The EU hopes for its ability to solve the financial problems in Southern Europe are inflated because of a parallel being drawn between the current situation and what took place with regard to Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Ivan Krastev laid out a range of reasons why we need to be more careful in our assessment. For one, the presence of popular resistance to the change is different – the underlying system has not been delegitimized as was the case in Eastern Europe, and neither has the existing regime delegitimized the role of civil society activism. The discourse on capitalism is no longer ‘the only game in town’ – there are valid alternative discourses that question this – largely in the slipstream of recent negative consequences of capitalism – in a way that was unimaginable twenty years ago. These differences among several others, Kratsev argued, point to the ‘optical illusion’ present in the current EU vision, which is premised on the belief that the EU intervention in the South will work because similar external intervention was successfully imposed and implemented in the East.

As emerged during the question and answer session, the fact that the Southern European countries are already EU member states as well as members of the Eurozone means that the comparison may be somewhat problematic, because one is not comparing like with like. Yet, to me, this comparison seems a useful one in light of the debate to which it is contributing as it highlights the extent to which the underlying ideologies (and actors involved in the generation and perpetuation of these ideologies) have shifted in the two decades that have passed between the two events.