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A Citizen’s Guide to Greece 2015

Open the doors/where are the people?

By David Wisner Growing up my friends and I used to play a small game with our hands. We would start with our hands clasped, thumbs aligned, index fingers erect. “Here is the church/here is the steeple/open the doors/wher...

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Youth and public service: satisfaction and peril

We share two poignant reminders of the lure — and challenges — of engaging young people in public service. In Afghanistan, a young American foreign service officer, Anne Smedinghoff, was the victim of a suicide car ...

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Political extremism and violence

By David Wisner Takis Michas has written about political extremism and violence in today’s Protagon. “Is there really a difference,” he asks, “between the violent tactics used or condoned by SYRIZA (riot...

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Civic education in Greece*

By David Wisner Last November the Dukakis Center hosted an international symposium on political reform in Greece. We brought in a wide variety of distinguished practitioners, scholars, and journalists to engage in a frank publi...

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Whither the bourgeoisie?

I read a tongue-in-cheek article by the wags at Reform Watch Greece some weeks ago which got me thinking about one of my favorite Balzac stories, Cesar Birotteau. The middle class has been decimated, so the argument goes, the p...

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Circle dancing with the Greeks

By David Wisner I first drafted this note over a year ago. If anything, the tendency I described, and its implications for the future of Greece and the EU, are all the greater. A worldly Greek acquaintance likes to tell the fol...

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The New Byzantine

By David Wisner Byzantine: …excessively complicated and detailed… (Oxford English Dictionary) I went to my local mall this past weekend. Malls are interesting places to observe human behavior, and it strikes me that they ma...

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So many candidates

By Dimitris Diamantis and David Wisner “So many candidates, so little time to choose,” reported one interlocutor to us in early May. How can one decide about new parties and about personalities that had until recently resid...

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The Great Debate: The Greek Parliament Votes

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The Crisis of the EU and the future of Greece

By David Wisner Lecture given at Hamilton College, New York, September 2012 The title of my talk is: «The Crisis of the EU and the Future of Greece». It might well have been the inverse: «The Crisis in Greece and the Future ...

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Strategic agility in Greek human resource management

By Konstantinos Bouas and Petros Katsimardos Introduction Human Resource Management policy is probably the most important challenge for Greek public administration, given the severe on-going crisis and the need to sharply reduc...

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Democracy: reinvented

By David Wisner I’ve been looking for an adjective with which to describe this recent op ed article by Bill Keller in the New York Times. Curious, perhaps. It’s not quite a celebration of a certain place where democ...

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Nowhere to hide

By David Wisner Politis has pointed this phenomenon up before. Newsworthy Grecians can no longer hide behind the figurative distance between Athens and the rest of the world, or the relative inaccessibility of the Greek languag...

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We can’t help it!

By David Wisner I often tell my politics students that people have a natural predisposition to act and think politically. What we do with this is the great challenge of contemporary citizenship and civic education. Two recent a...

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Who is to blame?

Two very symptomatic editorials featured in the Sunday news, both tending to focus blame for Greece’s woes on specific elements in Greek society. In the first, an editorial in the New York Times by Kostas Vaxevanis, the e...

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Why do I stay?

By David Wisner I was interviewed on local TV some weeks back about possible ways out of the economic crisis that has gripped Greek society. Before closing out the interview the journalist asked me why, as a foreigner, I stay i...

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Sticki-gate

Nick Malkoutzis has a probing analysis of the circus act that is the current Greek Parliament in the English pages of Kathimerini. In this instance he writes about the debate this past Thursday over whom to investigate in the o...

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Ageing, but with grace?

The editors of Kathimerini write in today’s online English edition that “The prime minister knows better than anyone else how difficult the job ahead is, and how many problems he has to deal with… he is makin...

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Female, Aboriginal, Educated, and Idle No More

A great story published in today’s Globe and Mail focuses on the driving forces behind Canada’s Idle No More movement. They call themselves an “indigenous rights revolution” aiming at honoring and fulfil...

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Wanted: leaders and local color

Surveying the panoply of contemporary European leaders, John Lloyd quips in Reuters, “All this grey almost makes you wish for Silvio Berlusconi to return, to lighten the mood.” “At times it seems that Europe, ...

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