The status of dominance in the EU system of economic governance: drawing upon the Greek case

Greece is a case of differentiation based on strong external dependence and vulnerability. The long-term differentiation features well-embedded before the hard times began, have been exacerbated since then through the EU-led development of specific institutional and regulatory governance structures. In this paper we describe the main problematic forms of differentiation observed in Greece in the framework of the 2010 eurozone crisis and the post-Covid19 economic crisis and analyse their (fragmentation-driven) effects on public responsibility, accountability and democracy. We present and discuss empirical findings concerning the EU-driven domestic governance regime: hyper-centralized State with drastically narrowed core powers on public finance and public administration, weakening or abolition of State control mechanisms (semi-failed State), arbitrary multiplication of ‘independent’ (non-majoritarian) regulatory and supervisory bodies integrated in a multi-level surveillance logic as a unified field of action (hegemonic governance structures).In this framework we assess to what extent the institutional, normative and policy arrangements of surveillance are associated with dominance thus engendering various forms of new dependencies and biased decisions.