The crisis of the periphery. Greece and EU foreign policy

Since the outbreak of the EU debt crisis, severe budget constraints and urgent domestic concerns have been seriously affecting Greece’s foreign policy. The first part of the paper tries to shed light on how structural factors underlying both Greek policy-making and its regional context produce stabilizing effects on the country’s foreign policy. The emphasis is put on the outcomes of the Europeanization process and NATO’s influence on South-eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The second part focuses on the negative impact of the austerity measures imposed by the troika on Athens and, particularly, on the role played by Greece in the Mediterranean. This may turn out to scale down not only Greece’s interna-tional standing but also the role of the EU in the region.