The New Constitutionalism, Disciplinary Neoliberalism, and the 2015 Greek Election

Abstract

This article is an effort to situate the conflict between the Syriza government, elected in 2015, and Greece’s creditors in the context of broader changes in the structure of European political economy over the past quarter of a century. It explains the dynamics by which the leftist government of Alexis Tsipras shed its commitment to ending austerity through the lens of Stephen Gill’s “new constitutionalism.” While sovereign power helps show why Tsipras was unable to negotiate a new deal for Greece, two mechanisms of disciplinary power clarify different aspects of crisis politics: market reification, which obscured the role of the European Central Bank, and the reconstitution of truth claims, which led to the attribution of responsibility for the crisis to Greece itself.