This talk examines elite European discourses during the Greek financial crisis from its pre‐history in September 2008 up to the arrival of the SYRIZA government in January 2015. Having coded 1,153 unique quotes drawn from a dataset of 15,354 news wires from Reuters, it argues that the communicative discourse of 63 senior European (and IMF) officials on the Greek crisis during that period demonstrated significant volatility. Four distinct narrative frames are identified: ‘neglect’, ‘suspicious cooperation’, ‘blame’ and ‘reluctant redemption’, punctuated by three discursive junctures in 2010, 2011 and 2012, which reflect the content of the changing communicative discourse of the Greek crisis.

Dimitris Papadimitriou is Professor of Politics at the University of Manchester and Director of the Manchester Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. He has previously held visiting posts at Princeton University, the London School of Economics and Yale University. He has written extensively on the European Union’s political economy and external relations. He is also a leading scholar of Greek politics and public policy. His last book, Prime Ministers in Greece: The Paradox of Power (with Kevin Featherstone) was published by Oxford University Press in 2015.