematic study of this feature of Greek defence policy, we speculate that it is integrally connected to the fact that Greece is the only NATO member country not covered by Article 5, due to Turkey’s NATO membership; of course, this factor was starkly illuminated in 1974, during the invasion of Cyprus, where Greek units actually engaged Turkish invading forces, and in subsequent Greece-Turkey crises in which NATO adopted a neutral stance with the US playing the role of umpire.

This limited (albeit not insignificant) role played by NATO and the US, coupled with the nearly catastrophic lack of legitimacy engendered by the invasion of Cyprus (which led to Greece exiting the military wing of NATO only to renter it a few years later), has meant that Greek civilian leaders would pay  a formidable political cost in the event of Greek units suffering casualties during their participation in a US- or NATO-led mission. By contrast, in other peer countries, governments have invoked allied commitments to politically enable decisions to put troops in harm’s way[53]. The corollary of such risk avoidance is that defence policy in Greece, unlike in many other European NATO or EU member countries, was not parliamentarised in the post-Cold War period. In such countries, participating in wars of choice in far-off lands, as opposed to wars of national defence, resulted in extensive parliamentary debates, multiple parliamentary votes, and parliamentary inquiries conducted by the relevant parliamentary committees, making parliaments a factor in civil-military relations. This has most definitely not been the case in Greece[54].

Importantly, the Greek Parliament has exercised limited or no oversight of either defence spending or defence procurement through the Permanent Committee on National Defence and External Affairs—a state of affairs that persists to this day[55]. Parliamentary Committees have generally toed the party line, either faithfully supporting government policy , warts and all, or indiscriminately opposing it, depending on the party affiliation of their members. Committees lack expert staff to support the deliberations of the participating MPs, with MPs being supported, if at all, by their own personal staff, who are not defence experts. The  Permanent Committee on National Defence and External Affairs has not launched a single inquiry or issued a single report relating to defence policy or serious operational mishaps, nor has it demanded that the government do so[56]. Major weapon systems acquisitions are either supported by the Opposition parties, lest they be accused of not wanting to support national defence, or opposed as extravagantly costly, with hints that they may involve corruption on the part of government officials. However, no informed debate takes place on the pluses and minuses of these major acquisitions costing billions of euros, or on the pros and cons of possible alternatives.

This stagnation is widely perceived as being characteristic of Parliament as a whole, with commissions of inquiry coming in for the most severe criticism over time due to, on the one hand, the government’s use of its majority to paper over policy failure and, on the other hand, the Opposition minority exploiting such commissions to grandstand and score points against the government, negating any policy significance they may have[57].

That being said, as Nikos Alivizatos has pointed out, post-junta democratic governments of both the Right and Left have essentially left unchallenged the junta’s own norm, enshrined in legislation passed in 1973, of shielding defence from normal scrutiny, the premise being that it should be protected from the rough and tumble of competitive politics[58]. This junta-era legislation has its own antecedents in the pre-WWII Metaxas dictatorship (1936-1940), which reversed the robust, decades-long tradition of parliamentary control of defence matters that preceded it, as well as in the post-WWII period, when the goal was to shield from public scrutiny the deep involvement of the US in Greece’s running of its national security apparatus, including its Armed Forces.

Considering that legacy, it is no coincidence that leftist PASOK and its leader Andreas Papandreou argued, in Opposition, in favour of Parliamentary Committees of Defence and Foreign Affairs being able to conduct robust investigations of aspects of defence policy, with the appropriate classified safeguards in place, not least due to past abuses of secrecy by an all-powerful military. The template proposed was that of the Bundestag, reflecting the historically informed unwillingness to ever again leave a powerful military unaccountable. Illuminatingly, once in power, one of PASOK’s main enforcers, Menios Koutsogiorgas, who was Minister of the Interior at the time, argued that if Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry could be set up with the consent of only two fifths of Parliament, which is to say without the consent of the ruling party, that would be tantamount to the suspension of democratic government[59]. It is both fascinating and promising that in recent years increasingly reform-minded, albeit retired, high-ranking officers, frustrated by the unwillingness or inability of the country’s executive leadership to upgrade the fighting efficiency of the nation’s Armed Forces, have supported greater scrutiny of national defence by the Greek Parliament and the Permanent Committee on National Defence and External Affairs in particular – the assumption being that such scrutiny will advance and not retard the cause of Armed Forces reform[60].

The Greek Parliament (if not Greek civil society, as we will note below) seems to have mirrored India in recent years in presenting a case of a low accountability structure[61]; as an issue, this is not limited to defence and the Armed Forces. Since neither individual MPs nor the ruling and Opposition parties represented in Parliament are incentivised to gain influence and power through policy scrutiny and debate, they do not seek the resources and authority necessary to do so. Rather, the dominant incentive  is to protect or contest power via policy-free, as opposed to policy-informed, personal advancement and partisanship. Expertise and the authority to use it would hinder, not facilitate, the utilisation of this dominant incentive. It is indicative of this state of affairs that when the civilian leadership of Greece’s MND decided on two occasions to publish a White Book on Greece’s defence policy, Parliament failed to ensure that this becomes a standard practice, with future White Books on defence published at regular intervals and discussed at both the Committee and plenary levels.

Evolving Civil-Military Relations during the fiscal crisis and after it

The country’s fiscal crisis, we will argue, boosted critical elements of Greece’s civil-military relations, while also accelerating pertinent trends already present in Greece.

First, by humbling the Greek state and the majoritarian parties that mediated between the state machinery and popular will, the fiscal crisis boosted pluralism and civil society in Greece[62], opening up space for a variety of critical discourses, including frank discussion on the effectiveness of the Armed Forces.

The fiscal cutbacks arguably brought the Armed Forces very close to, or even past, the point at which they could no longer perform their essential mission of safeguarding the country’s territorial integrity in case of war with Turkey. Upgrades of key platforms were cancelled, accelerating the de facto obsolescence of key weapon systems in all three service branches. A lack of component parts compelled cannibalisation, limiting the availability of fighter aircraft and warships. Acquisitions of new weapon systems became an impossibility, confronting Greece with the reality of its being, militarily, at both a quantitative and qualitative disadvantage vis a vis Turkey. Even such staples as fuel for the Hellenic Navy (HN) Fleet could no longer be taken for granted, rendering operations close to unfeasible. As the country regressed to a 19th-to-early-20th-century model of private munificence becoming necessary for elementary state provisions, philanthropy originating from the shipping community in particular became a critical element, most prominently in the case of the HN, which maintains close links with the country’s shipowners. One of the most prominent of these philanthropists offered an unprecedently blunt as well as detailed critique of the HN’s state of preparedness in a series of remarkably frank articles in Greece’s quality press[63]. Along the same lines, recently retired high-ranking HN officers also shared their alarm with the public in an investigative piece on Greek TV[64]. The then Director of ELIAMEP, which is funded by Greek philanthropy and CSR and EU sources, also co-authored an analysis which pointed out that the still high ratio of defence expenditure to GDP meant little, considering the close to 30 % fall in the output of the Greek economy[65].

In tandem, amidst this fiscal-crisis-induced permissive environment for public discourse on defence, we witness the rise of a virtual community of specialist defence correspondents and scholarly retired officers who provide a steady stream of open access reports, analysis, and even peer-reviewed standard articles on the Greek Armed Forces and national defence in general. The audience for these defence specialists, who also provide feedback loops mainly on Facebook and LinkedIn, and can in individual cases partner with the providers of this output through such social media network activation, is comprised of active and retired members of the Armed Forces as well as members of the Armed Forces reserves who have served as conscripts[66].

We stress that, with driving forces such as these, informed and open debate on the state of the Armed Forces became the rule and not the exception during the fiscal crisis, with critical voices emerging in all public policy domains. This change was engendered by major, policy-informed philanthropic giving, as in the case of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which funded social welfare provision and youth employability schemes, or the funding of the dissemination of policy-relevant academic research by diaNEOsis, an organisation established by the Greek business magnate, Dimitris Daskalopoulos[67]. This crisis-generated precedent outlived the crisis as, after all, it had done nothing more that align Greece with the norms in its affluent, democratic peer states worldwide: namely, informed debate on national defence involving both retired officers and defence experts, either under the aegis of privately funded think tanks or solely on the basis of their prestige with no institutional affiliation attached[68]. Nor should we be surprised by the alacrity with which quality print and TV media responded and enhanced this trend, considering the organic links such media have with their international peers. Illuminatingly, Greece’s two major quality media groups (Kathimerini and Ta Nea – To Vima) publish investigative pieces by the New York Times and Wall Street Journal , including articles on defence-related themes, in either the original English or in translation.

Second, the fiscal crisis diffused technocracy throughout every aspect of public policy in Greece, and ultimately strengthened the technocratic element in the centre right party, ND, which also enjoys organic links with the Armed Forces due to its greater ideological affinity. With Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a very policy-oriented and technocratic Prime Minister at the helm, the ND government of 2019 was ready to apply its reform-mindedness to the domain of national defence[69]. This synthesis was not as pronounced during the first term of the Mitsotakis government, when major weapons procurements from abroad were privileged, being led by the PM himself and his Office, and when the MND was led by an ND politician with no prior background in foreign and defence policy. By the time the present incumbent, Nikos Dendias, a leading ND politician and former Minister of Foreign Affairs, took office, it became fully articulated under the ‘Agenda 2030’ Armed Forces reform programme.

Civil-Military relations and the implementation of the ‘Agenda 2030’

The ‘Agenda 2030’[70] aligns itself with the ND government’s overall reform orientation as much as with the predominant Armed Forces reform features worldwide. As such, it matches politics with policies to the extent that the MND has been transformed from a politically prestigious cul de sac for its Minister, and a risk not a benefit to the government of the day, to a stepping stone for its occupant and a feather in the hat of the government. A brief overview of the main elements of the ‘Agenda 2030’ – which includes the creation of a robust defence technological industrial base (DTIB), the selective adoption of the lessons learned from modern conflicts, most prominently from the war in Ukraine, the upgrading of conscription and the reform of professional military education – will make that clear.

The creation of a robust DTIB involves both the restructuring of ailing state-owned defence firms and the forging of a partnership between the Armed Forces and Greece’s growing start-up scene. It thus makes the MND and its Minister a catalyst for Greece’s manufacturing innovation and a participant to the wider efforts to make the Greek economy internationally competitive. It is also a highly resonant public policy effort to emulate rivals and friends alike. Namely, Turkey’s strong DTIB is recognised as a pillar of the threat that country poses to Greece’s territorial integrity and sovereign rights, while Israel provides the template for a country which has, through its defence-related innovation, both managed to build Armed Forces that are superior to all its rivals and a highly competitive economy. By contrast, Greece’s past record of acquiring imported weapon systems with zero impact on its innovation capacity, while mismanaging its state-owned defence firms at a substantial cost both to the military effectiveness of its Armed Forces and to its public finances, is seen as a contributor to the Greek fiscal crisis[71].

This policy orientation is also an important first step in the civilianisation of the MND, as for the first time ever an outfit jointly led and staffed by civilian and military personnel, the Hellenic Centre for Defence Innovation (HCDI), will be primarily responsible for procuring innovative products and services on behalf of Greece’s Armed Forces. The HCDI’s civilian element here is particularly pronounced: in addition to its President, who is the ex-Chief of the Fleet of the HN, its first managing director is a doyen of innovation who has sprung from Greece’s research community (an ex-professor, former leader of a public research organisation, and founder of one of Greece’s first and most successful tech start-ups[72]), while the HCDI’s modus operandi is compatible with the way start-ups are funded internationally, be they civilian or defence-oriented. The creation of a robust DTBI is also additionally strengthened, as established private-sector defence firms can and do communicate their criticisms to the media regarding the perceived shortfalls of this policy. The highly prestigious start-up community is also keen to highlight in public what it will take for its members to engage with the MND, while both the business press and the academic community are well able to pass informed judgement on the successes and failures of the policy[73].

The other key priority—adapting to lessons learned—is also an articulation of best-practice, evidence-based technocracy, which is how the government presents itself to the Greek electorate. In particular, the war in Ukraine has transformed key aspects of warfare and established clear benchmarks, in terms of the adoption of key technologies and emerging operational practices, which are relevant to Armed Forces worldwide. Importantly, the ‘lessons learned’ enterprise has a symbiotic, albeit non-exclusive, relationship with the cause of creating a robust DTIB, as Greek defence firms would in due course be called upon to create and manufacture a meaningful proportion of the technologies which feature prominently in these lessons learned.

Importantly, there has also been a break with the past in the domain of multinational military operations, whereby Greece has taken an active role in the creation and execution of the EU’s EUNAVFOR ASPIDES mission, involving the protection of merchant shipping from Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. This mission has involved the HN engaging in military operations, shooting and bringing down Houthi drones with its guns and electronic warfare (EW) instruments, and thus placed its crews and ships in harm’s way for the first time since WW II. The ASPIDES mission has been defended on collective defence grounds: thus, due to its  support of the Ukrainian war effort, the EU has become an increasingly credible collective security provider—unlike NATO, which has Turkey as a fellow member country. This development demonstrates that, once the policy conditions are in place, Greece’s civilian leadership follows the rule in terms of the decision to engage the country’s Armed Forces in multinational military operations. HN’s use of ‘Centaur’, an EW device developed and manufactured by EAV, the Greek aerospace firm, as well as the fact that Houthi attacks have also been launched against Greek merchant marine vessels and negatively impacted the role of Piraeus as a major transshipment port, have further enhanced Greek ‘ownership’ of the ASPIDES mission, as per the public advocacy of the current Minister of National Defence.

That being said, we must also point to the absence of creating a civilian component in the MND’s defence planning function. Essentially, the Minister’s measure of influence on the selection and adaptation of the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, and other wars,   will be limited to the selection of those officers entrusted with that particular mission.  The Minister of the MND will not be supported, in his final determination of which lessons from the war in Ukraine are most relevant to the Greek Armed Forces, by a group of permanent, civilian experts detached from single-Branch interests and perspectives[74]. By contrast, the government has often opted, vis-à-vis other policy challenges it has faced, to commission independent experts, often diaspora technocrats or scholars who are leaders in their field, to deliver policy recommendations in publicly available reports which generate additional debate and analysis by experts unattached to a particular agency of the government or bureaucratic group[75].

How does the academic and more general expert community connect with this executive intent, articulated in ‘Agenda 2030’, and the dynamics that drive it? There is a critical divide that mirrors the progress or lack thereof of the MND’s civilianisation efforts. University departments and schools focused on areas that do not fall within the humanities and social sciences have for years now been accessing European Research Council funds with dual use applications, civil and military, in such domains as IT and, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence, engineering and aerospace. As both EU and NATO funding in core defence have increased by leaps and bounds, these university departments and schools have built on their track record in dual use applications  and many of them are aggressively pursuing opportunities in defence R&D. Nor have they shied away from signing MoUs with one of the main Greek defence firms’ associations, SEKPY – albeit, according to information relayed to the author, with the significant exception of the Athens Polytechnic, Greece’s most prestigious engineering school and the site of the junta’s bloody suppression of the students’ revolt in 1973. Most recently, the discipline of finance has joined the fray[76]. Political Science, on the other hand, remains absent both in terms of wide-ranging scholarly output and policy-relevant research. There is still no department of defence studies in any Greek state universities, and core defence courses are not taught in their international affairs departments.

This absence of quality defence studies literature, and of a high-profile internationally prestigious national defence scholarship cohort resident in Greece, represents a twin as much as mutually reinforcing obstacle to the efforts of any Minister of National Defence, the current incumbent included, to civilianise the MND. First, the absence of a deep pool of resident civilian defence technocrats, as most of the Greek technocrats, men and women, have not only studied defence abroad, they have also been employed abroad, either by government or in research institutes, universities or the private sector. Second, the impression entrenched in both the civilian world and within the Greek officer corps, that only the officer corps can have the necessary expertise on matters of national defence, and that such expertise neither could nor should be synthesised, let alone challenged, by civilian experts.

The institution of an effective conscription system, replacing what the Minister himself has described on several occasions as the completely ineffective present conscription system[77] for both the Armed Forces themselves and the conscript, is an issue at the very core of civil-military relations, as it entails converting citizens into soldiers. Here, we will be dealing with a declining but still strong civilianisation tradition that we analysed above, which originated in the early democratisation period which will be contested by the segment of civil society that will want to judge conscription from the point of its military efficacy.

To the older civilianisation tradition, implementing a modern conscription system with both the physical rigour and calculated physical risk attendant on the upgrading of conscript training  will be tantamount to an attempt to revive historical authoritarianism and the manhandling of conscripts by the officer corps. By contrast, the civil society segment in favour of strengthening the effectiveness of the Armed Forces, which we also analysed, and which emerged during the fiscal crisis, will be  providing political support to the MND’s efforts to upgrade conscription.  At the same time,  these civil society advocates of an effective Armed Forces,  will also  be ready to highlight any regression to standard patronage practices that would bring disrepute to the reform of conscription as much as rendering it ineffective, such as widespread conscript unit selection, usually far away from the Greek-Turkish border, on the basis of patronage relations.

An important factor in how this reform of conscription unfolds is the international dimension as it is shaped by the Russo-Ukrainian war. The war has singlehandedly reaffirmed the indispensability of effective conscript armies for territorial defence; it has turned Finland and Israel into global paragons, due to their tradition of creating effective conscript systems under diverging national security environments; it has led to the revival of conscription in nearly all European countries adjacent to the Russian Federation; it has compelled Taiwan to revive its own moribund conscription system; last but not least, it has even raised questions in the US as to whether, in the era of Sino-US competition and the return of Big War, the All-Volunteer Force model adopted after the end of the Vietnam War is still fit for purpose. Implementing an effective conscription system is, of all the policy elements in the ‘Agenda 2030’, the most visible to the country’s civilian population; consequently, the fact that this policy has achieved global norm status is of vital significance to its effective public advocacy and, by extension, to its political viability.

Finally, one domain in which civil-military relations have demonstrated stagnancy in this otherwise dynamic phase in Greek civil-military relations is undoubtedly that of parliamentary oversight and debate. Indicatively, there has been no comprehensive debate on the rationale of the Greek Armed Forces participating in risky multinational military operations, at  the plenary level; this constitutes a missed opportunity to establish a new consensus on the participation of the Greek Armed Forces in multilateral military operations so that, in the event of future personnel fatalities and injuries, the country does not revert to the ‘free ridership’ which is so damaging to the national interest.

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendations

Both the way in which the post-authoritarian democratic transition has shaped civil-military relations in Greece, and the impact such civil-military relations have had on the country’s ability to produce effective Armed Forces, closely match the experience of other countries which experienced a similar historical trajectory.

A disinterested academic community which, bar individual exceptions, has not recognised  national defence as a legitimate and significant field of inquiry as a public policy domain; weak or no parliamentary oversight of national defence; and an excessively militarised MND are not exceptional in a country, like Greece, which has experienced a transition to democracy after the collapse of a military junta. Nor are the policy consequences of this state of affairs unique to Greece: namely, corruption in military procurement and organisational reform efforts which remain timid even after significant operational failures negatively impacting vital national interests.

Yet, as we have noted and argued, Greece is not exceptional, either, in the significant progress it has made to escape the long shadow cast by its authoritarian past and to meaningfully upgrade its civil-military relations and thus the effectiveness of its Armed Forces. The return of ‘Big War’ to Europe as part of the same trend that has fuelled Turkish revisionism vis a vis Greece, together with the need to make defence at least partly ‘pay its way’ through an innovation-inclined DTIB, have resulted in Greece, and other countries like Greece, adopting ambitious defence reforms which have been initiated  by the country’s civilian leadership and jointly conceived and implemented with the Armed Forces leadership. Suffice it to mention Taiwan here, which recently extended conscription from a derisory four months to a year, injected realism into its Armed Forces training exercises, raised its defence expenditure, and sought to engage its manufacturing in the production of innovative military technologies.

Importantly, the comparative perspective enables us not only to assess and identify the progress that has been made, but also those domains where this has not been the case. In that context, this policy paper will conclude with three recommendations:

1. To the leadership of the Greek Parliament: Create a specialised Committee on National Defence by dividing the present Permanent Committee on National Defence and External Affairs into two. Support this new Committee with staff specialised in defence and adopt best practices, in terms of the mandate of this Committee, with regard to its oversight function, its classified and non-classified hearings, reports and so on.
2. To the leadership of the MND: first, further strengthen the civilianisation of the MND by creating a strategic planning division staffed by civilian defence experts and military officers, but led by civilians. And second, staff the MND’s procurement division with permanent civilian staff. In the former case, personnel will need to be attracted from the cohort of defence experts from the Greek diaspora, as defence studies does not exist as a discipline in Greek universities. In the latter case, a combination of resident and Greek technocrats who have graduated from prestigious Greek and international polytechnic schools should be favoured. We underline that this recommendation entails the hiring of permanent civilian staff through transparent meritocratic selection processes. The Minister of National Defence can retain the right to hire a small staff of special advisers (three to five, say) in a non-executive capacity, whose tenure would coincide with that of the Minister. This paper shares the view established by the literature that meritocratically selected permanent staff perform better than political appointees, and would argue that the Greek civil service in totality, and not just the staff of the MND, would perform better if ministerial general secretaries stopped being political appointees and were selected instead from the permanent civilian staff[78].
3. To the leadership of Greece’s two leading universities, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki: establish defence studies departments to be led by distinguished diaspora Greek defence studies scholars, so you can produce the research and the human resources that Greece’s civil-military relations need—specifically, in the MND, Parliament and civil society actors such as think tanks–to address Greece’s 21st-century national security challenges.

It is worth noting that the first two of these three recommendations in particular are being advocated explicitly on the basis of observed best practice in civil-military relations internationally, and of the principle of democratically-legitimated civilian supremacy,as early as the late 1980s, a little more than a decade after the collapse of the junta, by one of Greece’s leading constitutional scholars: Nikos Alivizatos. We would also argue that the third recommendation, too, is implicitly present in Alivizatos’ seminal work referenced above. After all, his emphasis on the need to narrow the asymmetry in expertise between the civilian and military leaderships points to the indispensable role Greece’s academic community should be playing as the prime generator of human pools of such expertise, thus providing the intellectual and techno-scientific personnel and analytical output the civilian leadership needs to exercise its democratic mandate in national defence. In effect, what this paper argues is that, half a century after the transition to democracy, in the era of the return of ‘Big War’, of a transformation in the conduct of warfare, and of a highly revisionist Turkey,  Greece’s democratic polity has even less of an excuse for ignoring the clarion call, first sounded in 1987 by Nikos Alivizatos, for the wholesale modernisation of civil-military relations.

Finally, we are convinced that—inter alia safeguarding meritocratic selection in the Armed Forces; containing corruption in weapons procurement; establishing a regular publication cycle for defence doctrine and force structure documents to  distill military knowledge and ensure continuity in the evolution of the Armed Forces; defending the competence and authority of the officer corps to convert citizens into soldiers primarily in Greece’s Land Army; pushing for joint operations which, by removingobstacles presented by either single-Service-Branch parochialism and/or of the present anachronistic system of an all-powerful Chief of HNDGS, is a positive sum game for all services branches as well as for the country’s ability to defend itself; and developing and disseminating the strategic foresight that can mitigate, if not eliminate, the boom and bust cycle that so often bedevils fiscal commitment in the defence of democratic polities, Greece’s included—such a modernisation of civil-military relations cannot but be the greatest ally of the most competent and driven members of Greece’s officer corps.

 

[1]Indeed, the only reference the author could find to the performance of the Armed Forces under the junta was a review of a book written by a defence correspondent on the Greek Armed Forces’ single engagement with the invading Turkish Army, Καβαλλιεράκης, Στέφανος, ΕΛΔΥΚ: Η Τελευταία Μάχη – Έλληνες στρατιώτες χωρίς ταυτότητες αναγνώρισης, Τα Νέα, 20-21 Ιουλίου, 2024 [Kavallierakis Stefanos, ELDKYK: The last battle: Greek soldiers without dog tags, Ta Nea, 20-21 July 2024]. A recent edited volume on the junta does not address the way it managed the Armed Forces, see Anastasakis, Othon, and Katerina Lagos, eds. The Greek Military Dictatorship: Revisiting a Troubled Past, 1967–1974. Berghahn Books, 2021.

[2] The most recent contribution to Greek civil-military relations that the author could locate does not address the issue of second-generation reforms, see Tsarouhas, Dimitris. “Greece: From Overt Military Activism to Democratic Normality.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. 2020.

[3] Αλιβιζάτος, Νίκος “Η συνταγματική θέση των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων: Η αρχή του πολιτικού ελέγχου.” (1987). ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΝΤ. Ν. ΣΑΚΚΟΥΛΑ, 1987 [Alivizatos, Nikos, The constitutional position of the Armed Forces: The principle of civilian control, ANT. N. SAKOULAS EDITIONS, 1987]

[4] Cottey, Andrew, Timothy Edmunds, and Anthony Forster. “The second generation problematic: Rethinking democracy and civil-military relations”Armed Forces & Society 29.1 (2002): 31-56.

[5] Croissant, Aurel, et al. “Theorizing civilian control of the military in emerging democracies: Agency, structure and institutional change.” Zeitschrift für vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 5.1 (2011), p. 77.

[6]See the introduction to a special volume on this issue, Mello, Patrick A., and Dirk Peters. “Parliaments in security policy: Involvement, politicisation, and influence.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20.1 (2018): 3-18.

[7] See, Mukherjee, Anit, and David Pion-Berlin. “The fulcrum of democratic civilian control: re-imagining the role of defence ministries.” Journal of Strategic Studies 45.6-7 (2022): 783-797.

[8] Pion-Berlin, David, and Danijela Dudley. “Civil-military relations: What is the state of the field.” Handbook of military sciences (2020), p. 13.

[9] Mukherjee, Anit. “Fighting separately: Jointness and civil-military relations in India.” Journal of Strategic Studies 40.1-2 (2017): 6-34.

[10] Brooks, Risa A. “Integrating the civil–military relations subfield.” Annual Review of Political Science 22.1 (2019): 379-398.

[11] Pion-Berlin, David, Igor Acácio, and Andrew Ivey. “Democratically consolidated, externally threatened, and NATO aligned: finding unexpected deficiencies in civilian control.” Democratization 26.6 (2019): 1070-1087.

[12] For a succinct backgrounder see, DCAF – Geneva Center for Security Sector Governance, Parliaments-Roles and Responsibilities in good security sector governance, SSR Backgrounder Series. Geneva, 2019.

[13] Strong, James. “Democracy and Security in the UK: Why parliament matters.” (2021).

[14] Auerswald, David, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. “Some assembly required: explaining variations in legislative oversight over the armed forces.” Foreign Policy Analysis 19.1 (2023): p.4.

[15] For a discussion on how parliaments exercise their oversight functions across a diverse range of cases see, Auerswald, David, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. “Some assembly required: explaining variations in legislative oversight over the armed forces.” Foreign Policy Analysis 19.1 (2023)

[16] For an analysis of the Greek Parliament’s shortcomings in this domain (produced, not incidentally, by an international organization) see, Government Defence Integrity Index, Country Brief: Greece, Transparency International – Defence and Security, 2020.

[17] Strong, James. “Democracy and Security in the UK: Why parliament matters.” (2021).

[18] For a discussion of societal engagement with second generation reforms see, Douglas, Nadja. “The Role of Society in the Control of Armed Forces–Implications for Democracy.” Sicherheit und Frieden (S+ F)/Security and Peace (2015): 19-25.

[19] As has been the case with Israel in recent years see, Cohen, Amichai, and Stuart Alan Cohen. “Beyond the Conventional civil–military “gap”: Cleavages and convergences in Israel.” Armed Forces & Society 48.1 (2022): 164-184.

[20] For an analysis of neglect of the defence sector in -post authoritarian periods and the decidedly gradual development of defence studies as a discipline in academia see, Lima, Raphael C., Peterson F. Silva, and Gunther Rudzit. “No power vacuum: national security neglect and the defence sector in Brazil.” Defence Studies 21.1 (2021): 84-106.

[21] For a treatment of this issue in the militaries of key Latin American countries see, Solar, Carlos. “Trust in the military in post-authoritarian societies.” Current Sociology 70.3 (2022): 317-337.

[22] See, Beliakova, Polina. “Erosion by deference: Civilian control and the military in policymaking (Summer 2021).” Texas National Security Review, 4.3 (2021) and Friend, Alice Hunt, and Sharon K. Weiner. “Principals with Agency: Assessing Civilian Deference to the Military.” Texas National Security Review 5.4 (2022).

[23] See the introductory essay in the special volume, Mello, Patrick A., and Stephen M. Saideman. “The politics of multinational military operations.” Contemporary Security Policy 40.1 (2019): 30-37.

[24] Neal, Andrew W. “Parliamentary security politics as politicisation by volume.” European Review of International Studies 5.3 (2018): 70-93.

[25] Auerswald, David, Philippe Lagassé, and Stephen M. Saideman. “Some assembly required: explaining variations in legislative oversight over the armed forces.” Foreign Policy Analysis 19.1 (2023): orac034.

[26] See, Wagner, Wolfgang. “Is there a parliamentary peace? Parliamentary veto power and military interventions from Kosovo to Daesh.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20.1 (2018): 121-134, Lagassé, Philippe, and Patrick A. Mello. “The unintended consequences of parliamentary involvement: Elite collusion and Afghanistan deployments in Canada and Germany.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20.1 (2018): 135-157 and Lagassé, Philippe, and Justin Massie. “Parliamentarizing war: explaining legislative votes on Canadian military deployments.” International Relations (2023)

[27] See, Distler, Werner, and Miriam Tekath. “Knowledge and the governing of the interventionary object: Mali in the German parliament.” European Journal of International Security 8.3 (2023): 319-336.

[28] See, Bailes, Alyson JK. “Parliaments and National Strategy Documents: A comparative case-study from the Nordic region.” Geneva Center for Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), Policy Paper 36 (2015), Raunio, Tapio. “Parliament as an arena for politicisation: The Finnish Eduskunta and crisis management operations.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20.1 (2018): 158-174 and Jungwallius, Johanna. “Pushes and pokes: Towards understanding Swedish ‘mid-range’ security policy-making.” (2023).

[29] Reykers, Yf. “Strengthening parliamentary oversight of defence procurement: lessons from Belgium.” European security 30.4 (2021): 505-525.

[30] Narang, Vipin, and Paul Staniland. “Democratic accountability and foreign security policy: Theory and evidence from India.” Security Studies 27.3 (2018): 410-447.

[31] See Σωτηρόπουλος, Δημήτρης, Η κορυφή του πελατειακού κράτους: οργάνωση, στελέχωση και πολιτικοποίηση των ανώτερων βαθμίδων της κεντρικής διοίκησης στην Ελλάδα, 1974-2000, Ποταμός, 2001, [Sotiropoulos, Dimitris, The summit of the clientelistic state: organisation, manning and politicisation of the higher ranks of the central government in Greece 1974-2000, Potamos, 2001

[32] For example, favouritism played a significant role in appointments at ELDYK, the Greek Army contingent in Cyprus, up to the Turkish invasion of 1974, due to the higher compensation of officer corps postings in the island, see Βλάσσης, Σάββας, ΕΛΔΥΚ – Η τελευταία μάχη, ΔΟΥΡΕΙΟΣ ΙΠΠΟΣ, 2021 [Vlassis, Savas, ELDYK- The last battle, DOUREIOS IPPOS, 2021]

[33] See the following analysis by an ex-Chief of the Hellenic Army, Γκίνης, Κωνσταντίνος, Πολιτικο-στρατιωτικές σχέσεις στην Ελλάδα της κρίσεως (2008-2015) και το Δίλλημα της Κηδεμονίας, Στρατηγείν, 2019, Τεύχος 1, σελ. 1-32 (Ginis, Konstantinos, Civil-Military relations in crisis Greece (2008-2015) and the dilemma of Guardianship, 2019, Stratigein, Volume 1, pp. 1-32).

[34] Kornetis, Kostis. Children of the dictatorship: student resistance, cultural politics and the ‘long 1960s’ in Greece. Berghahn Books, 2022.

[35] See the following publication, in which Greek-Turkish strategic rivalry is selected as one of four highly illustrative rivalries worldwide, Colaresi, Michael P., Karen Rasler, and William R. Thompson. Strategic rivalries in world politics: Position, space and conflict escalation. Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 4-14.

[36] Αλιβιζάτος, Νίκος. “Η συνταγματική θέση των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων: Η αρχή του πολιτικού ελέγχου.” (1987). ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΝΤ. Ν. ΣΑΚΚΟΥΛΑ, 1987 [Alivizatos, Nikos, The constitutional position of the Armed Forces: The principle of civilian control, ANT. N. SAKOULAS EDITIONS, 1987]

 

[37] See, Kamaras, Antonis, Beating the authoritarian legacy: upgrading conscription in Greece and Taiwan, War on the Rocks, September 7 2022.

[38] See, Kamaras, Antonis, Establishing defence Studies in Greece? It’s high time, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 41, October 2020

[39] The author of this policy paper was taken aback by the venomous contempt articulated by an ex-General of the Hellenic Army in relation to the value of advice offered by civilian advisors to the Minister of National Defence.

[40] See, Kamaras, Antonis, Joint Operations in the Greek Armed Forces: Much to be desired, much to be achieved, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 151, January 2024.

[41] See, Γκίνης, Κωνσταντίνος, Εθνική Ασφάλεια: Υπάρχει επαρκής χώρος για αποτελεσματική στρατιωτική εισήγηση; Στρατηγείν,2020, Τεύχος 2, σελ. 1-18 (Ginis, Constantinos, National Security: is there sufficient space for effective military advice? Stratigein, 2020, Volume 2, pp. 1-18).

[42] Ibid.

[43] For an analysis of the awkward relationship between PASOK’s modernisers and the Armed Forces see, Καμάρας, Αντώνης, Εκσυγχρονιστές και Εθνική Άμυνα, GR Diplomatic Review, Μάιος 2021 [Kamaras, Antonis, Modernisers and National Defence, GR Diplomatic Review, May 2021]

[44] Ferreira da Silva, Peterson, and Augusto WM Teixeira Júnior. “The relationship between defence policy, the defence budget, and force structure in contemporary Brazil.” BRASILIANA: Journal for Brazilian Studies 10.2 (2021).

[45] Pion-Berlin, David, Igor Acácio, and Andrew Ivey. “Democratically consolidated, externally threatened, and NATO aligned: finding unexpected deficiencies in civilian control.” Democratization 26.6 (2019): 1070-1087.

[46] Mukherjee, Anit. “Fighting separately: Jointness and civil-military relations in India.” Journal of Strategic Studies 40.1-2 (2017): 6-34.

[47] The author analyses this state of affairs in Kamaras, Antonis, Joint Operations in the Greek Armed Forces: Much to be desired, much to be achieved, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 151, January 2024.

[48] Αλιβιζάτος, Νίκος. “Η συνταγματική θέση των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων: Η αρχή του πολιτικού ελέγχου.” (1987). ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΝΤ. Ν. ΣΑΚΚΟΥΛΑ, 1987 [Alivizatos, Nikos, The constitutional position of the Armed Forces: The principle of civilian control, ANT.N.SAKOULAS EDITIONS, 1987]

[49] See, Cohen, Eliot A. Supreme command: Soldiers, statesmen and leadership in wartime. Simon and Schuster, 2012.

[50] Ben-Ari, Eyal. “Taiwan’s changing military covenant and the armed forces’ institutional autonomy.” Center for Chinese Studies. http://ccs. ncl. edu. tw/ccs2/ENGLISH/research_info. aspx  (2019).

[51] Boeka, Ryan Layman. The Politics of Reform: How Elite and Domestic Preferences Shape Military Manpower Systems. Georgetown University, 2018 (unpublished Ph.D. Thesis).

[52] Kamaras, Antonis, Beating the Authoritarian legacy: upgrading conscription in Greece and Taiwan, War on the Rocks, 7 September 2022.

[53] Wagner, Wolfgang. “Is there a parliamentary peace? Parliamentary veto power and military interventions from Kosovo to Daesh.” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 20.1 (2018): 121-134.

[54] For a forceful critique of the limited engagement of the Greek Armed Forces in multinational military operations, see  Γκαρτζονίκας, Παναγιώτης, Με το ένα πόδι η Ελλάδα σε συμμαχίες και στρατιωτικές αποστολές…, SLPress, 24.4.2023 [Gartzonikas, Panagiotis, Greece with one foot in alliances and military missions …, SLPress, 24.4.2023]

[55] For an analysis of the shortcomings of parliamentary oversight of defence in Greece, see Government Defence Integrity Index, Country Brief: Greece, Transparency International Defence and Security 2020.

[56] See relatedly Καμάρας, Αντώνης, Πρέπει να μιλήσουμε για το στρατιωτικό απόρρητο, ΤΑ ΝΕΑ, 27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2023 [Kamaras, Antonis We need to talk about military classified information, TA NEA, 27 September 2023]

[57] Indicatively, none of the 24 parliamentary commissions of inquiry staged over the entire fifty years of post-junta democratic rule have issued a report that would culminate in findings endorsed by all their members, see Σταυρόπουλος Λάμπρος, Ο μεταπολιτευτικός κανόνας των εξεταστικών, ΤΟ ΒΗΜΑ, 17 Μαρτίου 2024 [Stavropoulos Lambros, The democratic transition rule of commissions of inquiry, TO VIMA, 17 March 2024]. For an astute analysis of how hyper-partisanship has undermined the role of the Greek Parliament in establishing the causal reasons of policy failure, and thus setting the foundations for mitigation via policy reforms, see Τσούκας Χαρίδημος, Κ, Τέμπη: κομματική πόλωση, παραταξιακή σκέψη, Καθημερινή, 31 Μαρτίου 2024 [Tsoukas, Haridimos, K., Tempi: partisan polarization, factional thought, Kathimerini, 31 March 2024].

[58] Αλιβιζάτος, Νίκος. “Η συνταγματική θέση των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων: Η αρχή του πολιτικού ελέγχου.” (1987). ΕΚΔΟΣΕΙΣ ΑΝΤ. Ν. ΣΑΚΚΟΥΛΑ, 1987 [Alivizatos, Nikos, The constitutional position of the Armed Forces: The principle of civilian control, ANT. N. SAKOULAS EDITIONS, 1987]

[59] While the 2/5 rule was subsequently instituted in the constitutional revision of 2019, defence and foreign affairs were excluded, see Χρήστου, Βασιλική, Εξεταστικές Επιτροπές: Η αναθέωρηση που έμεινε μετέωρη, 18 Απριλίου 2024 [Hristou Vasiliki, Committees of Inquiry: the revision that was left incomplete, 18 April 2024]

[60] See, Γκαρτζονίκας, Παναγιώτης, Κλειδί η διακλαδικότητα για την άμυνα στο Αιγαίο, SLPress, 3 Δεκεμβρίου 2022 [Gartzonikas, Panagiotis, Jointness is key to the defence of the Aegean, SLPress, 3 December 2022] and Λυμπέρης, Παναγιώτη,ς Για μια νέα οικονομία της άμυνας-Τι πρέπει να συζητήσουμε προεκλογικά για τις ανάγκες των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων, Καθημερινή, 2 Απριλίου 2024 [Liberis, Panagiotis, For a new economy of defence – What do we need to discuss pre-election for the needs of the Armed Forces, Kathimerini, 2 April 2024]

[61] Narang, Vipin, and Paul Staniland. “Democratic accountability and foreign security policy: Theory and evidence from India.” Security Studies 27.3 (2018): 410-447.

[62] For this aspect of the crisis’s impact on the evolution of Greek civil society, see Clarke, Jennifer, Huliaras, Asteris, and Sotiropoulos, Dimitris. Austerity and the third sector in Greece: Civil society at the European frontline. Routledge, 2016.

[63] See indicatively, Λασκαρίδης, Πάνος, Οι σχέσεις μας με την Τουρκία και η εθνική άμυνα: είμαστε σοβαροί;, Καθημερινή, 30 Σεπτεμβρίου 2019 [Laskaridis, Panos. Our relations with Turkey and national defence: are we serious?, 30th of September, 2019], Λασκαρίδης, Πάνος Αυταπόδεικτες αλήθειες, Καθημερινή, 12 Ιουλίου, 2020 [Laskaridis, Panos, Self-evident truths, Kathimerini, 12 July 2020].

[64] See, the investigative report by ‘Neoi Fakelloi’ on how the fiscal crisis had impacted the Hellenic Navy, in which recently retired high-ranking HN officers are remarkably frank, 21 May 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eA5h3x4ZLU

[65] Dokos, Thanos and Kollias, Christos, Greek defence spending in times of crisis: the urgent need for defence reforms, ELIAMEP Thesis, 26 April 2013.

[66] For an example of a specialist defence correspondent of this sort, see the defence news and analysis site doureios.com; for a scholarly journal run by retired officers, see strategein.gr.

[67] The author examines the interaction between philanthropy and pluralistic discourse during and beyond the fiscal crisis in Greece, in Kamaras, Antonis. “Diaspora and transnational philanthropy during the crisis and the shifting boundaries of state and civil society.” Diaspora Engagement in Times of Severe Economic Crisis: Greece and Beyond. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022. 71-93.

[68] On the increasing willingness of high-ranking retired officers to analyse the specific challenges facing the Greek Armed Forces, see the following op-ed by the retired Chief of the Fleet of the HN , Λυμπέρης, Παναγιώτης Για μια νέα οικονομία της άμυνας-Τι πρέπει να συζητήσουμε προεκλογικά για τις ανάγκες των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων, Καθημερινή, 2 Απριλίου 2024 [Liberis, Panagiotis, For a new economy of defence: What do we need to discuss pre-election for the needs of the Armed Forces, Kathimerini, 2 April 2024]

[69]For a typical demonstration of the Prime Minister’s command and ownership of national defence, see Ομιλία του Πρωθυπουργού Κυριάκου Μητσοτάκη στην Βουλή στη συζήτηση του Νομοσχεδίου του Υπουργείου Εθνικής Άμυνας «Μέριμνα υπέρ του προσωπικού των Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων, εξορθολογισμός της νομοθεσίες Ενόπλων Δυνάμεων, οργάνωση της Εθνοφυλακής και άλλες διατάξεις [Speech by the Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in Parliament in the debate on the Ministry of National Defence draft law on “Caring for the Armed Forces personnel, rationalizing the Armed Forces legislation, organizing the National Guard and other ordinances”], https://www.primeminister.gr/2023/02/07/31227

[70] Δένδιας, Νίκος, Ένοπλες Δυνάμεις 2030 Νέα Εποχή στην Εθνική άμυνα [Dendias, Nikos: Armed Forces 2030: New Era in National Defence], https://dendias.gr/kyvernitiko-ergo/ypourgeio-ethnikis-amynas/

[71] For this wider context, see Kamaras, Αntonis, The Greek Defence Sector: Turning the page?, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 126, February 2023 and Kamaras, Antonis, Innovation and the Greek Armed Forces, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 163, May 2024

[72] See this link for a brief CV of the head of HCDI, https://www.athexgroup.gr/el/pantelis-tzortzakis

[73] Indicatively, the MND almost immediately reversed course on the issue of the intellectual property rights of its funded projects, once the start-up community and defence sector firms pointed out that the original draft law was out of line with standard international practice and would be a non-starter for innovative firms. See, Γαβριήλ, Ελένη, Κρίσιμη αλλαγή από το υπουργείο Άμυνας στο νομοσχέδιο για την καινοτομία, Business Daily, 16 Μαΐου 2024 [Gavriil, Eleni, Critical change by the Ministry of Defence in the draft law for innovation, Business Daily, May 2024].

[74] For a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the war by the Greek Armed Forces, and some of the challenges they face in being able to do so, see Kamaras, Antonis, Lessons learned from a year of war in Ukraine: A Greek Reading, ELIAMEP Policy Paper 137, June 2023

[75] The most recent example is the issuing of a 400-page report by a Dutch consultancy, led by a Greek, on how the plain of Thessaly, Greece’s most fertile agricultural area, should recover from a catastrophic 2023 flood, see, Γεωργοπούλου, Τάνια, Το σχέδιο να μη γίνει έρημος η Θεσσαλία, Καθημερινή, 13 Mάρτιος 2023 [Georgopoulou, Tania, The plan to prevent Thessaly becoming a desert, Kathimerini, 13 March 2023].

[76] See the announcement of the partnership between SEKPY and universities and research institutes in Northern Greece, Newsroom, DefencEduNet: ΑΕΙ και επιχειρήσεις συμμαχούν για την άμυνα, The Power Game, 18 Δεκεμβρίου 2023 [Newsroom, DefencEduNet: Universities and businesses join forces for defence, The Power Game, 18 December 2023] and the conference jointly organized by the University of Piraeus Finance Lab and the Army Officer Cadet School on the funding of defence innovation and industry, at the following link: https://bankfin.unipi.gr/fql/defencefin2024/.

[77] See most recently, Συνέντευξη στον Βασίλη Νέδο, Νίκος Δένδιας Υπουργός Εθνικής Άμυνας – Οι δεσμεύσεις των ΗΠΑ δεν έχουν εκπληρωθεί, Καθημερινή, 13 Οκτωβρίου 2024 [Interview with Vasilis Nedos, Nikos Dendias Minister of National Defence – the Commitments of the USA have not been fulfilled, Kathimerini, 13 October 2024]

[78] For a discussion of this issue in the case of the US, see Lewis, David, E. The Number of Political Appointees: A practical Research Guide, Center for Effective Government-Harris School of Public Policy, The University of Chicago, 2024.

On 6 November 2024, ELIAMEP hosted a roundtable in Athens on ‘The Importance of History and NATO’s Role in the New Era,’ sponsored by NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division.

Policy-makers and scholars examined NATO’s evolution into a global security cornerstone, addressing key challenges such as terrorism, Russian aggression, European defence autonomy, and emerging partnerships. Emphasis was placed on balancing internal unity with external pressures, highlighting NATO’s adaptability in maintaining stability amid shifting global dynamics. 

You can read the report that presents the key points of discussion here.

The Transatlantic Periscope is an interactive, multimedia tool that brings together expert commentary, high-quality media coverage, official policy documents, quantitative data, social media posts, and gray literature. It will provide on a monthly basis a summary of the most important news concerning the Greek-US relations, as reflected in the media. Below you will find an overview for November 2024.

Following the elections of November 5 in the United States (US), the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis congratulated US President-elect Donald Trump on his victory, highlighting the longstanding and strategic nature of Greek-American relations, which he states he believes will continue to be strengthened under the new US administration. PM Mitsotakis also extended an invitation to Donald Trump to visit Greece. Moreover, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, President of the Hellenic Republic, sent a congratulatory letter to president-elect Donald Trump, wishing him success in his upcoming term.

Furthermore, six Greek-Americans have been elected to the US House of Representatives in the recent presidential election, evenly representing the Democratic and Republican parties, namely: Chris Pappas (D-NH), Maggie Goodlander (D-NH), Dina Titus (D-NV), Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY), and Mike Haridopolos (R-FL).

On defence matters, on November 14th, the State Department issued a statement approving a possible Foreign Military Sale to the Government of Greece of F-16 Engine Follow-On Support and related elements of logistics and program support for an estimated cost of $160 million. The principal contractor will be General Electric Aerospace, located in Evendale, OH.

On November 22, political consultations between Greece and the United States of America were held in Washington, D.C. ahead of Greece’s tenure in the United Nations Security Council as a non-permanent member for the 2025-2026 term. The discussions addressed technical issues regarding the United Nations Security Council but also key global challenges such as maritime security, the impact of climate change (particularly on coastal and marine environments), as well as growing risks associated with cyber security, digital resilience and United Nations peacekeeping missions.

More at: https://transatlanticperiscope.org/relationship/GR#

The Media Observatory Report (MORE) is the fruit of systematic monitoring of key Greek and Albania media. 

Each MORE offers a well-balanced mix of political insight and fact-driven analysis on the impact of Albanian media reporting of Greece and Greek media reporting of Albania on issues of common interest. It principally aims to filter out the noise that typically accompanies the media stories on the unresolved bilateral issues. 

3rd issue of MORE  (English).  The third issue is the outcome of a monitoring period between May 2023 – November 2023 and features: – The case of Fredis Beleris – The background, the various aspects of the case and the critical issues at hand – The media coverage and narratives in Greece and Albania

Greece’s integration efforts have been classified as “equality on paper”, highlighting significant gaps in the process of integration of refugees and migrants. Although the actions of the last five years have been crucial regarding labour market inclusion and access to education, persistent gaps, and fragmented implementation hinder the effectiveness of these initiatives. Focusing on the aforementioned vital pillars of integration- i.e., education and access to labour market- this paper will examine the state of the art, highlighting existing gaps and deficiencies, as well as good practices. Concretely, the objective of this paper is twofold: on the one hand, it assesses the current developments and practices, as well as the remaining obstacles; while on the other hand, it draws policy recommendations that will enable Greece to transform its integration policies from “equality on paper” to a more cohesive and effective approach.

Read here in pdf the Policy paper by Maria Eleni Pantazi Psatha, PhD candidate, KU Leuven, Programme Officer at METAdrasi-Action for Migration and Development.

Introduction

For many years, the reception and management of large migration flows, along with the control of irregular movements and the reinforcement of legal pathways, have been at the forefront of the Greek policy and legislative agenda.[1] However, there has been a shift in focus, with the integration of refugees and migrants into host communities becoming a fundamental pillar of migration policy. Undeniably, there is a strong link between migration and integration policies, while managing the effective integration of refugees and migrants is perceived both as a priority in the state’s migration policy agenda, and within the broader public discourse and opinion.[2]

Over the previous years, the Greek State has introduced and carried out numerous policy initiatives aimed at promoting integration across different aspects of social, political, labour, and economic life.

Over the previous years, the Greek State has introduced and carried out numerous policy initiatives aimed at promoting integration across different aspects of social, political, labour, and economic life. Aligning with the EU Action Plan on Integration and Inclusion for 2021-2027, which advocates for timely support of applicants and beneficiaries of international protection in the integration process, the adopted Greek National Integration Strategy seeks to facilitate and enhance the integration procedure.

Despite the actions undertaken in the past five years and the efforts to replace the absence of an inclusive integration plan, significant gaps and ambiguities persist, posing challenges to the comprehensive integration of refugees and migrants. Specifically, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX)[3], characterises the country’s approach as “equality on paper”, highlighting that while migrants in Greece enjoy basic rights, they lack equal opportunities.[4] The most significant obstacles emerge in the areas of education, and political participation, whereas access to the labour market was characterised as “slightly favourable”.

Therefore, the first section of this policy paper will examine one of the aspects of migrant and refugee integration, and specifically, labour integration. It will provide an overview of recent actions, highlighting both the progress made, and the persisting gaps. Moreover, the following section will explore the situation of educational opportunities and the access to Non-Formal and Formal Education in Greece. Lastly, this paper will present a set of policy recommendations aimed at improving the integration of refugees and migrants, with a focus on labour and educational integration, taking also into consideration climate change, as a factor that can affect the integration process.

Overall, the objective of this brief is twofold: on the one hand, it assesses the current state of integration policies and practices in Greece, while on the other hand, it draws policy recommendations to address gaps and barriers that hinder refugees’ and migrants’ access to education and employment opportunities. 

Labour Integration

…the focus of the Greek migration policy was to manage migration flows,

A significant parameter of refugee and migrant inclusion in the host society is labour integration. Undeniably, at a first stage, reception, housing, and provision of food emerge as priority needs, where most attention was paid by the Greek authorities. However, the economic integration and the employment of refugee and migrant populations becomes a means to regain their autonomy, and rebuild their lives, while also enhancing their social inclusion.[5] In the previous years, the focus of the Greek migration policy was to manage migration flows with an emphasis on border security, whereas the organised reception and integration of refugees and migrants was left aside.

Following the general elections in June 2023, a new set of priorities was introduced: promotion of social cohesion and integration of refugees and migrants, addressing the labour shortages in key sectors through organised legal migration, and enhancement of sustainable reintegration. Although the integration efforts made by the Greek state have been seen as “an equality on paper”, major steps have been made at a legislative and policy level, making the integration process “slightly favourable”.[6] Therefore, this section aims at unfolding the steps that have been made from the Greek state regarding labour integration, while also underlining persisting gaps and impasses.

Based on UNHCR figures on labour integration during the last two years,[7] the majority of respondents (80 per cent) were either not working or were only able to find occasional work. Of those working, 56 per cent were doing so without any type of legal contract, indicating significant levels of labour exploitation. The main three challenges that refugees and migrants face with respect to finding work in Greece are the lack of knowledge of the language, the lack of documentation, and the inability to find legal employment. Moreover, the majority of respondents highlighted that the reason for stopping their job was due to its seasonal character. The figures provided by another study,[8] further corroborate the aforementioned, highlighting also a significant gender-based gap in access to employment, with women being disproportionately affected compared to men. Additionally, the study revealed that while economic integration scored highest in Greece, linguistic and social integration were rated lowest, underscoring the multidimensional nature of the issue. Nationality is also an aspect determining access to the labour market, as per Figure 1.[9] Individuals from Egypt, Turkey, and Iran achieved the highest integration scores, followed by Palestinians, Iraqis, Cameroonians, Syrians, and Afghans.

Complementary, a survey conducted by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in 2021-2022, highlighted language barriers, and the lack of proper documentation as the primary challenges to employment.[10] Notably, the majority of participants (35 per cent) who had a job were asylum seekers, and a 33 per cent were beneficiaries of international protection, indicating that employment opportunities often depend on an individual’s legal status.[11] Overall, persistent obstacles, such as the temporary nature of available jobs and the difficulty in securing legal employment, significantly limit opportunities for stability and full integration.

 

Figure 1, Index attachment integration score for the ten largest nationality groups[12].

 

                                                                                                                            Source: IPL 2023.

 

An important legislative development was L. 5078/2023 and particularly Article 192 which amended Article 57 of the Asylum Code, providing that applicants have a right to access the labour market withing sixty days of the lodging of their application and the receipt of the relevant legal documents. It is considered as a crucial development as prior to 2020, asylum seekers had to wait six months to gain access to employment, leading to prolonged delays and uncertainty. The amendment also streamlines processes and enhances efficiency through digitalisation. In addition, Article 193 of the same Law, introduces a new procedure for granting residence permit, which provides access to paid employment and facilitates the regularisation of a substantial number of long-term migrants in Greece. The law further extends the duration of work permits, increases the quota for seasonal workers, reduces the types of residence permits, and simplifies documentary requirements for permit renewals.[13] Another noteworthy addition benefits second-generation migrants, who are eligible for ten-year residence permits, compared to the previous five-year permits, granting full access to the labour market. However, this favourable provision does not extend to beneficiaries of international protection, who without a valid residence permit, remain unable to access the labour market; [14] a disparity that highlights a gap in the inclusiveness of the legislative framework.

Another important legislative development is the new Migration Code which came into effect in January 2020 and amended various legal provisions of the previous Migration and Social Integration Code (L. 4251/2014).[15] The most important innovative provision is for the “long term residence permit” which allows a person to live and work in any country of the European Union.

As a general remark, it is vital to highlight the general labour market conditions in Greece. Despite noticeable improvements in recent years, unemployment rates in Greece remain high, compared to other EU Member States, ranking the country in the second place with 9,3 per cent of unemployment rate.[16] According to the International Migration Outlook,[17] the employment rate for migrants in Greece stands at 62,5 per cent, while the unemployment rate reaches a 14,9 per cent. These figures indicate a relative improvement in labour market conditions, with a greater reduction in unemployment among foreign-born individuals compared to native-born Greeks. Additionally, data from Eurostat’s migrant integration and inclusion visualisation corroborates this trend, showing that Greek nationals maintain higher employment rates than third-country nationals. [18] A particularly noteworthy finding is the temporality of employment contracts, which is significantly more common among non-EU nationals (23,3 per cent) compared to Greek nationals (10,1 per cent). This data, as illustrated in Figure 2 for labour market outcomes in 2023, underscores persistent disparities in employment opportunities and contract stability between migrants and nationals.                                    

 

 Figure 2, Labour Market Outcomes (2023)[19]

                                                                                                                   Source: Eurostat, 2024.

 

From the above it appears that high unemployment rates, combined with additional barriers, such as competition with Greek-speaking candidates, significantly hinder the holistic integration of refugees and migrants into the labour market.[20]  This challenge is particularly pronounced for third-country nationals, whose unemployment rate is even higher. According to the Public Employment Service, as of December 2023, the total number of registered unemployed third-country nationals stood at 126,610, a figure that rose further in January 2024. Interestingly, while public opinion on migration remains mixed, there is a notably positive perception of the economic benefits of labour migration.[21] Concretely, the majority of Greek nationals (71,8 per cent) believes that the departure of many migrants has had negative repercussions on production, particularly in the sectors of tourism and agriculture. Moreover, the acceptance of migrants based on the needs of the national economy is perceived highly positively (62,7 per cent).

In response to these challenges, the recently amended National Integration Strategy[22] focuses on social integration with an emphasis on early action and on the process of pre-integration for those with a refugee background. A key positive aspect of the Strategy is the inclusion of a pre-integration phase, which aims to facilitate smoother integration by teaching the Greek language, familiarising them with the European way of life, and instilling principles

of democracy and human rights. Several promising initiatives have emerged, such as the “Multaka: Intercultural Tours in Athens”, a pilot project which provided the opportunity to refugees and migrants to learn about Greek civilisation and history. While the Strategy focuses heavily on promoting social inclusion, it has faced criticism for its lack of a concrete implementation plan, and specific procedures to translate its objectives into effective actions.[23]

…he adopted legal provisions, while addressing some past barriers to labour integration, remain largely superficial.

As underlined “the objectives and actions proposed per chapter are fragmentary in nature, while there is no deepening and analysis of tools and practices that will be used to achieve them”.[24] The main issue, thus, lies in the fact that the adopted legal provisions, while addressing some past barriers to labour integration, remain largely superficial. As Lodovici points out, “measures to support access to the labour market are not sufficiently developed and are fragmented into projects implemented by NGOs and supported through EU funds”.[25] In other words, access to labour market is feasible solely through the submission of an ERGANI registration certificate by their employer to the National Social Security Entity (EFKA). However, this process can deter employers who may lack the necessary knowledge or support to navigate it, while also posing administrative hurdles for refugees and migrants.[26]

Another criticism apropos the population mentioned in the strategy underlines that focus has been placed on the integration of asylum seekers and refugees, rather than the migrant population. This by itself does not align with the preface that states “that the New National Integration Strategy is based on the new action plan of the European Union and adopts the recommendations for social inclusion”. In contrast it is mentioned that “the New Integration Strategy is addressed to asylum seekers as well as recognised beneficiaries of international protection and is aligned to the legal framework in force”,[27] which excludes to the fullest other categories of people. Thus, the idea of integration for all is not clearly envisaged in the Greek Strategy. Additionally, the progress made by state factors is also missing together with the best practices that have derived from the work of civil society organisations. At this point it is also important to underline the contribution of NGOs and international organizations in advancing the integration of refugees and migrants in Greece through the provision of employability services and vocational trainings.

A survey conducted by NGOs[28] revealed that individuals who participated in the research were beneficiaries of the project partner organisations, meaning they had received support from professionals prior to securing employment. Thus, this demonstrates that NGO support plays a critical role in providing refugees and migrants with access to labour market information and guidance on the necessary steps to gain employment. In any case, “successful integration of refugees needs a whole-of-society approach”.[29] There is also a notable absence of concrete measures addressing the needs of people with disabilities, as well as LGBTQ+ individuals.[30] Incontestably, significant progress has been achieved in improving employment opportunities for refugee and migrant populations; nevertheless, Greece still ranks among the lowest in Europe in terms of establishing an effective policy framework to enhance employability. [31]

…there have been several good practices that have been implemented in the area of integration and particularly labour integration.

Nonetheless, there have been several good practices that have been implemented in the area of integration and particularly labour integration, and often emerge from the collaboration between state actors, international organisations, and civil society organizations. The Hellenic Integration Support for Beneficiaries of International Protection programme (HELIOS), which was launched in 2019 by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) offered a variety of support actions aimed at promoting the independent living of beneficiaries of international protection, including information sessions, work counselling, language courses, and housing. A notable example is the organization of Job Fairs, which facilitate connections between employers from various sectors and refugees or migrants seeking employment. For instance, in July 2024, a Job Fair held on the island of Lesvos saw the participation of 452 individuals, resulting in 219 job offers.[32] Additionally, UNHCR has launched the ADAMA online platform, which plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between refugees looking for jobs in Greece and prospective employers across the country. This initiative not only provides refugees with essential information about the labour market and connects them with employers but also encourages businesses and agencies in the private sector to actively include refugees in their workforce, thereby fostering greater inclusion and diversity in the Greek labour market.

Another important initiative is the introduction of a pilot tool by the Hellenic Manpower Employment Organisation (OAED)- the so-called “Skills Recognition Tool”.[33] Specifically, as the report underlined, one key insight from this initiative is the critical role of collaboration between public institutions and civil society organisations in ensuring the effectiveness of the process.[34] This programme is therefore, aiming at placing approximately 1,000 recognised refugees in Attica and Central Macedonia. Such partnerships are essential for accurately evaluating refugees’ competencies and aligning them with appropriate employment opportunities. However, as of now, there is a lack of publicly available data detailing the progress and outcomes of this pilot program, making it challenging to assess its overall impact.

Furthermore, another factor that has contributed to shaping labour integration, is labour shortages. Concretely, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, the agricultural, tourism, and construction sectors faced increased shortages, which were addressed by granting exceptional right to work.[35] Yet, labour shortages remain a constant issue up to date, while efforts have been made since the beginning of the year through bilateral agreements with Bangladesh and Egypt. Before examining the aforementioned agreements, it is crucial to mention the system of metaklisi, which focuses on hiring third-country nationals for the purpose of employment- mainly to areas where there was no interest from Greek employees.[36] According to the latest available data (2022-2023) from the Ministry of Migration and Asylum regarding the system of metaklisi,[37] a total of 32,794 of requests were submitted in 2022, out of which 29,130 were accepted. In 2023, the number of requests decreased to 25,945 of which, 20,042 were approved. Nonetheless, this process has been criticised for often allowing informal hirings, without a contract, leading to exploitation.

According to the Hellenic Ministry of Labour, the total number of residence visa quotas for 2023-2024 was 167,925.[38] Of the available posts, 20,000 would be covered through the agreements with Egypt and Bangladesh, and the rest through the system of metaklisi. It is interesting to highlight two points at this stage. Firstly, the number of permitted work permits was set significantly lower than the requests submitted through the Regional Authorities- that were approximately 380,000. While there was an increase in the number of workers allowed in sectors such as hospitality and accommodation- 9,261 compared to 2,811 during 2021-2022- this figure remains far below the 80, 316 employees proposed. Specifically, of the 379,165 requests received for 2023-2024, only 147,925 permits were issued, covering just 39 per cent of the demand. [39] Secondly, limited quotas were allocated for highly skilled workers, reflecting also the relatively low demand within the Greek labour market.[40]

In February 2022, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on migration and mobility was signed with Bangladesh, covering seasonal labour needs. Specifically, the agreement outlines the conditions for entry and temporary residence of Bangladeshi nationals for temporary employment. It provides the issuance of 4,000 temporary residence permits annually, each valid for a duration of five years, under the system of metaklisi.[41] In addition, and for the purpose of covering existing labour shortages, the Memorandum allows for up to 15,000 Bangladeshis already residing undocumented in Greece to be granted temporary long term seasonal visas, enabling them to enter the labour market.

According to the information provided by the Greek authorities, a total of 10,337 Bangladeshis applied for regularisation in 2023, out of whom 3,405 were granted residence permits or legal status. However, 1,009 applications were cancelled for various reasons. As of February 2024, an additional 113 applications were submitted, with approximately 5,910 still pending review. According to the Embassy of Bangladesh, rejected applicants will have the opportunity to re-apply, provided they meet the necessary conditions.[42]

On the other hand, the agreement with Egypt was signed on November 2022 and concerned the entry and residence of 5,000 Egyptian citizens for the purpose of employment in the agricultural sector. The screening and the choice of Egyptian nationals will be made by the state of Egypt, and then forwarded to the Greek consular authorities. The permit cap is set at a level which can be regarded as insufficient to meet the actual needs of the Greek agricultural sector. However, according to the former Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, the low cap is intended to allow Greece to assess the agreement’s practical implementation, while ensuring that the country does not become overly dependent on a single source for its labour needs.[43]

The former Minister for Migration and Asylum, announced in June 2024 that an initial list of eligible 2,400 Egyptian seasonal workers had already been compiled.[44] However, specific statistics on the number of Egyptian workers who have arrived in Greece under this MoU is limited and not publicly available.[45] Based on data from ECRE,[46] the recognition rates for international protection among Egyptian applicants in Greece were notably low in recent years. In 2023, the recognition rate stood at 0,9 per cent, which further declined to 0,6 per cent in 2024.

…on the framework of adopting a more inclusive National Integration Strategy, factors such as climate change should also be taken into consideration.

In addition, and on the framework of adopting a more inclusive National Integration Strategy, factors such as climate change should also be taken into consideration since they can critically affect the integration of refugees and migrants into the labour market, and should thus, be included in the Integration Strategy. Specifically, climate change can influence labour integration, particularly in sectors such as agriculture and tourism. [47] Adverse effects like rainfall variability, soil erosion, and extreme weather events may disrupt agricultural production and reduce job opportunities. [48] Contrariwise, a more positive outcome would be the extension of the growing season which will benefit the cultivation of certain crops, leading to the emergence of new opportunities in some areas. Therefore, the link between climate change and labour integration is an aspect that could be incorporated into the Integration Strategy, as it could foster the development of regional responses that proactively address potential impacts of climate change on the integration process. This raises the question of whether existing bilateral agreements could be adapted to anticipate the challenges posed by climate change. An example could be the temporal circular labour migration scheme for communities vulnerable to climate change;[49] Bangladesh for instance, is a country that is severely affected by climate change. Thus, in the already signed MoU the aspect of climate change could also be added, reinforcing economic growth, social welfare, and innovation. Such an initiative would provide opportunities for both countries, reduce pressures on vulnerable communities, and expand avenues for sustainable labor integration.

…despite the strengthening of the institutional and legal framework for migrant integration, the implementation phase remains incomplete and “under construction”. 

Overall, from the above it becomes evident that despite the strengthening of the institutional and legal framework for migrant integration, the implementation phase remains incomplete and “under construction”. The primary issue thus, is not the absence of law, but rather the “inability of the administration to enforce it”.[50] The aforementioned analysis highlights that the question of integration of refugees and migrants into today’s Greek labour market remains largely unchanged over the past decade.[51] Undeniably, there have been notable advancements in employment through the adoption of the Law 5078/2023, the new Migration Code, the signature of the bilateral agreements with Egypt and Bangladesh, the National Integration Strategy, and the collaboration of civil society and international organisations; yet these efforts lack the coherence needed to achieve meaningful outcomes. A cohesive and comprehensive approach is still required, aligning with the needs of the national labour market, as well as emerging factors, such as climate change that could influence labour market needs, ensuring equal opportunities, and focusing on fostering long-term employment.

Non-formal and formal education

Access to education is transformative for refugees and migrants, serving as one of the most critical components of successful integration. Educational attainment and language proficiency are widely recognised as the cornerstones of the integration process, enabling individuals to build independence, enhance employment prospects, and foster social inclusion. [52] Therefore, this section explores the current state of educational opportunities for refugees and migrants in Greece, emphasising persistent challenges and barriers that hinder access and participation. It also highlights existing best practices that have proven effective and should be expanded to ensure a more inclusive and equitable educational framework for these populations.

In contrast with the access to labour market, education for refugees and migrants in Greece is rated as “slightly unfavourable”.

In contrast with the access to labour market, education for refugees and migrants in Greece is rated as “slightly unfavourable”, according to MIPEX. Based on a report from the Greek Council of Refugees, educational access is described as “another hurdle-filled area”.[53] Beyond legal stipulations, it is often the case that administrative challenges, and the absence of inclusive school practices frequently lead to exclusion. Even from a legal standpoint, the education of refugee and migrant children is often framed as an obligation, rather than a right.[54] Under Article 55 of the Asylum Code, asylum-seeking children are required to attend primary and secondary school, on the same basis as Greek nationals.[55] Preparation for entering formal education is also of outmost importance; nevertheless, reception classes, which are essential for easing this transitions, are often delayed due to understaffing and logistical challenges, leaving many children excluded from the educational system.

Based on data provided by Eurostat, “educational attainment is becoming an increasingly important factor, both in the labour market and for individuals, as well as society in general”.[56] Regarding educational attainment distributions in 2023, 41,8 per cent of third-country nationals had less than primary and lower secondary education, 41,8 per cent had upper secondary, and 10,1 per cent tertiary education.[57] Regarding children’s education, there is a lack of official data on enrollment in formal education provided by the Ministry of Education. Available information often pertains to non-formal activities, typically provided by NGOs. However, the Ministry of Education reported an increase in school registrations (16,417 students) and attendance (12,285 students) for 2021-2022.[58] Additionally, regarding the applications for recognition of titles and qualifications awarded by non-Greek Higher Education Institutions, 9,224 and 8,517 applications were submitted to DOATAP in 2022 and 2023 respectively. From those, a total of 11,472 and 8,481 diploma recognition documents were issued for 2022 and 2023.[59]

The programme[60] “All Children in Education” (ACE)[61] implemented by UNICEF from September 2021 to February 2024, assisted a total of 24,057 children not only through the provision of preparatory classes, but also through helping with the enrolment in formal education. By August 2022, approximately 22,000 refugee and migrant children were in Greece, with an estimated 17,000 being of school age, while at the end of 2022, 16,109 of these children had accessed education: 14,844 in formal education and 1,265 in non-formal education. Thus, about 68 per cent of refugee and migrant children attended formal or non-formal education.[62] By the end of 2023, approximately 15,134 refugee and migrant children were enrolled in Greek schools,[63] and by January 2024, 14,222 were actively attending classes.[64] Therefore, this demonstrates a clear increase in enrollment rates, with more refugee and migrant children actively participating in education. This progress underscores the impact of targeted programmes like ACE in promoting access to education.

It is important to note that the aforementioned data are provided by UNICEF and other organisations, since the availability and regency of official, and publicly available data is limited. Notably, Greece ranks second to last among European countries in child related Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) data availability, reaching only a 52 per cent.[65] This significant data impasse poses challenges in accurately assessing and addressing the educational needs of refugee and migrant children, underscoring the necessity for enhanced data collection and transparency to inform effective policymaking.

Adult refugees and asylum seekers are entitled to access several educational programmes offered by state and private agencies, international organisations or NGOS. For example, individuals who have not completed mandatory education can enroll in schools of Second Chance. Also, asylum seekers with a secondary education diploma are eligible to participate in examinations to enter Universities or Higher Technological Institutions or to register in Institutes of Vocational Training (IEK). On the other hand, beneficiaries of international protection are treated in the same way as Greek citizens regarding recognition of foreign certificates and qualifications. In case where documentation is unavailable, Greek authorities are required to facilitate the process. However, there is no official data available on the number of adult refugees and migrants attending formal education.

…understanding and learning the Greek language remains the most significant challenge for refugees and migrants. 

As highlighted earlier, understanding and learning the Greek language remains the most significant challenge for refugees and migrants. The limited availability of state-provided, language courses is often covered by local NGOs in collaboration with international organisations. Notable examples include the HELIOS project which integrates language learning as a component of its broader integration efforts. The Stepping Stone project implemented by a Greek NGO with the support of UNHCR, offering Greek language courses to facilitate communication and integration.

Good practices:

Several good practices are worth mentioning in the context of reinforcing educational integration of refugees and migrants. For instance, Action Two of the National Integration Strategy provides non-formal educational activities, conducted by professionals specialised in teaching Greek as a foreign language. This aspect is either taking place in preparatory classes or as an additional support within the formal educational system, including instruction in basic concepts of the English language. Nonetheless, what remains unclear is which entities will provide the language courses, how people can access them, and other general information. Additionally, the Department of Socio-economic Integration of the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, in collaboration with UNHCR, established a helpdesk for social integration.[66] This helpdesk, among other services, will also respond to requests on the access to Greek language courses and help people- through a new guide accessible in various languages- to take their first steps in the host country.

The Lifelong Learning Centers (LLC)[67] provided by the Ministry of Education and Religion are also another good practice that provides informal education to adults. In the context of a general education curriculum, the Centers offer Greek language courses to adults. This practice is of extreme importance for the promotion of education for adults with a refugee or migrant background and sets a great basis for the promotion of integration and social inclusion. It is also vital to mention that the Social Service through its collaboration with schools and educational authorities facilitates the enrollment of children in schools, even without any official documentation.[68]

Challenges:

From the above, it becomes obvious that a number of initiatives have been undertaken in the last years in order to facilitate the integration of refugees and migrants- both minors and adults- in the educational system of Greece; however, emphasis has been given to preparatory classes and non-formal educational activities rather than to the enrollment and active participation in formal education. These efforts, while promising, highlight gaps in coordination and communication that need to be addressed. Clarifying responsibilities, expanding the availability of language courses, and improving data collection on educational participation are some impasses that require amelioration.

One problem identified during the Greek Ombudsman’s on-site inspections, [69]  is that despite the existence of legal provisions that make education mandatory, there is a number of factors that prevent children from attending school regularly. One key challenge is transportation, as many children leave in remote areas or camps which are far from schools, making regular attendance difficult. Another issue is the inadequacy of resources- such as trained personnel- which usually complicates the inclusion of refugee and migrant children to a formal classroom.[70]

Shortcomings were also identified in some facilities regarding available logistical infrastructure, while the lack of funding from the Ministry of Education was also an important obstacle. These obstacles often lead to higher dropout rates and limited participation in education for refugee and migrant children. Notably, many of these issues were already identified and documented by the Greek Ombudsman as early as 2021, yet they remain largely unresolved. Addressing these systemic challenges is essential to ensuring meaningful access to education for all children.

…more attention has been paid in the preparatory process and the non-formal education activities rather than the inclusion to formal classrooms. 

From the above examination, it becomes obvious that despite the existence of a legal framework that reassures the access to educational activities for refugees and migrants, either minors or adults, in practice, a harmonised approach with common standards and indicators for education quality and content is missing. Specifically, more attention has been paid in the preparatory process and the non-formal education activities rather than the inclusion to formal classrooms. In no case does this undermine the importance of introductory classes that will enable the smoother integration to the Greek educational system. However, more attention needs to be paid from state actors to adopting a unified approach regarding formal education. Additionally, the lack of publicly available data is also hindering the monitoring of the achieved results.

…stronger collaboration between state actors, NGOs, facilities, and international organisations is required.

If we take the example of data offered by a Greek NGO for 2024, from the 1,920 new students that attended non-formal educational activities, only 754 attended formal education. This proves that the gap between non-formal and formal activities is wide, leading to an insufficient educational integration. The persistent impasses and difficulties in accessing formal education led to the conclusion that stronger collaboration between state actors, NGOs, facilities, and international organisations is required in order to provide an organised programme of educational activities for children and adults. 

Policy recommendations 

The aforementioned analysis highlights that Greece has made notable progress in advancing the integration of refugees and migrants, with significant steps, such as the adoption of new legislation to reinforce labour integration, the release of the New Integration Strategy, and the implementation of various educational activities by organisations, public actors, and NGOs. Nevertheless, the ad hoc nature of these policies, and the inconsistencies in strategic planning continue to pose challenges. “The contradictions [of the implemented policies] cause serious impasses, and inefficiencies, which public services and agencies, the local authorities, and NGOs involved are called upon to address”.[71] To achieve effective and sustainable integration, it is imperative to develop a stable and coherent integration policy that addresses the evolving realities of refugee and migrant populations in Greece, including emerging challenges such as climate change. [72]

…the integration process of refugees and migrants is still facing substantial gaps that hinder the creation of an equitable and inclusive society. 

Overall, the integration process of refugees and migrants is still facing substantial gaps that hinder the creation of an equitable and inclusive society. Addressing these challenges requires a commitment to the principles of inclusivity, equity, and adaptability. By embracing a more comprehensive approach and fostering collaboration across all sectors of society, Greece can transform integration from a mere policy goal into concrete outcomes.

1. Adopt a holistic and coherent policy framework that will address the needs and challenges that the refugee and migrant population is facing based on the principle of equal opportunities. While the Greek state has made strides in implementing a more structured legal and policy framework, many actions remain isolated efforts rather than part of a comprehensive strategy. Greece needs to prioritise systematic planning and coordinated efforts across all sectors.
2. Simplify administrative processes and make them more accessible. For example, the Greek Asylum Service’s upgraded information system (Alkyoni II), developed by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, offers a promising solution by enabling services such as document submission and application registration in multilingual and digital formats, streamlining previously cumbersome processes.
3. Implement a more comprehensive National Integration Strategy that applies to all legally residing third-country nationals and individuals with a migrant background. Though the new National Integration Strategy provides a pre-integration process, it fails to fully incorporate labour integration into its framework. A more cohesive and inclusive approach will not only reduce inequalities but also foster social cohesion and economic development.
4. Shift focus from temporary employment to long-term labour opportunities that align with the evolving needs of the market. Additionally, a needs assessment would also be essential for the evaluation of labour demands, identification of the required skills, and a determination of the duration of work and stay.[73]
5. Incorporate climate change and adaptation in the integration strategy. Labour migration could be perceived as an adaptation strategy to the effects of climate change.in general, migration can be seen as an adaptation strategy regarding mobility due to climate change. Therefore, this could also be implemented in the case of labour integration through bilateral skills partnerships, or circular/seasonal migration schemes. Such initiatives would provide opportunities for both countries, reduce pressures on vulnerable communities, and expand avenues for sustainable labor integration.
6. Enhance collaboration among state agencies, local authorities, the private sector, NGOs, international organizations, and professional associations. Such partnerships can provide targeted support and facilitate the effective integration of refugees and migrants.
7. Reinforce access to formal education., programmes like ACE must be further reinforced, as it has successfully provided both formal and non-formal educational opportunities to children, while also preparing teachers to handle diverse classrooms, resulting in a more harmonised approach to education. Scaling up such programmes and addressing systemic barriers like transportation and teacher training will be crucial for improving access to education for refugee and migrant populations in Greece.
8. Develop individualised and needs-based approach policies focusing on the needs of refugees and migrants. Training in intercultural education and cultural diversity, academic guidance, and financial support are some targeted needs that could be further explored at a national level, taking into consideration the needs and capacities of the country.

 

References

Article 16 of Law No. 4783/2021 (previously Article 42 of the Legislative Act 1-5-2020).

Casalis M., Hangartner D., Hartman A., Sanchez R., ‘Home for Good? Obstacles and Opportunities for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Greece’ (IPL, 2023) < https://reliefweb.int/report/greece/home-good-obstacles-and-opportunities-refugees-and-asylum-seekers-greece > accessed 03 November 2024.

Chouzouraki A., ‘Without papers, there is no life: Legal barriers in access to protection for unaccompanied children in Greece’ (Greek Council for Refugees and Save the Children, 2023) < https://gcr.gr/wp-content/uploads/No_paper_no_life.pdf > accessed 11 November 2024.

DiaNEOsis, ‘What Greeks Believe-Part B’ (DiaNEOsis, 2024) < https://www.dianeosis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/TPE2024_Part_B.pdf> accessed 06 November 2024.

Dimitriadi A., ‘Looking for seasonal workers: Greece’s search for migrant labor’ (ELIAMEP, 2024), < https://www.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Policy-Paper-164-Dimitriadi-EN-final.pdf > accessed 05 November 2024. 

DOATAP, ‘Statistical Data’ (DOATAP, 2023) < https://www.doatap.gr/enhmerosh/statistika/> accessed 13 November 2024.

EUAA, ‘Annual Report on the Situation of Asylum in the European Union’ (EUAA, 2024) < https://euaa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/2024-06/2024_Asylum_Report_EN.pdf> accessed 08 November 2024.

Eurostat, ‘Migrant integration and inclusion dashboard’ (Eurostat, 2024) < https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/dashboard/migrant-integration-inclusion/> accessed 06 November 2024.

Eurostat, ‘Migrant integration statistics-education’ (Eurostat, 2024) <  https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Migrant_integration_statistics_-_education> accessed 12 November 2024.

Eurostat, ‘Population by educational attainment level, sex, age and citizenship’ (Eurostat, 2024) <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/edat_lfs_9911/default/table?lang=en> accessed 12 November 2024. 

Eurostat, ‘Unemployment by sex and age’ (Eurostat, 2024), <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/UNE_RT_M__custom_4655204/bookmark/table?lang=en&bookmarkId=6870950a-b6ad-4f89-b327-2e1829d16c11 > accessed 05 November 2024. 

Frangiskou A., Kandylis G., et al., ‘From reception to integration: migrant populations in Greece during and in the aftermath of the crisis’ (National Centre for Social Research-EKKE, 2020) < https://www.ekke.gr/publication_files/from-reception-to-integration-migrant-populations-in-greece-during-and-in-the-aftermath-of-the-crisis > accessed 02 November 2024.

Gemi E., and Feta B., ‘Migration Developments in Greece in 2023’ (ELIAMEP, 2024) < https://www.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Working-paper-128-SOPEMI-2.pdf > accessed 03 November 2024.

Generation 2.0, ‘Comments on the National Integration Strategy’ (Generation 2.0, 2022), <https://g2red.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/sxolia-g2red-gia-ethiniki-stratigiki.pdf> accessed 07 November 2024. 

Georgakopoulos T., ‘The Consequences of Climate Change in Greece’ (DiaNEOsis, 2021) < https://www.dianeosis.org/en/2021/12/the-consequences-of-climate-change-in-greece/ > accessed 15 November 2024.

Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Access to Education; (ECRE, 2024) < https://asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/reception-conditions/employment-and-education/access-education/> accessed 11 November 2024. 

Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Access to the Labour Market’ (ECRE, 2024) < Reception Conditions: Access to the Labour Market> accessed 06 November 2024.

Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Do the Human Right Thing: Raising our voice for refugee rights’ (Active Citizens Fund, 2022) < https://www.rescue.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/Seeking%20a%20new%20life%20-%20seeking%20employment.pdf > accessed 03 November 2024.

Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Statistics’ (ECRE, 2024) < https://asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/statistics/?utm_source=chatgpt.com> accessed 11 November 2024.

Greek Forum for Refugees, ‘Activity Report 2023’ (Greek Forum for Refugees, 2023) < https://gcr.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PROSFYGES_pepragmena_2023_GR.pdf > accessed 14 November 2024.

Greek Forum of Refugees, ‘Position on the National Integration Strategy’ (Greek Forum of Refugees,2022) < https://refugees.gr/greek-forum-of-refugees-position-on-the-national-integration-strategy/> accessed 07 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, ‘Government Gazette Issue’ (Ministry of Labour, 2023), < https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/FEK-2023-Tefxos-B-06844-downloaded-20_12_2023.pdf> accessed 10 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, ‘Press Release on metaklisi for 2023-2024’ (Ministry of Labour, 2023), <https://ypergasias.gov.gr/sto-epipedo-tis-proigoumenis-dietias-oi-metakliseis-ergazomenon-apo-trites-chores-gia-tin-periodo-2023-2024/ > accessed 10 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Metaklisi 2022-2023’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2023)< https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/%CE%A3%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AC-%CE%9C%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%BA%CE%BB%CE%AE%CF%83%CE%B5%CF%89%CE%BD-2022_2023.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com  > accessed 10 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘National Integration Strategy’ (Ministry of Migration and ASYLUM, 2022) < https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/NATIONAL-STRATEGY-FINAL.pdf  >accessed 07 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Press Release’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2024)< https://migration.gov.gr/megali-proseleysi-ton-epi-makron-diamenonton-metanaston-sti-nomimi-apascholisi-symfona-me-to-arthro-193-tis-tropologias-toy-ypoyrgeioy-metanasteysis-kai-asyloy/ > accessed 14 November 2024.

Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Press Release on the agreement between Greece and Egypt’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2024)< https://migration.gov.gr/stis-10-ioynioy-xekina-ti-leitoyrgia-tis-i-ilektroniki-platforma-gia-tin-efarmogi-tis-symfonias-elladas-aigyptoy/> accessed 10 November 2024.

InfoMigrants, ‘About 3,400 Bangladeshi migrants regularized in Greece in 2023’ (InfoMigrants, 2024) < https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/55362/about-3400-bangladeshi-migrants-regularized-in-greece-in-2023> accessed 10 November 2024.

IOM, ‘Integrating Migration into Environment and Climate Change Interventions: A Toolkit’ (IOM,  2021) <https://eca.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl666/files/mmicd/environment-climate-change-toolkit.pdf > accessed 15 November 2024.

IPA (L. 4636/2019).

Kalogiannidis S., Kalfas D., et al., ‘Integration of Climate Change Strategies into Policy and Planning for Regional Development: A Case Study of Greece (Land, 2024) < https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/3/268> accessed 14 November 2024.

Kapsalis A., ‘Mobility and Employment of Refugee Populations in the Greek Region’ (IOM, 2022) <https://greece.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl1086/files/documents/MOBILITY%20AND%20EMPLOYMENT_EN_online.pdf> accessed 07 November 2024.

Lodovici M.S., ‘Integration of Refugees in Greece, Hungary and Italy: Comparative analysis’ (European Parliament, 2017).

Migrant Integration Policy Index, ‘Greece-2019’ (Migrant Integration Policy Index, 2019) <https://www.mipex.eu/greece> accessed 01 November 2024.

Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, ‘Refugees and Education’ (Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, 2024) < https://www.minedu.gov.gr/tothema-prosfigiko-m> accessed 12 November 2024.

OECD, ‘International Migration Outlook 2024’ (OECD, 2024) https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/11/international-migration-outlook-2024_c6f3e803.html  accessed 05 November 2024.

Papadopoulos V., ‘Issues of Integration of Immigrants in Greek Society’ (Institute for Alternative Policies [ENA], 2023),<  https://enainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ENA_Issues-of-Integration-of-Immigrants_EN-1.pdf > accessed 02 November 2024.

The Greek Ombudsman, ‘The Challenges of Migratory Flows and Refugee Protection: Refugee Conditions and Procedures’ (The Greek Ombudsman, 2024) <https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/news/greece-help-desk-integration-refugees_en> accessed 13 November 2024.

UNHCR, ‘The talent behind the numbers: Introducing Refugees in Greece’ (UNHCR, 2022) <https://reliefweb.int/report/greece/unhcr-greece-introducing-people-behind-numbers-updated-june-2022-enel > accessed 11 November 2024.

UNICEF, ‘All Children in Education: Ensuring a Pathway to Education for Refugee and Migrant Children in Greece’ (UNICEF, 2024) < https://www.unicef.org/greece/en/media/4306/file/%CE%91CE%20Brief%20ENGL.pdf.pdf> accessed 12 November 2024.

UNICEF, ‘Country Office Annual Report 2022: Greece’ (UNICEF, 2022) < https://www.unicef.org/media/135936/file/Greece-2022-COAR.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com > accessed 13 November 2024.

UNICEF, ‘Country Office Annual Report 2023: Greece’ (UNICEF, 2023) < https://www.unicef.org/media/152026/file/Greece-2023-COAR.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com> accessed 13 November 2024.

Wolffhardt A., Carmine Conte and Sinem Yilmaz, ‘The European Benchmark for Refugee Integration: A comparative analysis of the National Internation Evaluation Mechanism in 14 EU Countries’ (Fundacja Instytut Spraw Publicznych, 2022) < https://www.migpolgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/The-European-benchmark-for-refugee-integration.-Evaluation-2-Comprehensive-report.pdf > accessed 11 November 2024.

World Bank Group’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, ‘Support to the Labour Market Integration of Refugees in Greece: Assessing Skills and Work Readiness-Best Practices and Recommendations’ (World Bank Group, 2020), <https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099816003082261107/pdf/P17097904da52c05308137080d97c1ffb23.pdf> accessed 08 November 2024. 

 

 

[1] Vassilis Papadopoulos, ‘Issues of Integration of Immigrants in Greek Society’ (Institute for Alternative Policies [ENA], 2023),<  https://enainstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/ENA_Issues-of-Integration-of-Immigrants_EN-1.pdf > accessed 02 November 2024.

[2] Amalia Frangiskou, Georgios Kandylis et al., ‘From reception to integration: migrant populations in Greece during and in the aftermath of the crisis’ (National Centre for Social Research-EKKE, 2020) 17, < https://www.ekke.gr/publication_files/from-reception-to-integration-migrant-populations-in-greece-during-and-in-the-aftermath-of-the-crisis > accessed 02 November 2024.

[3] The measurements included in the Migrant Integration Policy Index are the most recent, referring to the period 2019-2020.

[4] Migrant Integration Policy Index, ‘Greece-2019’ (Migrant Integration Policy Index, 2019) <https://www.mipex.eu/greece> accessed 01 November 2024.

[5] Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Do the Human Right Thing: Raising our voice for refugee rights’ (Active Citizens Fund, 2022) < https://www.rescue.org/sites/default/files/2022-04/Seeking%20a%20new%20life%20-%20seeking%20employment.pdf > accessed 03 November 2024.

[6] Migrant Integration Policy Index (n 4).

[7] An ongoing study commissioned by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) from February 2022 until November 2024- with the latest available data, provides insights and figures on the integration of refugees and migrants. See: https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiNzNhNmJjMzktOGJkMi00MTFkLTliYmUtZmUzMjVlMzhmZmJjIiwidCI6ImU1YzM3OTgxLTY2NjQtNDEzNC04YTBjLTY1NDNkMmFmODBiZSIsImMiOjh9

[8] Marine Casalis, Dominik Hangartner, Alexandra Hartman, Rodrigo Sanchez, ‘Home for Good? Obstacles and Opportunities for Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Greece’ (IPL, 2023) 37, < https://reliefweb.int/report/greece/home-good-obstacles-and-opportunities-refugees-and-asylum-seekers-greece > accessed 03 November 2024.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Greek Council for Refugees, (n 5).

[11] Additionally, it is important to mention that based on Article 26 of the Asylum Code, recognised refugees and subsidiary protection beneficiaries have full and automatic access to the labour market, under the same conditions as nationals, without any obligation to obtain a work permit.

[12] Marine Casalis (n 8) 35.

[13] Eda Gemi and Bledar Feta, ‘Migration Developments in Greece in 2023’ (ELIAMEP, 2024) 21, < https://www.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Working-paper-128-SOPEMI-2.pdf > accessed 03 November 2024.

[14] Specifically, beneficiaries of subsidiary protection do not have the right to receive a three-year permit like recognised refugees. Instead, they obtain a one-year residence permit.

[15] Angeliki Dimitriadi, ‘Looking for seasonal workers: Greece’s search for migrant labor’ (ELIAMEP, 2024), < https://www.eliamep.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Policy-Paper-164-Dimitriadi-EN-final.pdf > accessed 05 November 2024.

[16] Eurostat, ‘Unemployment by sex and age’ (Eurostat, 2024), <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/UNE_RT_M__custom_4655204/bookmark/table?lang=en&bookmarkId=6870950a-b6ad-4f89-b327-2e1829d16c11 > accessed 05 November 2024.

[17] OECD, ‘International Migration Outlook 2024’ (OECD, 2024) 55, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/11/international-migration-outlook-2024_c6f3e803.html  accessed 05 November 2024.

[18]Eurostat, ‘Migrant integration and inclusion dashboard’ (Eurostat, 2024) < https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/dashboard/migrant-integration-inclusion/> accessed 06 November 2024.

[19] Ibid, 213.

[20] Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Access to the Labour Market’ (ECRE, 2024) < Reception Conditions: Access to the Labour Market> accessed 06 November 2024.

[21] DiaNEOsis, ‘What Greeks Believe-Part B’ (DiaNEOsis, 2024) < https://www.dianeosis.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/TPE2024_Part_B.pdf> accessed 06 November 2024.

[22] Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘National Integration Strategy’ (Ministry of Migration and ASYLUM, 2022) < https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/NATIONAL-STRATEGY-FINAL.pdf  >accessed 07 November 2024.

[23] Greek Forum of Refugees, ‘Position on the National Integration Strategy’ (Greek Forum of Refugees,2022) < https://refugees.gr/greek-forum-of-refugees-position-on-the-national-integration-strategy/> accessed 07 November 2024.

[24] Apostolis Kapsalis, ‘Mobility and Employment of Refugee Populations in the Greek Region’ (IOM, 2022) <https://greece.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl1086/files/documents/MOBILITY%20AND%20EMPLOYMENT_EN_online.pdf> accessed 07 November 2024.

[25] Manuela Samek Lodovici, ‘Integration of Refugees in Greece, Hungary and Italy: Comparative analysis’ (European Parliament, 2017).

[26]Apostolis Kapsalis (n 24).

[27] Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum (n 22) 6.

[28] Greek Council for Refugees, (n 5).

[29] UNHCR, ‘Advancing Refugee Integration in Greece’ (UNHCR, 2023).

[30]Generation 2.0, ‘Comments on the National Integration Strategy’ (Generation 2.0, 2022), <https://g2red.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/sxolia-g2red-gia-ethiniki-stratigiki.pdf> accessed 07 November 2024.

[31] The assessed indicators are the following: a) Access to employment for groups of special concern, b) Administrative barriers to accessing employment, c) Awareness raising about the specific labor market situation of beneficiaries of international protection, d) Assessment of skills, e) Job-seeking counselling and positive action, f) Targeted support for entrepreneurs. (Ibid n 24).

[32]EUAA, ‘Annual Report on the Situation of Asylum in the European Union’ (EUAA, 2024) 143, < https://euaa.europa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/2024-06/2024_Asylum_Report_EN.pdf> accessed 08 November 2024.

[33]World Bank Group’s Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, ‘Support to the Labour Market Integration of Refugees in Greece: Assessing Skills and Work Readiness-Best Practices and Recommendations’ (World Bank Group, 2020), <https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099816003082261107/pdf/P17097904da52c05308137080d97c1ffb23.pdf> accessed 08 November 2024.

[34] Ibid, 30.

[35] Article 16 of Law No. 4783/2021 (previously Article 42 of the Legislative Act 1-5-2020) sought to address seasonal needs.

[36] Angeliki Dimitriadi (n 15).

[37] Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Metaklisi 2022-2023’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2023)< https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/%CE%A3%CF%84%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%B9%CE%BA%CE%AC-%CE%9C%CE%B5%CF%84%CE%B1%CE%BA%CE%BB%CE%AE%CF%83%CE%B5%CF%89%CE%BD-2022_2023.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com  > accessed 10 November 2024.

[38] Hellenic Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, ‘Government Gazette Issue’ (Ministry of Labour, 2023), < https://migration.gov.gr/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/FEK-2023-Tefxos-B-06844-downloaded-20_12_2023.pdf> accessed 10 November 2024.

[39] Hellenic Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, ‘Press Release on metaklisi for 2023-2024’ (Ministry of Labour, 2023), <https://ypergasias.gov.gr/sto-epipedo-tis-proigoumenis-dietias-oi-metakliseis-ergazomenon-apo-trites-chores-gia-tin-periodo-2023-2024/ > accessed 10 November 2024.

[40] Based on the latest data from the Ministry of Migration and Asylum (September 2024), only 15 residence permits for highly skilled workers (EU Blue Card) were recorded. See more in: https://shorturl.at/GsDAZ  (table 5, page 6).

[41] Angeliki Dimitriadi (n 15).

[42] InfoMigrants, ‘About 3,400 Bangladeshi migrants regularized in Greece in 2023’ (InfoMigrants, 2024) < https://www.infomigrants.net/en/post/55362/about-3400-bangladeshi-migrants-regularized-in-greece-in-2023> accessed 10 November 2024.

[43] Hellenic Parliament, ‘Minutes session IV, Standing Committee on National Defense and Foreign Affairs Proceedings, article 40 para. 1’ (Hellenic Parliament).

[44] Angeliki Dimitriadi (n 15) 17.

[45] Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Press Release on the agreement between Greece and Egypt’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2024)< https://migration.gov.gr/stis-10-ioynioy-xekina-ti-leitoyrgia-tis-i-ilektroniki-platforma-gia-tin-efarmogi-tis-symfonias-elladas-aigyptoy/> accessed 10 November 2024.

[46] Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Statistics’ (ECRE, 2024) < https://asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/statistics/?utm_source=chatgpt.com> accessed 11 November 2024.

[47] Stavros Kalogiannidis, Dimitrios Kalfas et al., ‘Integration of Climate Change Strategies into Policy and Planning for Regional Development: A Case Study of Greece (Land, 2024) < https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/13/3/268> accessed 14 November 2024.

[48] Thodoris Georgakopoulos, ‘The Consequences of Climate Change in Greece’ (DiaNEOsis, 2021) < https://www.dianeosis.org/en/2021/12/the-consequences-of-climate-change-in-greece/ > accessed 15 November 2024.

[49] IOM, ‘Integrating Migration into Environment and Climate Change Interventions: A Toolkit’ (IOM,  2021) 4, <https://eca.iom.int/sites/g/files/tmzbdl666/files/mmicd/environment-climate-change-toolkit.pdf > accessed 15 November 2024.

[50]  Amalia Frangiskou, Georgios Kandylis et al. (n 2) 118.

[51] Alexander Wolffhardt, Carmine Conte and Sinem Yilmaz, ‘The European Benchmark for Refugee Integration: A comparative analysis of the National Internation Evaluation Mechanism in 14 EU Countries’ (Fundacja Instytut Spraw Publicznych, 2022) 17, < https://www.migpolgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/The-European-benchmark-for-refugee-integration.-Evaluation-2-Comprehensive-report.pdf > accessed 11 November 2024.

[52] UNHCR, ‘The talent behind the numbers: Introducing Refugees in Greece’ (UNHCR, 2022) <https://reliefweb.int/report/greece/unhcr-greece-introducing-people-behind-numbers-updated-june-2022-enel > accessed 11 November 2024.

[53] Agapi Chouzouraki, ‘Without papers, there is no life: Legal barriers in access to protection for unaccompanied children in Greece’ (Greek Council for Refugees and Save the Children, 2023) < https://gcr.gr/wp-content/uploads/No_paper_no_life.pdf > accessed 11 November 2024.

[54] IPA (L. 4636/2019).

[55]Greek Council for Refugees, ‘Access to Education; (ECRE, 2024) < https://asylumineurope.org/reports/country/greece/reception-conditions/employment-and-education/access-education/> accessed 11 November 2024.

[56] Eurostat, ‘Migrant integration statistics-education’ (Eurostat, 2024) <  https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Migrant_integration_statistics_-_education> accessed 12 November 2024.

[57] Eurostat, ‘Population by educational attainment level, sex, age and citizenship’ (Eurostat, 2024) <https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/edat_lfs_9911/default/table?lang=en> accessed 12 November 2024.

[58] Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, ‘Refugees and Education’ (Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs, 2024) < https://www.minedu.gov.gr/tothema-prosfigiko-m> accessed 12 November 2024.

[59] DOATAP, ‘Statistical Data’ (DOATAP, 2023) < https://www.doatap.gr/enhmerosh/statistika/> accessed 13 November 2024.

[60] It is important to mention that the ACE programme provided both formal and non-formal education opportunities for refugee and migrant children in Greece and was implemented in collaboration with the Ministry of Migration and Asylum and implemented in collaboration with various partners, and mainly Greek NGOs.

[61] UNICEF, ‘All Children in Education: Ensuring a Pathway to Education for Refugee and Migrant Children in Greece’ (UNICEF, 2024) < https://www.unicef.org/greece/en/media/4306/file/%CE%91CE%20Brief%20ENGL.pdf.pdf> accessed 12 November 2024.

[62] UNICEF, ‘Country Office Annual Report 2022: Greece’ (UNICEF, 2022) < https://www.unicef.org/media/135936/file/Greece-2022-COAR.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com > accessed 13 November 2024.

[63] UNICEF, ‘Country Office Annual Report 2023: Greece’ (UNICEF, 2023) < https://www.unicef.org/media/152026/file/Greece-2023-COAR.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com> accessed 13 November 2024.

[64]Greek Council for Refugees (n 55).

[65] UNICEF (n 61).

[66] The Greek Ombudsman, ‘The Challenges of Migratory Flows and Refugee Protection: Refugee Conditions and Procedures’ (The Greek Ombudsman, 2024) <https://migrant-integration.ec.europa.eu/news/greece-help-desk-integration-refugees_en> accessed 13 November 2024.

[67] See more at: The Lifelong Learning Centers (LLC- ΚΔΒΜ)

[68] Greek Forum for Refugees, ‘Activity Report 2023’ (Greek Forum for Refugees, 2023) 19, < https://gcr.gr/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/PROSFYGES_pepragmena_2023_GR.pdf > accessed 14 November 2024.

[69] The Greek Ombudsman, (n 66) 92.

[70] Here it is important to add that the ACE programme, among other components, also prepared educators for diverse classrooms and helped them integrate refugee and migrant children.

[71] Amalia Frangiskou, Georgios Kandylis et al. (n 2).

[72] By new realities it is meant the consequences of climate change and how it will affect the labour integration of refugees and migrants into the Greek society.

[73] Hellenic Ministry of Migration and Asylum, ‘Press Release’ (Ministry of Migration and Asylum, 2024)< https://migration.gov.gr/megali-proseleysi-ton-epi-makron-diamenonton-metanaston-sti-nomimi-apascholisi-symfona-me-to-arthro-193-tis-tropologias-toy-ypoyrgeioy-metanasteysis-kai-asyloy/ > accessed 14 November 2024.

• EU cohesion policy is horizontal in nature and works in a complementary and supportive way to other public policies.
• Therefore, actions included in the National and Regional Programmes funded by the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) in Greece must support (national) sectoral and regional policies.
• The aim of this policy paper is to trace the relationship between the Partnership Agreement for the Development Framework (PADF) 2014-2020 and Greece’s climate change adaptation strategy – a top policy priority at national and regional level.
• To this end, it examines the policy initiatives that took shape during the period 2013-2020 and looks for synergies between these processes and the programming of cohesion policy actions for the period 2014-2020 – and, subsequently, the period 2021-2027.
• The conclusion of this exercise is disappointing. On the one hand, years of delays in the formulation of the required plans have resulted in their complete disconnection from the investment programming of the PADF 2014-2020 and 2021-2027. On the other hand, the resulting plans do not produce meaningful policy commitments and lack implementation mechanisms.

Read here in pdf the Policy Paper by George Andreou, Research Fellow, ELIAMEP; Assistant Professor at the School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (in Greek).

 

• The Letta and Draghi reports begin with the same realisation, though they formulate it differently: that the international geopolitical environment has changed dramatically and that the EU must take immediate action as a result.

• The Letta report’s take-home message is that the Single Market must be transformed into something “much more than just a market”. Thus, research, innovation and education need to be integrated into its core, as a “fifth freedom”, and the Single Market extended to include the telecommunications, energy, financial services and defence sectors.

• There is fear at the heart of the Draghi report, fear of the “existential challenge” confronting the EU, which will require an extra €800 billion a year in investment. The report’s proposals are articulated around five major horizontal policies: closing the innovation gap, decarbonising the economy and making it more competitive, strengthening security and the defence sector and reducing dependencies in this area, financing investment, and strengthening EU governance.

• The Letta and Draghi reports agree on both the fields where intervention is required and the form such intervention should take. And while they differ in terms of the competition—and, still more, cohesion—policy they prescribe, they do so constructively while their proposals complement one another.

• In relation to Greece, the proposals made in both reports with respect to the defence industry, to reducing energy costs, and to the provision of generous funding for additional investment through —inter alia—joint borrowing, are of the utmost importance.

• No serious disagreement has been voiced with respect to the proposals made in the Letta and Draghi reports, apart from the predictable German reaction to additional funding and new joint borrowing, coupled with unfounded criticism of the proposals as ‘unfeasible’.

• The “New European Agreement on Competitiveness” adopted in Budapest on 8 November is a critical development, given that it adopts the bulk of the key approaches contained in the Letta and Draghi reports, and sets specific milestones for some, as well.

• The two reports stress that, even if certain recent developments around the world cannot be considered favourable for the EU (political crisis in Germany, economic problems in France, Trump’s election in the US), Europe still has the “weapons” it needs to reverse the situation. And while the Budapest summit decision may not have gone as far as the situation demands, it still adopted the bulk of the proposals made in the two reports, making it crystal clear that the European Union has taken the need to regain the initiative fully on board.

Read here in pdf the Policy paper by Alekos Kritikos, Senior Policy Advisor, ELIAMEP; Former senior official, European Commission; former Secretary General, Ministry of the Interior.

Introduction 

Looking back at the history of European integration, one quickly realises that its greatest moments were, without exception, preceded by a report highlighting the need for the major changes that followed. The founding of the EEC itself was prefigured by the Spaak report, Lord Cockfield’s white paper formed the basis for decisions on the establishment of the internal market, while the Padoa-Schioppa and Delors reports were precursors for the establishment of the EMU. Of course, the reverse is not necessarily true: not all reports necessarily lead to major change. Thus, for example, the McDougall report, which proposed as early as 1974 that the EEC budget should be raised to 5% of the Community’s GDP, is still waiting in vain —a full half century later—to finally be heeded.

However, there are multiple indications that suggest the Letta[1] and Draghi[2] reports will end up being in the first of these categories. And that is because they came about not as an initiative conceived of by certain inspired circles or individuals, but as a logical consequence of rapid geopolitical developments. As noted at the very start of the Letta report: “The Single Market is a product of an era when both the EU and the world were ‘smaller’” and must now be transformed into something that is “much more than a market”. Mario Draghi, in turn, speaks in rather dramatic tones of an “existential challenge” facing the EU and declares that Europe will lose its very raison d’être if it cannot guarantee prosperity, freedom and democracy to its citizens—values that can only be guaranteed if the bloc becomes more productive and changes radically.

The almost jubilant adoption by the Budapest European Council summit of the bulk of the proposals made in the two reports provides an initial confirmation both of their importance and of the role they are expected to play.

The Letta Report: The Single Market Must Become Much More Than a Market 

…the Single Market must be transformed into something much more than just a market. In this context, [the Letta report] proposes expanding the Single Market to include the telecommunications, energy, defence and financial services sectors.

The proposals included in the report by Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy (2013-2014), published in April 2024, are bold and at times provocative. The core of his report, summed up in its title, is that the Single Market must be transformed into something much more than just a market. In this context, it proposes expanding the Single Market to include the telecommunications, energy, defence and financial services sectors. 

The report does not restrict itself to expressing views on the workings of the internal market, and also makes proposals regarding most of the areas in which the European Union is active.

It begins with the need to establish a “fifth” freedom. As a central pillar of this strategy, it proposes that research, innovation and education be added to the core of the internal market through the creation of a European Knowledge Commons: a centralized digital platform providing access to publicly-funded research, data sets, and educational resources.

It then sets off in search of ways to finance the Union’s strategic objectives, with the primary goal of mobilising private capital. In this context, the report advocates a key change: creating a Savings and Investment Union to make use of the €33 trillion in private savings in the EU for investment.

…the report proposes to envision a state aid contribution mechanism, requiring Member States to allocate a portion of their national funding to financing pan-European initiatives and investments.

Worried about the distortions to competition caused by the state aid economically powerful states make available to national companies, the report proposes “to balance a stricter enforcement of State aid at national level and the progressive expansion of EU-level funding support” and “to envision a state aid contribution mechanism, requiring Member States to allocate a portion of their national funding to financing pan-European initiatives and investments”. 

The Letta report’s other potentially trailblazing proposal concerns the need to provide substantial support to the European defence industry with funds from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM). On this point, while the author does not hide his preference for the issuance of a European defence bond, the report does not actually highlight this course of action, as Mario Draghi would do a few months later.

…European telecommunication companies having an average of 5 million customers, while the corresponding figure in the US is 107 million and in China 467 million.

The Letta report underscores the centrality of both energy and electronic communications to any industrial policy. When the Single Market was created, these sectors were deliberately excluded from its scope, as they were considered too strategic to be removed from national control. However, national control is now proving an obstacle to the development and competitiveness of these sectors at a European and global level. As the report takes pains to stress, fragmentation has resulted in European telecommunication companies having an average of 5 million customers, while the corresponding figure in the US is 107 million and in China 467 million!

Similar arguments can be made regarding the need for a common EU approach to defence. The inadequacy of Europe’s fragmented military industrial complex is becoming increasingly apparent. The report points out that, of all the military equipment sent to Ukraine by European nations since the start of the conflict, 78% was purchased from non-EU producers!

The report pays particular attention to the space industry, a crucial sector for the development of the Single Market. It also points out that how critically important it now is that the European dimension be incorporated into the health sector, particularly in the light of Europe’s demographic decline and the likelihood of crises in the future. At the same time, the report underlines the crucial nature of the transport sector for realising the full potential of the Single Market.

Data showing that people living in regions that are suffering decline often feel compelled to move by the lack of jobs or access to high-quality education and adequate services, lead Enrico Letta to table new and expanded content for the EU’s cohesion policy. Letta thus proposes that, while free movement must continue to be guaranteed, so must the freedom of European citizens to remain in their current place of residence; relocation should be a matter of choice rather than something that is forced upon them. 

As the report highlights, the further development of the Single Market can only be successful if it includes a social dimension that guarantees social justice and cohesion, addresses social inequalities, and ensures inclusive economic growth.

The report also highlights the need to strengthen digital infrastructure and skills, on the grounds that the digital economy is a fundamental tool for allowing citizens and businesses alike to realise the full potential of the Single Market, and for ensuring their freedom to stay where they live.

Furthermore, given that most EU SMEs are active in the services sector, the Letta report also argues that a renewed commitment to removing barriers to their activity is a necessity. According to the European Commission’s own research, around 60% of the barriers in the Single Market for services identified in 2002 still exist today. 

The Letta report concludes by stating that the dynamism and effectiveness of the EU are currently severely hampered by a number of factors, notably an excessive regulatory burden and bureaucracy. For this reason, the report argues, the mechanism for formulating proposals must be improved, with consultation procedures and the Better Regulation toolbox streamlined, impact assessments conducted for proposed amendments before the final decision is taken, and other related measures.

The report concludes by urging “the Single Market to go fast and go far”, moving beyond Europe’s borders.

The report concludes by urging “the Single Market to go fast and go far“, moving beyond Europe’s borders in order to achieve a balance between competitiveness, strategic autonomy and global conditions and to promote strategic partnerships.

Letta’s proposals do not stop there, of course. Rather, the full text renders them specific through a host of innovative and sometimes revolutionary suggestions coupled with exhortations that they be enacted without delay. The implementation of most—if not all—of these proposals is presented as a necessary and sufficient condition for ensuring the competitiveness of a united Europe, promoting its strategic autonomy in the new geopolitical context, and, ultimately, securing its economic and cultural survival. For this reason, the report urged the Council “to delegate to the European Commission the task of drafting a comprehensive Single Market Strategy”, which it went on to do at the informal European Council summit in Budapest (8 November 2024), at which the Commission was invited “to present, by June 2025, a new and comprehensive horizontal strategy on the deepening of the Single Market, including a roadmap with clear timelines and milestones“. This is undoubtedly a very important development which must be credited to the Letta report.

The Draghi Report: Europe is Facing an Existential Challenge

The main, dramatic message of the report prepared by Mario Draghi, former Governor of the European Central Bank (2011-2019), former Prime Minister of Italy (2021-2022), which was made public in September 2024, is that the EU is facing an “existential challenge”. To extricate itself from the low productivity and weak growth which keep it lagging behind the United States and China in the international rankings, Europe needs to invest an additional 800 billion euros per year: representing as much as 5% of EU GDP, this is much higher than even the 1-2% of GDP the Marshall Plan invested in the reconstruction of Europe after World War Two.

Mario Draghi considers the situation to warrant an urgent response. As he points out in the foreword: “We should abandon the illusion that only procrastination can preserve consensus. In fact, procrastination has only produced slower growth, and it has certainly achieved no more consensus.”

Covering almost all the critical spheres in which Europe must act, the Draghi report articulates its proposals around five major horizontal policies which should, it argues, both operate in tandem and complement one another: closing the innovation gap, decarbonisation and making the economy more competitive, increasing security and reducing dependencies, financing investments, and strengthening EU governance.

Covering almost all the critical spheres in which Europe must act, the Draghi report articulates its proposals around five major horizontal policies which should, it argues, both operate in tandem and complement one another: closing the innovation gap, decarbonisation and making the economy more competitive, increasing security and reducing dependencies, financing investments, and strengthening EU governance. Wanting to underscore that his report is complementary to the Letta report, Mario Draghi states that he has not included a separate chapter on the internal market, because this subject has already been dealt with systematically in the Letta report, which also presents the relevant proposals.

It should also be noted that there is no mention of agriculture, because agriculture was the subject of a separate report commissioned from Professor Peter Strohschneider, a figure with whom the European public is largely unfamiliar. The fact that Strohschneider is not a public figure with the international stature of Draghi—or Letta—may be indicative of the (lack of) importance the European Commission leadership assigns to agriculture in relation to all the other sectors examined in the Letta and Draghi reports.

The report’s most prolonged cry of anguish concerns the EU’s failure to keep up in innovation, which Draghi sees as the root cause of the bloc’s low competitiveness and productivity. He sees digital technology, in which Europe currently lags behind, as a key factor in the productivity gap between the EU and the US. The report also estimates that European public spending on Research and Innovation (R&I) is significantly below the levels invested by its competitors. To remedy this, Draghi proposes the creation of a Research and Innovation Union that would lead to the joint formulation of a common European R&I strategy and policy capable of promoting a “European Action Plan for Research and Innovation”. It also recognises the need to establish European academic institutions at the forefront of global research.

Mario Draghi has no qualms about sacrificing many of the EU’s “sacred cows” on the altar of Europe’s future, starting with competition policy, which, he argues, has long been aimed in the wrong direction, focusing on competition between Member States rather than on competition between the EU and the rest of the world. He therefore proposes that those aspects of EU competition policy that relate to mergers, state aid, etc. be radically overhauled, so they no longer impede the bloc’s ability to compete with the US and China. However, his report does not go as far as the Letta report, which proposes the gradual replacement of state aid with European aid. Rather, it attaches greater importance to removing barriers to mergers, which Draghi blames for Europe’s inability to put forth players capable of taking on the global competition.

The Draghi report proposes “updating” the respective policies “to reflect the changing dynamics of trade and innovation”, so the bloc’s cohesion policy keeps up with its efforts to boost innovation and complete the Single Market.

A similar observation could be made about another of the EU’s “sacred cows”: its cohesion policy. The Draghi report proposes “updating” the respective policies “to reflect the changing dynamics of trade and innovation”, so the bloc’s cohesion policy keeps up with its efforts to boost innovation and complete the Single Market. The more sceptical may see this translating into cohesion policy resources being moved away from the original goal of reducing disparities between EU regions and towards more general EU development objectives[3]. For comparison, as mentioned above, Enrico Letta proposes “freedom to stay in one’s own place”, i.e. providing each region with the means to retain its population.

It should be noted, however, that the Draghi report advocates the preservation of the European social model[4], noting that while the EU should aim to draw closer to the US model in terms of productivity and innovation, it should steer clear of the disadvantages of the US social model.

The Draghi report attaches particular importance to the development of a common European policy with regard to the defence industry, and argues that the relevant actions should focus on joint procurement and joint management of industrial defence stocks. It considers that, along with the urgent need to increase overall defence investment, there is also a need for greater cooperation between Member States in the defence industrial sector, as well as for efforts to bolster Research and Innovation. It proposes joint European financing of the defence industry from new EU resources, including Eurobond issues.

As well as calling for the development of the defence industry, the report proposes a new industrial strategy for Europe which calls for the Single Market to be fully implemented and for industrial policy, competition policy and trade policy to be more closely interlinked.

…the EU should, [the report] argues, form a genuine Energy Union, so that those functions of the energy market that are of cross-border significance can be regulated at a centralized European level.

Viewing decarbonisation in terms that extend beyond the environment, as a factor that can also contribute decisively to the competitiveness of the European economy, the Draghi report proposes a strategy which, while eliminating carbon emissions, will also provide Europe with the opportunity to bring down the high cost of its energy, which is a major obstacle to growth, and to play a leading role in clean technologies, while simultaneously becoming more energy secure. At the same time, the EU should, it argues, form a genuine Energy Union, so that those functions of the energy market that are of cross-border significance can be regulated at a centralized European level.

…it proposes extending qualified majority voting to more areas and to consider the possibility of “enhanced cooperation” in areas where it proves hard to pass decisions.

The Draghi report makes bold proposals in relation to the financing of the entire plan for boosting EU competitiveness. Finding that the support the EU can provide for both public and private investment is limited by the size of its budget and by the insufficient mobilisation of private capital, Draghi proposes the creation of a Capital Markets Union to free up private capital. He goes on to propose that the EU should seek to complete its Banking Union in order to boost the financing capacity of the banking sector, and proposes without prevarication that the EU should proceed with regular bond issuances to finance joint investment projects among Member States, thereby contributing to its economic and financial integration.

As mentioned above, the Draghi report estimates that the EU needs to invest an additional €800 billion per year, i.e. up to 5% of its GDP, a percentage which is far higher than even the 1-2% of GDP the Marshall Plan invested in rebuilding Europe after World War Two. It is proposed that the bulk of these funds come from private capital, although a significant portion is still left over to be covered by European public funds. The proposal that these European public funds should come from the joint debt issuance is hugely significant, as such a move mark a further major step towards EU fiscal union.

The Draghi report concludes by underlining the need for a EU new governance, without which the new industrial strategy and the entire project aimed at strengthening European competitiveness cannot succeed. The report proposes that a new ‘competitiveness coordination framework’ be created at EU level in the priority sectors, and opines that a ’28th regime’ is needed to allow companies to opt out of national regulatory frameworks and follow rules that apply across the EU. Finally, it proposes extending qualified majority voting to more areas and to consider the possibility of “enhanced cooperation” in areas where it proves hard to pass decisions.

Similarities and Differences between the two Reports

Even though the Letta and Draghi reports (a) were requested by different bodies (the Letta report by the Spanish and Belgian EU Presidencies, the Draghi report by the European Commission), (b) were compiled by authors with different political backgrounds, and (c) focus on different subject matter (the former on the Single Market, the latter on competitiveness), they converge to such an extent that the value of their findings and—above all—their proposals is rendered virtually self-evident. Indeed, Mario Draghi has said he did not include a chapter on the Single Market in his report because “the Letta report has systematically analysed the key challenges facing the Single Market and provided recommendations”; in practice, however, most of the recommendations on both sides are essentially identical.

Indeed, though formulated differently, both begin with the realisation that the global geopolitical environment has changed dramatically and that the EU must take immediate action to meet what Mario Draghi calls the “existential challenge”. They largely coincide in terms both of their proposed fields of intervention and the interventions they advocate in those fields.

Both agree on the need for drastic intervention in the field of financial services, with Letta proposing a Savings and Investment Union and Draghi favouring a Capital Markets Union.

Both agree on the need for drastic intervention in the field of financial services, with Letta proposing a Savings and Investment Union and Draghi favouring a Capital Markets Union. Their common goal is to mobilise private capital on a grand scale in order to finance the investments Europe needs to make.

The two reports also agree that the main obstacle confronting Europe is the fragmentation of the Single Market, particularly in the energy, telecoms and defence sectors, while both also make concrete proposals for tackling the issue.

Another common goal is eliminating the use of coal for energy production and reducing energy costs. 

Both reports also place considerable emphasis on joint defence procurement and on the strengthening of the European defence industry, which will have to serve as the engine driving the EU’s overall industrial and economic development and the bloc’s efforts to achieve strategic autonomy.

…the reports coincide, too, in attaching great importance to Research and Innovation.

In addition, the reports coincide, too, in attaching great importance to Research and Innovation. Letta views it as a “fifth freedom” in the Single Market, while Draghi considers the EU’s deficiencies in this area to be the primary cause of the growth gap that has opened up between the bloc and the US.

The two reports also contain common references to, and views on, the importance of and need to promote the digital transition, transport networks and Space-related actions, but also the need for meaningful interventions that address both skills gaps and the governance deficit.

Letta and Draghi—the former less daring in his formulations, the latter more direct and on the nail—also agree on the need for new joint borrowing to provide the European public funds required to finance part of the EU’s investment deficit. Draghi estimates the total size of this investment deficit at 800 billion per year. The remaining—larger—part of this deficit will have to be covered by private funds.

It is worth nothing that the two reports differ in terms of the competition policy they prescribe, but do so constructively and with proposals that complement one another.

It is worth nothing that the two reports differ in terms of the competition policy they prescribe, but do so constructively and with proposals that complement one another. The Letta report considers the misuse of state aid to distort competition and therefore proposes, in addition to the stricter enforcement of state aid regulations, the creation of a European State Aid Contribution Mechanism. This mechanism would oblige Member States to contribute part of their national state funding to a common fund for financing pan-European initiatives and investments. And though the Draghi report does not make a comparable proposal, it still attaches considerable importance to the mergers aspect of competition policy, arguing that if European firms are to emerge as international leaders, especially in the tech field, it will require flexibility in relation to the clearing of mergers and to companies acquiring “dominant positions”.

Both reports represent radical departures which, if adopted, will turn European competition policy into a key tool for promoting both the overall development of the EU and its economic and social cohesion.

The two reports are more differentiated when it comes to European cohesion policy.

The two reports are more differentiated when it comes to European cohesion policy. As mentioned above, the Letta report views economic and social cohesion as a crucial element of the new form of Single Market it proposes. The new and broader content it imbues this cohesion with focuses on European citizens’ freedom to remain in the area they call home; it therefore complements—rather than impedes—the four currently guaranteed freedoms of movement: of persons, goods, capital and services. For its part, the Draghi report proposes “updating” cohesion policy so its programmes “reflect the changing dynamics of trade and innovation”. This may translate into cohesion policy resources being redirected towards more general EU growth objectives—as the previous Lisbon and Europe 2020 strategies suggested—and thus into a shift away from the policy’s original objective of reducing disparities between EU regions. (We noted above that this proposal is already finding application in the field of defence—according, at least, to a recent article in the Financial Times.)

What remains to be seen, of course, is whether a strict and above all unilateral adherence to the traditional principles of cohesion policy is the best response to the new challenges. Already, the proposals being put forward by the European Commission’s Committee of Wise Persons on the Future of Cohesion Policy[5] no longer insist on this.

What the Letta and Draghi Reports Mean for Greece

Regarding the significance of the two reports for Greece specifically, over and above their obvious importance for the country as an EU member state, we could focus on the specific proposals for:

• Strengthening the defence industry at European level and developing a common European policy in this field. This could be the precursor to the formation of a genuine common defence policy, with obvious positive impacts for Greece in terms both of defence expenditure and guarantees for the security of its national borders.

• Additional investments of €800 billion per year, which could cover Greece’s investment deficit, which is estimated at €20 billion per year.

• New joint borrowing, which could help maintain the level of European funding to Greece and avoid the falling growth rates that could stem from a possible reduction.

• Decarbonisation and the replacing of coal with “green” and cheaper energy sources, which, in combination with other measures, could reduce energy costs for Greek consumers, who are currently suffering from high energy prices.

The other fields (technology/industrial recovery, climate change, etc.) are very important but, as Tasos Giannitsis[6] believes, they are only of marginal significance for the national choices Greece makes. He argues that “The [Draghi] report should be studied carefully; taking a close and dispassionate look ‘behind the mirror’ will reveal what it entails for Greece, in the form, too, of reactions to its proposals. Reading the various issues the report draws attention to raises questions we can either ignore or address: given our strengths and weaknesses (negative net savings, overconsumption, low levels of investment, poor international ranking in terms of education / the Pisa report, the functioning of the Rule of Law, corruption, our technological infrastructure and state efficiency), do we feel we can rest easy, or should we be concerned?”

The Objections Raised to the two Reports

The Letta and Draghi reports have been welcomed almost universally and with enthusiasm in many quarters, in terms both of their findings and conclusions and of the proposals they make. This positive reception culminated with the adoption of almost all their proposed actions by the informal European Council in Budapest on 8 November 2024, and the incorporation of their formulations into the “Budapest Declaration on the New European Competitiveness Deal”[7].

Objections of varying seriousness were, of course, made. These generally related to the Draghi report, both because of its outspoken proposal for new joint borrowing, and because of the greater visibility it received as a result of its publication being delayed by the European elections, but also because of Mario Draghi’s personality and his (well-earned) reputation as the saviour of the eurozone.

The most negative response to the Draghi report came from Christian Lindner, the now sacked German Finance Minister, who was quick to condemn the proposal for new joint borrowing. Lindner’s criticism was supported by representatives of other “frugal” Member States.

The most negative response to the Draghi report, which was made almost immediately after its publication, came from Christian Lindner, the now sacked German Finance Minister, who was quick to condemn the proposal for new joint borrowing. Lindner’s criticism was supported by representatives of other “frugal” Member States (Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden).

…the most serious dissenting opinion came from the former Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti , who, along with the considerable praise he lavished on the Draghi report, also expressed a reservation in relation to its proposed revision of EU competition policy, and its approach to mergers, in particular, which he felt would be detrimental to the great majority of European businesses.

Apart from this reaction, which surprised no one, the most serious dissenting opinion came from the former Prime Minister of Italy, Mario Monti[8], who, along with the considerable praise he lavished on the Draghi report, also expressed a reservation in relation to its proposed revision of EU competition policy, and its approach to mergers, in particular, which he felt would be detrimental to the great majority of European businesses. “Size matters”, Mario Monti notes, “but it is not the only factor (in determining competitiveness), and it would be a shame to weaken one of the very few tools the EU has the authority to wield at a European level, at a time when it is perhaps more important than ever to use it”.

In addition, analysts at Bruegel[9] have opined that, while the Draghi report’s analysis of the EU’s digital weaknesses raises the right issues, it fails to address them adequately with its proposals. They also found the report to contain good ideas for reducing the overall cost of the energy system, but questioned its proposals for reducing the cost of energy-intensive industry on grounds of fairness and of efficiency. They point out that disregarding either budgetary constraints or World Trade Organization rules could easily backfire, making the EU’s frugal Member States even less willing to agree to increasing the EU’s budgetary resources, and thus undermining the Union’s efforts to accelerate decarbonisation around the world and not just in Europe.

…analysts from the Bruegel have expressed the view that Letta’s proposals for public sector investment in Research and Innovation ignore the fact that the level of private sector investment in this area now far exceeds what the public sector could fund.

Furthermore, analysts from the same think tank[10] have expressed the view that Letta’s proposals for public sector investment in Research and Innovation ignore the fact that the level of private sector investment in this area now far exceeds what the public sector could fund, while failing to take it into account that the main driver of R&D funding is the income generated by the commercial exploitation of its findings. 

“New wine in an old bottle”[11] is how the Draghi report is described by those who argue that the EU’s lack of investment and capital in due to the bloc’s long-standing insistence on stability and fiscal discipline, and that decarbonisation will not be possible without critical raw materials and green technologies from China (which is also the most important market for many EU products). They note that “military Keynesianism” (meaning the common defence industrial policy) cannot be implemented in any form, given that the report does not recognise that NATO’s defence shield in Europe implies the purchase in return of armaments from the US. Finally, they also point out that, while the report proposes the largest investment programme in the history of the EU, the social conditions required to ensure that the benefits are shared fairly are absent.

There are also some who, without rejecting the content of the Draghi report, describe it as utopian and unworkable, especially with regard to its proposals for funding and joint borrowing.

There are also some who, without rejecting the content of the Draghi report, describe it as utopian and unworkable, especially with regard to its proposals for funding and joint borrowing. This group includes leading players from Greek industry (one of whom also represents an important branch of European industry), who agree that both the Letta and Draghi reports capture the magnitude and urgency of the stakes for the European Union[12], but consider Draghi’s proposals to be unrealistic. Paradoxically, just a month ago, one of these players was highlighting the positive proposals contained in the report for industrial competitiveness and predicting that many would be well-received by Europe’s struggling industrial sector, primarily because they touch upon the issue of costs[13].

However, as Tasos Giannitsis notes[14]: “Draghi’s proposals were criticised as utopian when they were first made public, especially in so far as they advocate an increase in EU debt and the issuance of European bonds. These objections are familiar and understandable. But whether the Report is utopian or not depends on how one evaluates both the current threats in the three areas it addresses, and the will on the part of European societies to confront them. It also depends on how one views the changes over the last decade in how much weight the EU carries on the international stage.”

The ‘New European Competitiveness Deal’ Adopts the Leta and Draghi Reports

The two reports provide a solid foundation on which we will ambitiously advance our work. We seize their wake-up call. It is imperative that we urgently close the innovation and productivity gap, both with our global competitors and within the EU. We will work in unity and solidarity for the benefit of all EU citizens, businesses and Member States.

The “New European Agreement on Competitiveness”[15] adopted by the informal European Council in Budapest (8 November 2024) is a very important development, as it adopts most of the key approaches contained in the Letta and Draghi reports, setting specific milestones for some, too. As the European Council stresses emphatically in its Declaration: “We welcome [these reports]. They provide a solid foundation on which we will ambitiously advance our work. We seize their wake-up call. It is imperative that we urgently close the innovation and productivity gap, both with our global competitors and within the EU. We will work in unity and solidarity for the benefit of all EU citizens, businesses and Member States.”

Of course, the Deal studiously avoids even mentioning the possibility of joint borrowing. In relation to new sources of funding, it limits itself to “exploring the development of new [financial] instruments”, etc. Of course, with Germany currently in the throes of a major political crisis—not to forget France, with its huge budget deficit—how much further could the Deal have gone at this juncture? Probably for the same reasons, the Deal does not even touch on the proposals the two reports make for radical changes to the bloc’s competition policy, and everything that would entail for the state aid the German government currently lavishes on German businesses.

The Budapest Declaration concludes with “The need for a unified response has never been more compelling”, its dramatic tone probably dictated by Trump’s election in the US, before calling on “all EU institutions, Member States and stakeholders to urgently implement and deliver this New European Competitiveness Deal.” Finally, the European Council pledges to continue to provide further strategic guidance and to review progress regularly over the coming year.

The almost jubilant adoption of the two reports by the 27 leaders, albeit incomplete with its proposals vis-a-vis competition policy and financing left out, is extremely encouraging for the EU’s short- and medium-term prospects. It remains to be seen whether, and how quickly, the two major issues which the New European Deal on Competitiveness fails to address will be added, and whether the agreement will be turned into legally binding and enforceable texts.

Conclusions

The European Council accepting the bulk of the proposals made in the Letta and Draghi reports, and doing so in short order (by EU standards), indicates how important they are for the future of Europe. This assessment is further reinforced by the inclusion of many of their proposals in the action guides which Ursula von der Leyen has handed out to the members of the new European Commission.

It is not only Draghi and Letta who are raising the alarm. In a recent report, the International Monetary Fund itself predicts a further widening of the gap between Europe and the US by the end of the decade. According to the IMF, this is mainly due to low productivity and an ageing population in Europe, coupled with the bloc’s failure to keep up in the spheres of innovation and technology. Indeed, Europe can only muster a growth rate of 1.45% per annum, compared with 2.29% in the US. The report also points out that European productivity in general, and in tech in particular, has stagnated over the last 20 years, while it has increased by 40% in the US (!). The IMF has called on the EU to take action to further integrate the economies of Europe[16].

The two reports show the “weapons” with which the EU can confront, and perhaps reverse, the above trends, defending itself but also launching a counter-attack in the ongoing undeclared tariff and subsidy war between the US and China in which the bloc will inevitably be embroiled, willingly or otherwise.

The two reports show the “weapons” with which the EU can confront, and perhaps reverse, the above trends, defending itself but also launching a counter-attack in the ongoing undeclared tariff and subsidy war between the US and China in which the bloc will inevitably be embroiled, willingly or otherwise.

However, the difficult context in which the EU finds itself having to wage its own ‘war’ must also be taken into account. In Europe today, the advocates of “illiberal democracy” and ethnocentric approaches to critical issues such as immigration, have become dangerously emboldened as they grow in strength. This political landscape, combined with the ‘leadership deficit’ that has emerged due to Germany and France’s current inability to pull the European train behind them, is not conducive to the realisation of Draghi’s proposals, and by extension to the taking of initiatives that will help the EU to survive in the new geopolitical and economic environment.

The difficulties are exacerbated by the recent rift between the European People’s Party (EPP) and the European Socialists, the two pillars on which the EU’s institutional balance and stability rests. A Europe that is divided rather than united is not the best response to the existential dangers it faces.

However, the political crisis and the early elections in Germany also have their positive side. Before the crisis broke out, the start of negotiations for the EU’s multiannual budget for 2028-2034 was expected to be delayed until elections were held in Germany in autumn 2025. Barring any dramatic surprises, the early elections in Germany will allow the Commission to present its proposal faster, and discussions on the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034, to which the financing of the additional investment proposed by the two reports is linked, to start earlier than expected.

To these adverse circumstances, we must add Trump’s election to as Presidency of the United States and the uncertainties, if not threats, this entails for the EU’s prospects. On the one hand, this development may strengthen and accelerate the bloc’s awakening, confirming Jean Monet’s prophetic comments yet again on the contribution crises have made to European integration. On the other hand, there is always the risk that the losses incurred in the meantime (from the imposition of draconian tariffs on European products, other protectionist measures, the withdrawal of the US defence umbrella, etc.) may precede the “awakening”, and not only halt any recovery efforts underway, but also cause Europe to regress, possibly irreversibly. Which is why how Europe reacts is important, but so is when it reacts.

Still, it is encouraging that—as all the indications show—change is now afoot in Europe.

Still, it is encouraging that—as all the indications show—change is now afoot in Europe. And while the Budapest decision may not have gone as far as the situation demands, it still makes it crystal clear that the European Union has taken the need to regain the initiative fully on board. It remains to be seen whether this momentum can be maintained. Which is certain is that the problems cannot wait a moment longer.

 

[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ny3j24sm/much-more-than-a-market-report-by-enrico-letta.pdf

[2] Part A:https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/97e481fd-2dc3-412d-be4c- f152a8232961_en?filename=The%20future%20of%20European%20competitiveness%20_%20A%20competitiveness%20strategy%20for%20Europe.pdf Part B: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/ec1409c1-d4b4-4882-8bdd-3519f86bbb92_en?filename=The%20future%20of%20European%20competitiveness_%20In-depth%20analysis%20and%20recommendations_0.pdf

[3] This approach is already starting to be applied in the field of defence, at least according to an article in the Financial Times (11 November 2024) https://www.ft.com/content/eb0de7f4-5ba1-460a-a83d-1a7302fc1536)

[4] “We‘re still Europe though“, Mario Draghi stressed as he presented his report to the European Parliament.

[5] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/el/pres_00_900

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2010:2020:FIN:en:PDF

file:///C:/Users/30697/Downloads/forging%20a%20sustainable%20future%20together-KN0623048ENN-4.pdf

[6] https://www.tanea.gr/print/2024/09/14/opinions/i-ekthesi-ntragki-kai-ta-minymata/

[7] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/el/press/press-releases/2024/11/08/the-budapest-declaration/

[8] https://www.kathimerini.gr/world/563302615/mario-monti-poios-tha-xypnisei-ti-synestalmeni-eyropi/

[9] https://www.bruegel.org/newsletter/mario-draghis-eu-competitiveness-report-landmark-plan-was-promised

[10] https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/eu-savers-need-single-market-place-invest

[11] https://www.in.gr/2024/09/28/world/emmoni-tou-ntragki-tin-antagonistikotita-den-tha-vgei-se-kalo-ton-eyropaion-ti-lenei-eidikoi/

[12] https://www.sev.org.gr/deltia_typou/spyros-theodoropoulos-aparaititi-i-synergasia-politeias-epicheiriseon-kai-ergazomenon-gia-na-epitefchthei-to-ependytiko-alma-pou-echei-anagki-i-chora/

[13]https://www.capital.gr/oikonomia/3864923/e-mutilinaios-olokliromeni-kai-emperistatomeni-i-ekthesi-ntragki-thetikes-protaseis-gia-ti-biomixania/

[14] https://www.tanea.gr/print/2024/09/14/opinions/i-ekthesi-ntragki-kai-ta-minymata/

[15] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/el/press/press-releases/2024/11/08/the-budapest-declaration/

[16] Oikonomiki Kathimerini, 27 October 2024

• The key objective of the smart specialisation strategy is to mobilise research and innovation at regional level, focusing on existing potential, enhancing economic diversification and creating a comparative advantage.
• It was implemented at the European level for the first time during the 2014-2020 programming period with the mobilisation and active participation of national and regional authorities in the development and implementation of the strategy at its core.
• The research and development environment in Greece was already unfavourable both due to structural weaknesses and because of the deep economic crisis.
• The country’s institutional framework both in the management of the NSRF in general and in the management of the Smart Specialisation Strategy in particular was the main weakness that prevented the effective implementation of the strategy, with delays and lack of coordination between stakeholders.
• Despite the difficulties, Greece has managed to improve its performance with respect to the European innovation indicators, but has not managed to reach the European average.

Read here (in Greek) the Policy paper by by Pery Bazoti, PhD candidate, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.

 

The Transatlantic Periscope is an interactive, multimedia tool that brings together expert commentary, high-quality media coverage, official policy documents, quantitative data, social media posts, and gray literature. It will provide on a monthly basis a summary of the most important news concerning the Greek-US relations, as reflected in the media. Below you will find an overview for October 2024.

On October 5, 2024, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis held a working breakfast at his residence in Chania with a group of Republican US Senators who participate, among others, in the Committees on Appropriations, Intelligence and Energy of the United States Senate. The meeting was also attended by the Minister of National Defence Nikos Dendias, while the US side was represented by Senators Jerry Moran (Kan.), Susan Collins (ME), John Boozman (AR), John Cornyn (TX), John Hoeven (ND) and the US Ambassador to Athens, George Tsunis. During the meeting, they discussed the excellent level of Greek-American relations and Greek-American defence cooperation, as well as Greece’s role as a pillar of stability and security in the wider region.

According to Vassilis Nedos (Kathimerini), Greece is rekindling discussions with the US regarding the potential acquisition of four littoral combat ships (LCS) as part of the so-called ‘Blinken package’. Following previous negotiations that faltered due to the aging and defective nature of the offered ships, Athens is seeking alternatives that better meet its needs. The Hellenic Navy insists on acquiring upgraded LCS vessels, specifically the Wichita, Billings, Indianapolis and St Louis, rather than the older Milwaukee, Detroit, Little Rock and Sioux City.

On October 24, 2024, the Deputy Minister of National Defence, Mr. Giannis Kefalogiannis, met the US Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Mr. James C. O’Brien, and the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Mr. Joshua R. Huck, in the Ministry of National Defence. The Chief of Hellenic National Defence General Staff, General Dimitrios Houpis, also participated in the meeting. During this meeting, common security and regional stability matters were discussed, while the strategic importance of the defensive cooperation between Greece and the United States, as that is defined in the updated Mutual Defence Cooperation Agreement (MDCA) of 2021, was highlighted.

According to the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT), on October 31, former Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo visited Greece and held a meeting with the Greek Prime Minister. As Secretary of State in the first Trump administration, Pompeo had expressed his support for Greece on several occasions with his visit to Chania in 2020 focusing on the US naval base in the Gulf of Souda and his letter on Greece-US strategic cooperation to his then Greek counterpart, Minister Nikos Dendias, in 2020.

More at: https://transatlanticperiscope.org/relationship/GR#

The policy paper “Cybersecurity: how to shield the country’s digital future” summarizes and elaborates on the conclusions of the roundtable discussion organized in March 2024 by the Center for Cyber Resilience of the Delphi Economic Forum, in collaboration with ELIAMEP, with the support of Vodafone Greece and the participation of leading government, political, academic and market representatives.

This paper presents: a) a brief historical review of the evolution and shaping of the cybersecurity architecture at the European Union level, as well as the corresponding efforts to formulate a policy framework in Greece; b) the findings of a public opinion survey on cybersecurity among Greek citizens and businesses operating in Greece, conducted by Metron Analysis; c) a set of policy proposals for strengthening cybersecurity in Greece.

Read the paper here (in Greek).

 

The policy brief outlines the strategic vision and structural reorganisation of the European Commission under Ursula von der Leyen’s second term. Emphasising “Security, Prosperity, and Democracy,” von der Leyen’s Commission 2.0 consolidates power through a streamlined, centralised structure with six Executive Vice-Presidents, aiming for a more responsive and efficient EU. Each Commissioner has been assigned specific, often overlapping, missions focusing on key areas such as the Green Deal, technological sovereignty, and European defence. This centralisation marks a shift toward a more presidential model, raising concerns about governance complexity and missed opportunities for deeper citizen engagement and clearer portfolio distinctions. At the same time, it constitutes the core strategic approach to addressing the EU’s complex priorities.

• Vision: President Ursula von der Leyen prioritises “Security, Prosperity, and Democracy,” aiming for a responsive, flexible, and efficient European Union.

• New Commission Structure: The von der Leyen Commission 2.0 introduces a centralised structure with six Executive Vice-Presidents, removing traditional Vice-Presidents to streamline leadership.

• Mission Letters: Each of the 26 Commissioners-designate received specific missions, with major focuses on the Green Deal, technological sovereignty, industrial sovereignty, and European defence.

• Presidentialisation: The Commission’s structure reflects increased centralisation, reinforcing von der Leyen’s authority and moving towards a presidential model.

• Challenges: Overlapping portfolios (e.g., environment, defence, and competitiveness) create complexity and redundancy across roles.

• Missed Opportunities: The new structure lacks a dedicated focus on EU governance reform and clearer citizen engagement pathways, which could enhance responsiveness to public concerns​.

• Strategic Approach: The persistent overlap of portfolios necessitates a centralised, streamlined structure to improve governance and address the EU’s complex priorities.

Read here in pdf the Policy brief by Spyros Blavoukos, Professor, Athens University of Economics and Business, Head of the ‘Arian Condellis’ European Programme, ELIAMEP; Dimitrios Kollias, Junior Research Fellow, Programme Manager, Ariane Condellis European Programme, ELIAMEP, Stefanos Spyridon Pappas, Research Assistant, EPACE-EU, ELIAMEP; Lefteris Foivos Vasilopoulos, Research Assistant, EPACE-EU, ELIAMEP.

Introduction

Ursula von der Leyen opened the game with a straight ‘Security, Prosperity, Democracy’ flush. The Commission President envisions a Europe that is more responsive to its citizens, grounded in local engagement and characterised by greater flexibility and efficiency. This vision is evident in the President’s initial written addresses to the Commissioners-designate. In the Mission Letters to Commissioners-designate (2024-2029), President von der Leyen establishes the priorities and expectations guiding each portfolio, setting a strategic tone for the responsibilities of each Commissioner and the collaborative goals within the Commission.

These letters draw upon insights and recommendations from landmark reports commissioned by previous administrations of the European executive. These documents include the Draghi Report, addressing the future of European competitiveness; the Strategic Dialogue report on the future of EU Agriculture; and the Letta Report, which focuses on the development of the Single Market. Additionally, the recent Niinistö Report, which will guide Europe’s civilian and defence preparedness, is also referenced. The incoming Commission will leverage these reports to underpin new proposals and initiatives.

The strategic orientation and concrete directives in each Commissioner-designate portfolio will be thoroughly discussed during the European Parliament’s rigorous screening process, scheduled between November 4th and 12th. This process is of high value in democratic and political terms. It will legitimise the Commission and reveal where prospective Commissioners stand on the more sensitive issues of the next five-year agenda.

This policy brief outlines and analyses the revamped structure and key features of the von der Leyen Commission 2.0. More importantly, it offers a comprehensive overview of the mission letters issued to the Commissioners-designate in anticipation of the forthcoming hearings.

The New Structure of von der Leyen’s Commission 2.0

Reshuffling of portfolios for a new Commission term is standard practice, necessary to accommodate the growing number of Commissioners and changing priorities. The 2019–2024 College of Commissioners bore some similarities to previous structures but also introduced notable differences. The Commission was directed by the President alongside Executive Vice-presidents (EVPs) and Vice-presidents (VPs). Each one of them was assigned the task of leading groups of Commissioners who focused on specific strategic pillars with a thematic orientation. Key portfolios, such as the European Green Deal, Promoting the European Way of Life, and Stronger Europe in the World, operated under the leadership of an EVP or VP, who in turn reported directly to the Commission President.

The mission letters addressed to the 2019-2024 College of Commissioners highlighted a clear distinction in structure and roles. Under von der Leyen’s initial leadership model, eight Vice-presidents were entrusted with guiding and coordinating thematic groups of Commissioners, each focused on one of the Commission’s key priorities, with support provided by the Secretariat-General. Every Commissioner was involved in one or more of these groups, with a notable exception: the Commissioner for Budget and Administration, Johannes Hahn, reported directly to the President of the European Commission. Among the eight Vice-presidents, three held the special role of Executive Vice-president, balancing dual responsibilities. These Executive Vice-presidents not only led a specific Commissioners’ Group, but also managed an assigned policy domain, overseeing a Directorate-General within their remit. A unique feature of this structure was that one of the three, First Vice-President Frans Timmermans, assumed the role of chairing the College in the President’s absence.

The von der Leyen Commission 2.0 features an increasingly centripetal organizational structure, reminiscent of presidential systems.

The von der Leyen Commission 2.0 features an increasingly centripetal organizational structure, reminiscent of presidential systems. Vice-presidents are out and the six Executive Vice-presidents (5 + the High Representative, Kaja Kallas) now oversee a select group of Directorates-General and departments, with their influence varying considerably by position. This resulting organizational structure is simpler, eliminating one layer of command and control, i.e. the Vice-presidents. This new organizational architecture is expected to remain irrespective of how the upcoming hearings of the Commissioners-designate play out.

Source: Politico, ‘Who works for whom in the new EU power structure’

 

Mission Letters in Brief

Reviewing the complete set of all twenty-six mission letters is a formidable task, even for EU enthusiasts. For this reason, we have compiled a table of concise overviews of the portfolios and the respective missions of the 2024–2029 Commissioners-designate.

Commissioner Portfolio Mission Teresa Ribera Rodríguez Executive VP for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition Circular Economy, European Green Deal, growth strategy and competition policy
• Clean Industry Deal
• European Climate Law: 90% reduction in emissions till 2040
• Social Climate Fund & Just Transition Fund Henna Virkkunen Executive VP for Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy Cybersecurity, AI, Tech Sovereignty and internal security, border management – frontier technology, EU Digital Norms and Standards Internationally, digital public infrastructure
• Europe’s 2030 Digital Decade Targets
• AI Strategy – AI Factories Initiative
• European Data Union Strategy• European Democracy Shield Stéphane Séjourné Eexecutive VP for Prosperity and Industrial Sovereignty Productivity, Innovation, competitiveness, industrial strategy, horizontal Single Market strategy, research and development, Critical Raw Materials Act
• Clean Industrial Deal
• European Competitiveness Fund
• Competitiveness Coordination Tool Kaja Kallas High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and VP of the European Commission Strengthening security and defence, strategic partnerships, joined-up foreign policy
• Preparation of regular College of Commissioners’ debates on foreign policy issues.
• Modern and joined up FP (new foreign economic policy, external financial instruments) Roxana Mînzatu Executive VP for People, Skills and Preparedness Training and education, Erasmus+, European Sport Model, Quality Jobs roadmap
• European Pillar of Social Rights, New Pact for European Social Dialogue
• EU Anti-poverty Strategy
• European Affordable Housing Plan Raffaele Fitto Executive VP for Cohesion and Reforms Productivity, innovation, competitiveness, Next GenerationEU, resilience and sustainability
• Effective right to stay for every citizen
• European Affordable Housing Plan / New European Bauhaus Initiative
• Climate Adaptation Plan Maroš Šefčovič Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security; Interinstitutional Relations and Transparency Competitiveness, security, sustainability, free and fair trade, World Trade Organization, international negotiations, EU and the G7, new economic security doctrine
• European Economic Security Strategy
• Clean Trade and Investment Partnerships
• EU Customs Authority Valdis Dombrovskis Commissioner for Economy and Productivity; Implementation and Simplification Stability, Growth, NextGenerationEU, European Semester, competitiveness, digital euro
• Stability and Growth Pact
• Recovery and Resilience Facility
• Competitiveness Coordination Tool Dubravka Šuica Commissioner for Mediterranean Mediterranean, demography, external aspects of migration policy, security, crime, terrorism, Southern Neighbourhood
• New Pact for the Mediterranean
• Trans-Mediterranean Energy and Green Tech Cooperation Initiative
• Reconstruction plan for Gaza
• Gulf Strategy Olivér Várhelyi Commissioner for Health and Animal Welfare Health and Animal Welfare, European Health Union, modernisation of rules on animal welfare, food safety standards
• Critical Medicines Act
• European Biotech Act
• European Health Data Space Wopke Hoekstra Commissioner for Climate, Net Zero and Clean Growth Climate risks, climate diplomacy, security, ecological transition, emissions trading scheme and taxation
• European Climate Law
• Clean Industrial Deal / European Climate Adaptation Plan
• Revision of the Energy Taxation Directive Andrius Kubilius Commissioner for Defence and Space European Defence Union, space, military mobility, civil-military, EU-NATO strategy
• White Paper on the Future of European Defence
• EU Space Strategy for Security and Defence / EU Space Law
• European Defence Fund / European Defence Industrial Strategy Marta Kos Commissioner for Enlargement Enlargement, EU neighbourhood policy, Ukraine, Turkey, Balkans, Southern Caucasus
• Gradual integration of candidate countries
• Black Sea Strategy Jozef Síkela Commissioner for International Partnerships Clean trade and investment partnerships

• Team Europe approach

• Global Gateway Costas Kadis Commissioner for Fisheries and Oceans Coastal communities, food security, food sovereignty
• Common Fisheries Policy
• EU Ocean Research and Innovation Strategy
• Climate Adaptation Plan Maria Luís Albuquerque Commissioner for Financial Services and the Savings and Investments Union Financing green, social and digital transition, EU as global leader in sustainable finance

•             Banking Union / European Deposit Insurance Scheme

•             European Savings and Investments Union Hadja Lahbib Commissioner for Preparedness and Crisis Management; Equality Civil preparedness, integrated approach to crisis management, international humanitarian law, roadmap for women’s rights, antiracist action, LGBTIQ rights, People with Disability Rights, and rights of minorities
• EU Preparedness Union Strategy / EU Preparedness Law
• European Civil Defence Mechanism
• Gender Equality Strategy
• Anti-racism Strategy
• LGBTIQ Equality Strategy
• Strategy for the Persons with Disabilities Magnus Brunner Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration Internal security, strong common borders, migration, fight again organised crime, cybercrime, improvements of Schengen framework
• European Internal Security Strategy
• EU Visa-Policy Strategy
• Pact on Migration and Asylum Jessika Roswall Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy European Green Deal, water security and resilience, natural world, bioeconomy, global water leadership
• European Water Resilience Strategy
• Climate Adaptation Plan
• New European Bauhaus Piotr Serafin Commissioner for Budget, Anti-Fraud and Public Administration Responsive budget, anti-fraud, modern public administration
• European Competitiveness Fund
• Conditionality Regulation
• European Anti-Fraud Office Dan Jørgensen Commissioner for Energy and Housing Energy Union, sustainable and affordable housing
• European Affordable Housing Plan
• Clean Industrial Deal
• Electrification Action Plan Ekaterina Zaharieva Commissioner for Startups, Research and Innovation Startups, research and development, innovation
• European Innovation Council / European Research Council
• European Innovation Act
• European Research Area Michael McGrath Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, and the Rule of Law Democracy, Justice and Rule of Law, fairness and integrity, single market
• European Democracy Shield
• Rule of Law Report
• Consumer Agenda 2025-2030 Apostolos Tzitzikostas Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism Resilient and competitive tourism sector, sustainable transport

• Trans-European Transport Corridor

• Single Market for Transport Services

• Comprehensive EU Port Strategy Christophe Hansen Commissioner for Agriculture and Food Food security, rural areas, food sovereignty
• European Water Resilience Strategy
• Vision for Agriculture and Food Glenn Micallef Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport Strategy on Intergenerational Fairness, youth participation, Culture Compass, European Sport Diplomacy
• Youth Policy Dialogues
• President’s Youth Advisory Board
• EU Strategy on the Rights of the Child

 

The Keywords of the new Commission: Presidentialisation, Overlap and Missed Opportunities

In her re-election speech to the European Parliament and subsequent political guidelines for the 2024-2029 European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen has outlined a strategic framework of action centred around seven key pillars. These define the focal areas of her vision and include:

• A New Plan for Europe’s Sustainable Prosperity and Competitiveness
• A new era for European Defence and Security
• Supporting people, strengthening our societies and our social model
• Sustaining our quality of life: food security, water and nature
• Protecting our democracy, upholding our values
• A global Europe: Leveraging our power and partnerships
• Delivering together and preparing our Union for the future.

In their in-depth analysis of the political guidelines and mission letters Levente Kocsis and Eric Maurice, identify 194 specific commitments made by the President of the Commission. These commitments are broadly organised across the strategic pillars mentioned in the guidelines, as seen in the following graph, in percentage terms. They also align closely with the priorities defined in the Strategic Agenda adopted in June 2024, as well as with those of the European political parties whose support was essential for von der Leyen’s re-election by the Parliament.

Source: EPC, COMPENDIUM EUROPEAN POLITICS AND INSTITUTIONS PROGRAMME 24 OCTOBER 2024

When considering the new structure of the Commission (absent of Vice-presidents) in tandem with the study of specific policy areas in each portfolio, three features emerge: increased presidentialisation, continuity of overlapping mandates, and missed opportunities to upgrade policies and streamline Commision’s work.

Presidentialisation

Von der Leyen’s first term has been characterised by a slow but undoubtable shift of power to the Commission’s centre, i.e. a presidentialisation of the institution, that is especially poignant compared to the two previous office holders, namely José Manuel Barroso and Jean-Claude Juncker (Kassim 2021). The initial presidentialist thrust owes much to the first use of the Spitzenkandidaten process in 2014 (Dimitrakopoulos et al. 2024: 8). The multi-faceted and continuous crisis environment, from the global pandemic to the land war at the EU’s doorstep, have created windows of opportunity for the incremental centralisation of power and authority in the hands of the Commission President (Moens et al 2024). Von der Leyen has capitalised on all the above. This trend conflicts with the traditional Commission ethos of purely collegial pluralism, wherein Commissioners are of de facto equal rank and free to exercise independent judgment, as enshrined in the Treaties (Article 17(8) TEU and Articles 234 and 250 TFEU).

Still, there are references in the Treaties that pave the way for a different conceptualisation of the Commission President’s role. Such alternative approaches could be justified by the fact that Commission Presidents are elected first (as President-elect) and exercise considerable control over the subsequent composition of the College (Article 17(7) TEU). Furthermore, after the confirmation of the Commissioners, the President retains full control of the body. Their power to unilaterally compel the resignation of an individual Commissioner, except the High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, is proof of this (Article 18(1) TEU). Finally, the Commission President has wide-ranging organisational powers that allow them to exert significant control over individual Commissioners, whether through re-shuffling of portfolios or division of portfolios (Article 17(6) TEU and Article 248 TFEU) (Cotter 2024).

…centralisation may allow for greater effectiveness, especially in a poly- and perma-crisis environment. 

The ongoing centralisation is accompanied by greater politicisation that risks undermining the technocratic nature of the Commission. The fusion of politics and technocracy may be anathema to many, whilst others may see it as a necessary step towards further political integration in the European project. Nevertheless, centralisation may allow for greater effectiveness, especially in a poly- and perma-crisis environment. While acknowledging the legitimacy concerns of such a development, its positive effect may prove catalytic for the association between European demos and the – oft demonised – EU institutional architecture.

Regardless of one’s disposition towards the Commission’s presidentialisation, what appeared to be an unorganized and seemingly improvisational manoeuvre in von der Leyen’s first term now seems baked into her strategy. The Commission’s new structure, with its murky portfolios and downgraded Vice-presidents now limited to a seemingly obedient executive role, hints at a transformation of the Commission from a collegial body into a Presidential office, as Alberto Alemanno argues. This restructuring is designed to drive key priorities forward by simplifying the ‘line of command’. In the new format, Executive Vice-presidents oversee only a select few Directorates-General and departments, with their influence varying significantly across roles. Certain Commissioners—including ‘heavy guns’ like former Vice-presidents Valdis Dombrovskis and Maros Šefčovič but also Piotr Serafin who will handle the EU budget ‘hot potato’ during the Multi-Annual Financial Framework negotiations—will report directly to the President. The new setup clearly indicates a Commission that operates under the strict supervision and guidance of President von der Leyen in most if not all key issues, including economic security and productivity. Thus, the structure of the new Commission is clearly hierarchical, which testifies to its further presidentialisation.

Overlaps

Each new College of Commissioners is typically prefaced by discussions around “overlap,” an issue recognised as fact rather than speculation. After successive enlargements, the number of Commissioners now exceeds the scope of EU competences, raising valid questions about the substantive content of certain portfolios. This presents a structural problem that underlies any discussion about the inevitable overlap of individual portfolios.

Clear examples of overlap include Teresa Ribera Rodríguez, Executive VP for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition and Stéphane Séjourné, Executive VP for Prosperity and Industrial Sovereignty. The authority of Ribera Rodriguez appears somewhat uncertain. Although officially tasked with overseeing the implementation of the Green Deal, her remit includes control over the powerful Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP), the EU body with exclusive competence over competition; this is a policy area currently being transfigured by economic sovereignty concerns. She is tasked, among others, with the Circular Economy (although there is a Commissioner on Circular Economy: Jessika Roswall), the European Green Deal, growth strategy and competition policy, the Clean Industry Deal and the Social Climate Fund & Just Transition Fund. Crucially, Séjourné, responsible for prosperity and industrial sovereignty (and not competitiveness), is also responsible (among others) for Productivity (as opposed to growth strategy), competitiveness, industrial strategy the Clean Industrial Deal, the European Competitiveness Fund and the Competitiveness Coordination Tool.

Furthermore, an even more weirded situation exists between Roxana Mînzatu, Executive VP for People, Skills and Preparedness, in a triple (or more) partial overlap with Executive VP of Cohesion and Reforms Raffaele Fitto; and Commissioners-designate Glenn Micallef, Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport; and Dan Jørgensen, Commissioner on Energy and Housing. The first focuses on skills and labour gaps, training and education, Erasmus+, the European Sport Model, the Quality Jobs roadmap, the European Pillar of Social Rights, the New Pact for European Social Dialogue, the EU Anti-poverty Strategy and the European Affordable Housing Plan. The second, Raffaele Fitto, also focuses on the European Affordable Housing Plan and New European Bauhaus Initiative, the Climate Adaptation Plan, competitiveness and NextGenerationEU. Glenn Micallef follows with every youth and culture-related topic before going back to Dan Jørgensen and sustainable and affordable housing, specifically the European Affordable Housing Plan and the Clean Industrial Deal (among other things).

Maroš Šefčovič, Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security, Interinstitutional Relations and Transparency, has a portfolio that overlaps with the International Partnerships portfolio of Commissioner Jozef Síkela.

Executive Vice-president Henna Virkkunen, overseeing Tech Sovereignty, Security, and Democracy, manages a portfolio that intersects significantly with technology—particularly AI—and the strengthening of external borders, especially in relation to managing migration flows. Her role directly references the Pact on Asylum and Migration and is closely aligned with the operations of Frontex. This creates a reciprocal overlap with Andrius Kubilius, Commissioner for Defence and Space; Magnus Brunner, Commissioner for Internal Affairs and Migration; and Dubravka Šuica, Commissioner for the Mediterranean, highlighting a cohesive yet complex interrelation across portfolios.

Having already highlighted the overlap between Executive Vice-president Henna Virkkunen and Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius, it is essential to address another area of significant overlap—namely, the intersection of foreign policy and defence. Kaja Kallas, High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and VP of the European Commission, among others, also operates with a mandate to strengthen security and defence (focusing on Ukraine, European Defence Union, NATO, and sanctions).

Bearing in mind the above discussion, three features characterise the structure of the new College: overlapping hierarchy; significant differences between executive Vice-presidential portfolios; and reporting lines that run in different directions with several Executive Vice-presidents responsible for several Commissioners and von der Leyen being directly responsible for some parts of the Commissioners’ portfolios (Patrin 2024).

Missed Opportunities

The new Commission has missed the opportunity to sharpen its objectives and distribute more clearly defined portfolios.

The new Commission has missed the opportunity to sharpen its objectives and distribute more clearly defined portfolios. An example is that of the Belgian Commissioner-designate, Hadja Lahbib, who is responsible for “preparedness”, encompassing mainly prevention and crisis management. However, her portfolio also includes the promotion of gender equality and the combating of discrimination—two areas of competence notably distinct from her primary crisis-related duties, creating some confusion and raising doubts about the rationale behind this competence allocation. Moreover, considering the portfolio of Olivér Várhelyi, integrating public health policy with animal health could inadvertently undermine the efforts within his primary sector—a potentially shortsighted approach. Health policy is intricately connected to economic drivers such as biotechnology and pharmaceuticals and is essential in addressing significant challenges, including demographic shifts, the implications of an ageing population, workforce sustainability, and the potential emergence of future health crises, such as pandemics.

A second missed opportunity regards interaction with European citizens. Although the Mission Letters broadly state that the Commission intends to usher in a new era of dialogue with citizens, this commitment is not clearly reflected in the responsibilities assigned in the mission statements. If the new Commission aims to integrate citizens into its work, this priority should have been explicitly incorporated into the Commission’s structure, ideally through the defined role of at least one Executive Vice-President (Zuleeg and Emmanouilidis, 2024).

Finally, the overarching goal of strengthening EU governance, rendered especially important in response to numerous internal and external challenges and the potential expansion to over 30 member states, is notably absent in the new Commission’s structure. This priority is only lightly touched upon in the general section of the Mission Letters and is not evident in the distribution of major portfolios. Such omissions strongly suggest that governance reform within the EU is not a central focus of the second von der Leyen Commission. 

Conclusion

…a much more centralised, compact and centripetal approach is required. Adopting a more streamlined, hierarchical structure is a strategic decision to enhance proactive and better-coordinated governance within the Commission.

As previously noted, portfolio reshuffling and overlap among Commissioners is not uncommon. On the contrary, it has become the norm. The Treaty-enshrined high number of Commissioners, directly linked with the number of member-states, and the challenge of accommodating all of them in different portfolios remain ongoing concerns. This was a notable feature of the prior political cycle and continues to be so in the new Commission structure. Restructuring and reshuffling have not yet solved the major problem of overlap as evidenced by the priorities of the Commissioners-designate discussed in the first section of this policy brief. The shift toward a more centripetal approach, therefore, may not be an unforeseen or undesirable development, especially given the ambitious and highly complex triptych of ‘Security, Prosperity, Democracy’ put forward by Von der Leyen herself. To achieve these goals, a much more centralised, compact and centripetal approach is required. Given the inevitability of portfolio overlaps, adopting a more streamlined, hierarchical structure is a strategic decision to enhance proactive and better-coordinated governance within the Commission. 

 

References

Cotter, J. (2024) ‘La Commission, c’est moi? The invisible hand of Article 17(6) TEU in the presidentialisation of the European Commission’, 25 September, https://verfassungsblog.de/eu-commission-new-von-der-leyen-president/

Dimitrakopoulos, D., Ceron, M. and Christiansen, Th. (2024) ‘Introduction: The Politicisation of the European Commission’s Presidency’ in Dimitrakopoulos, D., Ceron, M. and Christiansen, Th. (eds) The Politicisation of the European Commission’s Presidency Spitzenkandidaten and Beyond, Palgrave Macmillan.

Draghi, M., 2024. Report on European Competitiveness. Commissioned by the European Commission. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/topics/strengthening-european-competitiveness/eu-competitiveness-looking-ahead_en  [Accessed 31 October 2024].

European Parliament, 2014. Letters by President Sassoli to Commission President-elect von der Leyen Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20190930IPR62887/letters-by-president-sassoli-to-commission-president-elect-von-der-leyen [Accessed 31 October 2024].

European Parliament, 2024. Confirmation Hearings Process Overview. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu [Accessed 31 October 2024].

European Union, 2024. Mission Letters to Commissioners-designate (2024-2029). Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/documents_en [Accessed 31 October 2024].

European Council, 2024. Strategic Agenda Adopted by the EU. European Council Meeting, June 2024, Brussels. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ac_24_3549 [Accessed 31 October 2024].

Fondation Robert Schuman, 2024. Analysis on the Structure of the von der Leyen II Commission. Paris: Fondation Robert Schuman. Available at: https://server.www.robert-schuman.eu/storage/en/doc/questions-d-europe/qe-764-en.pdf [Accessed 31 October 2024].

Kassim, H. (2021) ‘The European Commission: from collegiality to presidential leadership’, in D. Hodson, U. Puetter, S. Saurugger, and J. Peterson (eds) The Institutions of the European Union (5th edn), Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Kocsis, L. and Maurice, E., 2024. 194 Specific Commitments Analysis in European Politics and Institutions Programme. EPC Compendium on European Politics, European Policy Centre, Brussels.

Letta, E., 2024. Report on the Future of the Single Market. Commissioned by the European Commission. Available at: https://www.consilium.europa.eu/media/ny3j24sm/much-more-than-a-market-report-by-enrico-letta.pdf  (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

Moens, B., Griera, M. and Barigazzi, J (2024) ‘From queen to empress: Inside Ursula von der Leyen’s power grab’, Politico, 19 September, https://www.politico.eu/article/ursula-von-der-leyen-europe-commission-brussels-power/

Niinistö, S. (2024) Safer Together Strengthening Europe’s Civilian and Military Preparedness and Readiness, Report by Sauli Niinistö, former President of the Republic of Finland, In his capacity as Special Adviser to the President of the European Commission, European Commission. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/5bb2881f-9e29-42f2-8b77-8739b19d047c_en?filename=2024_Niinisto-report_Book_VF.pdf (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

Parliament Hearing Committee, 2019. Concerns on Nominees László Trócsányi, Rovana Plumb, and Sylvie Goulard. Internal Report, European Parliament Hearings, Brussels.

Patrin, M. (2024) ‘New Structure, New Priorities – Why the Next Commission May Be More Hierarchical but less Coherent’, 15 October, https://verfassungsblog.de/commissions-new-structure/

Piodi, F. (2007) A Study of the proceedings of the European Convention accompanied by archive documents, EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT. Available at: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/pdf/cardoc/pe_and_job_ce_en.pdf  (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

Strategic Dialogue Group, 2024. Report on the Future of EU Agriculture. European Commission, Brussels. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_24_4528 (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

Taylor, S. (2014) How jeleva was forced out, POLITICO. Available at: https://www.politico.eu/article/how-jeleva-was-forced-out  (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

von der Leyen, U., 2024. Political Guidelines for the 2024-2029 European Commission. Brussels: European Commission. Available at: https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/e6cd4328-673c-4e7a-8683-f63ffb2cf648_en?filename=Political%20Guidelines%202024-2029_EN.pdf&trk=public_post_comment-text (Accessed: 31 October 2024).

von der Leyen, U., 2024. Re-election Speech to the European Parliament. European Parliament, Strasbourg, 4 July.

von der Leyen, U. (2019) Misson Letter Margrethe Vestager, European Commission. Available at: https://commissioners.ec.europa.eu/document/download/0146cc5f-761f-48ee-8316-a3e92dc3e7ca_en?filename=mission-letter-margrethe-vestager_2019_en.pdf(Accessed: 01 November 2024).

Zuleeg, F. and Emmanouilidis, J. (2024) Reactions to the next commission, EPC – European Policy Centre. Available at: https://www.epc.eu/en/publications/Reactions-to-the-next-Commission~5d5e58  (Access

Ioannis Armakolas and Alexandra Voudouri, co-authored the article “Relaunching Enlargement: How Will It Affect the Western Balkans?” for the 21st European Institute of the Mediterranean Yearbook, which focuses on the developments and perspectives of European policy in the wider Mediterranean region.

In their paper, the authors highlight the process of redefining the EU’s enlargement strategy in the light of geopolitical changes, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with a focus on the integration of Ukraine, Moldova and the Western Balkans by 2030. They argue that the cycle of indecision can be broken if the EU links the new Growth Plan to critical reforms and negotiating chapters, providing incentives for candidate countries to overcome bilateral differences. Furthermore, according to the authors, a credible roadmap for deeper integration, clarity on the necessary reforms and effective communication to ensure public support are essential for a successful enlargement process.

You can read the article here.

This database provides an inventory and critical appraisal of available estimates and indicators related to irregular migration flows.  The datasets include meta-level information on sources and methodology and a quality assessment based on MIrreM’s criteria.

Siruno, L., Leerkes, A., Badre, A., Bircan, T., Brunovská, E., Cacciapaglia, M., Carvalho, J., Cassain, L., Cyrus, N., Desmond, A., Fihel, A., Finotelli, C., Ghio, D., Hendow, M., Heylin, R., Jauhiainen, J.S., Jovanovic, K., Kierans, D., Mohan, S.S., Nikolova, M., Oruc, N., Ramos, M.P.G., Rössl, L., Sağiroğlu, A.Z., Santos, S., Schütze, T., & Sohst, R.R. (2024) MIrreM Public Database on Irregular Migration Flow Estimates and Indicators. Krems: University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University Krems). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10813413

This policy paper explores Russia’s use of the Wagner Group in Africa, highlighting how the concept of plausible deniability allows the Kremlin to expand its influence in regions such as Mali and the Central African Republic. By distancing itself from direct responsibility for controversial military actions, Russia is able to exert significant geopolitical control. The paper also examines the continuation of Wagner Group operations following the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and discusses the broader implications of these developments for Africa and the Mediterranean region.

• The Wagner Group’s operations continued after the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, with increased integration into Russia’s Ministry of Defence, signaling Russia’s deeper involvement in the continent’s security dynamics.
• Moscow’s activities in Africa signal a broader strategy to challenge Western influence by supporting local regimes and displacing Western control over critical resources, while securing Russia’s standing as a dominant player in the region’s security and economic landscape.
• Russia has secured access to valuable natural resources through its African interventions, extracting billions in gold and pursuing strategic control over uranium in countries like Niger. These resources likely help fund Russia’s broader geopolitical ambitions, including its war efforts in Ukraine.
• Russia offers “pragmatic engagement” as a substitute for dwindling Western aid in Africa, capitalizing on the gap left by reduced Western support to build influence through military assistance, resource extraction, and infrastructure projects.

Read here in pdf the Policy brief by Natalia Tellidou, Research Fellow at ELIAMEP’s Mediterranean Programme.

Russia’s Strategic Push into Africa

In 2020, the world witnessed a record 56 unique conflicts, the highest number in a single year since 1946.[1] Over half of these were internationalized civil wars, where external powers sponsor local actors to fight on their behalf. This practice, known as conflict delegation, has become a strategic tool for powerful states looking to extend their influence without direct involvement. As a result, geopolitical tensions have escalated, with proxy wars becoming a common feature of modern conflict.

One of the most prominent players in these proxy wars is Russia, which relies heavily on private military security contractors (PMSCs) like the Wagner Group. These contractors provide a range of services, including intelligence gathering, military training, logistical support, and infrastructure protection. Operating in countries like Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR), the Wagner Group has supplied military training and assistance while enabling Russia to maintain plausible deniability. By relying on these contractors, Russia can distance itself from controversial actions, all while securing a foothold in these key regions.

Even after the death of Wagner’s leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the group’s operations have continued, underscoring the strategic importance of their mission. Russia has adapted to ensure these activities persist, maintaining its involvement in ongoing conflicts and protecting its interests in Africa (Figure 1). Beyond military influence, Russia reaps significant rewards from these operations, including increased security leverage, access to critical natural resources, and the ability to offer African states an alternative to dwindling Western aid.

By multiplying risks in the Global South, Russia seeks to undermine the United States and its allies, positioning itself as a dominant force in the region.

By multiplying risks in the Global South, Russia seeks to undermine the United States and its allies, positioning itself as a dominant force in the region.

Considering all this, this policy brief will first explore how the Wagner Group became instrumental in providing military support to countries like Mali and the CAR followed by an analysis of the post- Prigozhin period and the operations. Finally, the discussion will focus on what Russia gains from these activities—enhanced security leverage, access to valuable natural resources, and a pragmatic engagement to the diminishing development aid offered by Western countries.

Figure 1: Where and How Wanger Group Has Engaged in Africa. Sources: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, ACLED, Kathrin Buchholz https://www.statista.com/chart/30665/wagner-group-engagement-africa/

Wagner Group in Africa: A Tool for Russia’s Military and Political Ambitions 

 

Long before the war in Ukraine, Russia was already actively expanding its influence in the Global South, particularly through the Wagner Group, that allows Moscow to operate in conflict zones with plausible deniability.

Long before the war in Ukraine, Russia was already actively expanding its influence in the Global South, particularly through the Wagner Group, that allows Moscow to operate in conflict zones with plausible deniability. Plausible deniability refers to a strategy in which a sponsoring state avoids direct responsibility for its involvement in foreign conflicts[2]. By covertly supporting proxies, as the Wagner Group, the sponsor-state can reap the benefits of a potential victory without facing the risks and costs associated with direct intervention, including defeat or international condemnation. This approach allows the state to distance itself from the consequences of its actions, evading criticism from both international and domestic audiences. As a result, plausible deniability becomes a key incentive for states to engage in proxy wars. By leveraging Wagner’s presence, Russia has been able to support regimes and shape outcomes while distancing itself from the group’s often controversial and illegal activities.

Take Mali, for example. Since December 2021, Wagner has been actively involved in the country’s security landscape, invited by the Malian government, which had grown frustrated with international forces like the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali, the UN peacekeeping mission (MINUSMA) and French troops. Wagner’s presence was intended to stabilize the country and support the peace process following the 2012 crisis. At its peak, over 2,000 Wagner personnel were stationed in Mali, providing military support, handling air force operations, and securing the ruling elite.

Wagner’s primary objective was to strengthen Mali’s offensive capabilities, particularly in the conflict-ridden northern region. Unlike international forces, Wagner and the Malian government reject population-centric, “soft” approaches to counterinsurgency. Wagner forces are notorious for their violent tactics, especially towards civilians, and they often coerce prisoners and locals into collaborating by providing intelligence or leading them to insurgent hideouts. While the French-backed reconciliation process with northern Tuareg rebels sought a more diplomatic solution, the Malian government—supported by Wagner—favored a military strategy, fueling renewed conflict in the north. Without Wagner, Mali’s armed forces would struggle to challenge insurgent control, and the demand for Wagner’s expertise in training and air force operations continues to grow.

Politically and socially, the group has exploited widespread discontent with the security situation and anti-French sentiments, positioning itself as a necessary force for stability.

Wagner’s impact in Mali is not confined to military efforts alone. Politically and socially, the group has exploited widespread discontent with the security situation and anti-French sentiments, positioning itself as a necessary force for stability. This multifaceted approach extends Russia’s influence far beyond the battlefield.

A similar pattern can be observed in the Central African Republic (CAR). Since January 2018, Wagner—alongside another Russian PMC, Patriot—has provided military training and security in exchange for access to valuable resources like gold, uranium, and diamonds. Wagner has been instrumental in bolstering the regime of President Faustin-Archange Touadéra, particularly during a 2020 rebel incursion into Bangui, where the group played a critical role in defending the government. Wagner has since become a cornerstone of Touadéra’s war efforts, helping him reclaim rebel-held territories.

However, Wagner’s involvement in CAR has exacerbated violence and militarization, much like in Mali. Russian mercenaries have instructed local militias to merge with the national army and function as self-defense units. These units, however, soon became rogue, committing widespread human rights abuses against civilians. Wagner’s presence has not only intensified the violence but also fragmented the region’s security environment, further entrenching instability.

In both Mali and the CAR, Wagner’s role extends beyond providing military support—it is about leveraging local grievances, securing valuable resources, and deepening Russia’s influence while operating in the shadows. The group’s activities have serious implications for the stability of these regions and underscore Russia’s strategic use of conflict delegation to assert itself on the global stage. 

Post-Prigozhin Dynamics 

While disruptions following the group’s mutiny and Prigozhin’s death caused some temporary instability—such as delayed salaries and suspended missions—operations quickly resumed, signaling the group’s resilience.

Despite the death of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Wagner Group’s operations across Africa have persisted, though not without adjustments. The “Expeditionary Corps,” Wagner’s key operational unit, continued its activities in countries like Sudan, Niger, and Burkina Faso, maintaining its original objectives and utilizing the same resources. While disruptions following the group’s mutiny and Prigozhin’s death caused some temporary instability—such as delayed salaries and suspended missions—operations quickly resumed, signaling the group’s resilience. 

In Mali, for instance, after internal disagreements, Wagner reached a new agreement to work directly under the Russian Ministry of Defence. This shift allowed the Ministry to supply Wagner with essential military assets—vehicles, planes, and ammunition—at no cost, reinforcing Wagner’s role in the region. Moreover, the Ministry of Defence has sought additional means of support, including potential collaborations with other groups like Redut, which operate similarly to Wagner.

Following Prigozhin’s mutiny, the Kremlin formally moved Wagner’s African operations under the control of Russian military intelligence, the GRU. This reorganization saw senior Russian officials, including General Averyanov and Deputy Defence Minister Yunus-Bek Yevkurov, visiting former Wagner strongholds in Africa in early September. Far from signaling the end of Russia’s involvement, Prigozhin’s death marked a deeper entrenchment of Russian influence in the region. Wagner’s activities have since been rebranded under the Ministry of Defence as the “Africa Corps,” reflecting this increased oversight[3].

Russia’s diplomatic engagement has also expanded. In January 2024, Chad’s junta leader, Mahamat Idriss Déby, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow to discuss strengthening bilateral ties. This meeting is particularly significant, as Chad had previously maintained a pro-Western stance. These developments indicate that Russia’s strategy in Africa, spearheaded by the Wagner Group and its successors, remains robust and continues to adapt to evolving geopolitical realities.

Strategic Returns: Russia’s Gains from its African Engagement

Russia’s involvement in Africa through the Wagner Group brings several strategic advantages. First and foremost, it strengthens Russia’s security posture. One clear example is Russia’s ongoing effort to establish a naval base at Port Sudan, which would grant Russia vital access to the Red Sea. Although the agreement has faced setbacks due to United States pressure, Russia remains determined to secure this critical foothold, signaling its broader ambitions in the region.

Secondly, Russia gains access to valuable natural resources. Over the past two years, Russia has reportedly extracted $2.5 billion worth of gold from Africa, with much of this wealth likely funding its war in Ukraine, according to the Blood Gold Report. Russian fighters, many of them former Wagner mercenaries, also took control of the Intahaka gold mine in northern Mali, a strategically significant asset long contested by various armed groups. In Niger, Russia is actively pursuing uranium concessions, aiming to reduce French influence over these critical resources. The broader pattern is clear: Russia seeks to challenge Western dominance over Africa’s minerals and energy reserves, positioning itself as a key player in this global resource competition.

Russia presents itself as a “pragmatic engagement” to diminishing Western development aid.

Lastly, Russia presents itself as a “pragmatic engagement” to diminishing Western development aid. With countries like the UK significantly cutting back on foreign aid, many African nations are turning to Russia as a reliable partner. By filling the void left by the West, Russia secures both influence and access to resources, while offering these nations military assistance, infrastructure projects, and less conditional diplomatic engagement. This approach allows Russia to build alliances, exert political influence, and further undermine Western presence in the region.

Implications for Global Security: Russia’s Growing Role in Africa

In conclusion, Russia’s strategy in Africa, executed largely through the Wagner Group and other proxies, represents a multifaceted attempt to enhance its geopolitical influence while undermining the global standing of the United States and its allies. By providing military support, gaining control over vital natural resources, and offering a pragmatic alternative to Western aid, Russia is positioning itself as a dominant force across the continent. 

Moving forward, it is crucial for policymakers and international actors to recognize the implications of Russia’s growing influence and to respond accordingly.

The death of Yevgeny Prigozhin did little to disrupt these plans, as Russia’s operations have not only persisted but have expanded under direct Kremlin oversight. This deepened involvement, combined with its strategic maneuvering in key areas like Mali, the Central African Republic, and Chad, ensures that Russia remains a pivotal player in the Global South. Moving forward, it is crucial for policymakers and international actors to recognize the implications of Russia’s growing influence and to respond accordingly. The stakes are not only regional but have far-reaching consequences for global security and resource access.

[1] Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946-2020 is published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Figure 1, page 2, presents the number of battle deaths and conflicts.

[2] Mark Galeotti presents the benefits Russia reaps from covert proxy relationships highlighting how plausible deniability was expertly used in Ukraine, before the military invasion in 2022.

[3] Wagner Group is a reference to the composer Richard Wagner. The reasons why this name was chosen remains a mystery.

 

References

‘A Mixed Picture: How Mali Views the Wagner Group’. 2024. 11.10.2024. https://rusi.orghttps://rusi.org

Arduino, Alessandro. 2024. ‘Wagner Group Is Now Africa Corps. What This Means for Russia’s Operations on the Continent’. The Conversation. 14.02.2024. https://theconversation.com/wagner-group-is-now-africa-corps-what-this-means-for-russias-operations-on-the-continent-223253.

Bloomberg.Com. 2024. ‘Russia Raises the Stakes in Tussle Over Africa’, 30.01.2024. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-01-30/russia-raises-the-stakes-in-tussle-over-africa.

‘Decoding the Wagner Group: Analyzing the Role of Private Military Security Contractors in Russian Proxy Warfare’. n.d. New America. Accessed 11.10.2024. http://newamerica.org/future-security/reports/decoding-wagner-group-analyzing-role-private-military-security-contractors-russian-proxy-warfare/.

Doxsee, Catrina. 2023. ‘How Does the Conflict in Sudan Affect Russia and the Wagner Group?’, April. https://www.csis.org/analysis/how-does-conflict-sudan-affect-russia-and-wagner-group.

Galeotti, Mark. 2016. ‘Hybrid, Ambiguous, and Non-Linear? How New Is Russia’s “New Way of War”?’ Small Wars & Insurgencies 27 (2): 282–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2015.1129170.

‘Infographic: Where & How Wagner Group Has Engaged in Africa’. 2023. Statista Daily Data. 24 August 2023. https://www.statista.com/chart/30665/wagner-group-engagement-africa.

Jones, Seth G., Catrina Doxsee, Brian Katz, Eric McQueen, and Joe Moye. 2021. ‘Russia’s Corporate Soldiers: The Global Expansion of Russia’s Private Military Companies’, July. https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-corporate-soldiers-global-expansion-russias-private-military-companies.

Liik, Kadri. 2023. ‘From Russia with Love: How Moscow Courts the Global South’. ECFR. 21.12.2023. https://ecfr.eu/publication/from-russia-with-love-how-moscow-courts-the-global-south/.

‘Moscow’s Mercenary Wars: The Expansion of Russian Private Military Companies’. 2023. Moscow’s Mercenary Wars: The Expansion of Russian Private Military Companies. Accessed 11.10.2024. https://russianpmcs.csis.org.

Reuters. 2024. ‘Putin Meets Chad Junta Leader as Russia Competes with France in Africa’, 24 January 2024, sec. Africa. https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/putin-meets-chad-junta-leader-russia-competes-with-france-africa-2024-01-24/.

‘Russia Is Using the Soviet Playbook in the Global South to Challenge the West – and It Is Working | Chatham House – International Affairs Think Tank’. 2024. 16.05.2024. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/05/russia-using-soviet-playbook-global-south-challenge-west-and-it-working.

Saucedo, Natalia. 2023. ‘Russia’s Influence in Mali’. Human Rights Foundation (blog). 11.08.2023. https://hrf.org/russias-influence-in-mali/.

‘Stop Taking the Global South for Granted | Wilson Center’. 2024. Accessed 11.10.2024. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/stop-taking-global-south-granted.

‘The Blood Gold Report’. n.d. Blood Gold Report. Accessed 11.10.2024. https://bloodgoldreport.com/.

‘Wagner in Africa: How the Russian Mercenary Group Has Rebranded’. 2024, 20.02.2024. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-68322230.

Watts, Stephen, Bryan Frederick, Nathan Chandler, Mark Toukan, Christian Curriden, Erik E. Mueller, Edward Geist, et al. 2023. ‘Proxy Warfare in Strategic Competition: Military Implications’. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA307-3.html.

 

[1] Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946-2020 is published by the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Figure 1, page 2, presents the number of battle deaths and conflicts.

[2] Mark Galeotti presents the benefits Russia reaps from covert proxy relationships highlighting how plausible deniability was expertly used in Ukraine, before the military invasion in 2022.

[3] Wagner Group is a reference to the composer Richard Wagner. The reasons why this name was chosen remains a mystery.

Based on 20 countries across Europe, North America and North Africa, this report synthesises key trends and patterns of national policy approaches towards migrant irregularity, highlighting commonalities and differences across various contexts. In particular, this report examines three key research questions: how have irregular migration policies evolved over time and in response to what; what pathways into and out of irregularity have these policies produced or aimed to address; and what challenges have hindered policy implementation. In doing so, the report aims to contextualise irregular migration policy changes, as well as how such policies can channel migrants into or out of irregularity.

 

Hendow, M., Qaisrani, A., Rössl, L., Schütze, T., Kraler, A., Ahmad Yar, A. W., Bircan, T., Oruc, N., Mohan, S. S., Triandafyllidou, A., Jauhiainen, J. S., Smolander, S., Toivonen, H., Cyrus, N., Nikolova, M., Desmond, A., Heylin, R., Cacciapaglia, M., Bonizzoni, P., … Sohst, R. R. (2024). Comparing national laws and policies addressing irregular migrants. In MIrreM Working Paper No. 6. Krems: University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University Krems). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10782561

The Public Database on Irregular Migration Stock Estimates (the Database) provides an inventory and critical appraisal of country-level estimates of irregular migration stocks in 13 European countries, the United States and Canada for the period 2008 to 2023. It is a deliverable of the MIrreM project, which is a follow-up to Clandestino. Clandestino covered the period 2000-2008.

Kierans, D., Vargas-Silva, C., Ahmad-Yar, A. W., Bircan, T., Cacciapaglia, M., Carvalho, J., Cassain, L., Cyrus, N., Desmond, A., Fihel, A., Finotelli, C., Gonzalez Ramos, M. P., Heylin, R., Jauhiainen, J., Kraler, A., Leerkes, A., Nikolova, M., Rössl, L., Santos, S., … Sohst, R. R. (2024). MIrreM Public Database on Irregular Migration Stock Estimates (Version 2) [Data set]. Krems: University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University Krems). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13856861

 

 

This brief provides an abridged overview of the national policy landscape on irregular migration in Greece, based on a more extensive policy analysis. It also provides an overview of the main types of migrant irregularity that emerge and the pathways into and out of irregularity, including regularisations as relevant. Annexed to this deliverable is also an overview of the mapped legal and policy frameworks.

Nikolova, M. (2024). MIrreM Country Brief on Migration Policy Context – Greece. In MIrreM Report. Krems: University for Continuing Education Krems (Danube University Krems). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12606423

The interview is available only in Greek here.

Source: Free Sunday

Commentary published in the newspaper “Filelevtheros” (available only in Greek here), which refers to the recently published report entitled “Structural Reforms in Greece during the Crisis: 2010-2014. Overview, Evaluation and Policy Proposals” edited by the Crisis Observatory

The Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) under the Mercator European Dialogue (MED) program, successfully organized the strategic  workshop on: “Threat perceptions and scenarios for EU security and defense” on the 10th of July.

European MPs and researchers attended the event, had the opportunity to exchange views on critical issues of the European Union. This exchange has been initiated under the framework of the Mercator European Dialogue, a project organised by the German Marshall Fund of the United States in cooperation with the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs, the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, and the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens and is funded by Stiftung Mercator and since 2017 also by the King Baudouin Foundation.