Alternative Forms of Resilience in the Eurozone Crisis: Comparing the Greek and German Experience, 2007-2015

Alternative Forms of Resilience appear in hard economic times, allowing citizens to meet increasing needs, or fostering alternative participatory initiatives. They do so through Alternative Actions of formal and informal Organizations (AAOs) (LIVEWHAT WP6, 2015). This paper aims to compare these collective resilience initiatives and practices in the contrasting settings of Greece and Germany during the Eurozone crisis, in order to unravel whether and to what extent AAOs in the two countries diverge and converge in terms of the socio-political profile, their actions and practices, their beneficiaries, the type of rights and needs they address, and the values under which they act.

On the basis of our findings we propose to explain a partial expected convergence in reference to two major factors. On the one hand, we observe similar action fields, although in austerity-stricken Greece these tend to focus on urgent needs (e.g. food, housing, health) across the country, whereas in Germany they tend to be older and more institutionalized, while they involve more migrant and vulnerable populations. On the other hand, we suppose that the Great Recession has unleashed common discourses and transnational networks that favor the diffusion of innovative practices of cooperation and self-help.

The method applied is Alternative Action Organization Analysis (AAOA), an innovative content analysis approach deriving from protest event and political claims analysis, created for the needs of the EC research project LIVEWHAT*, (WP6, Alternative Forms of Resilience), which uses online media sources.

*EC FP7, http://www.livewhat.unige.ch/