Greece and the EU: Integration Challenges in the 21st Century

Greece is the first country in the Balkans to join the European integration project. This predetermined Greece’s subsequent role as a state working to expand the EU’s borders in the region. However, Greece inevitably faced both internal problems and external challenges affecting its own EU integration process. Thus, the boundaries of Greece’s European integration in the 21st century have at least two dimensions - an internal one, defining Greece’s own place within the EU, and an external one, showing Greece’s role as a European state in the Balkans. Greece’s accession to the Eurozone in 2001, on the one hand, led to the country’s rapid economic growth in the first decade of the 21st century, and on the other hand, became a precondition for the deep financial and economic crisis of the 2010s, caused by Athens’ debt problems. The crisis catalysed the spread of Eurosceptic sentiments, albeit moderate, in Greece. At the same time, it required a serious reform of the European Union, “forcing” it to develop anti-crisis instruments that had not existed before. At the same time, at the beginning of the 21st century, Greece, being the (at first the only) EU member in the Balkans, played the role of a locomotive of European integration for the other countries of the region. However, Greece’s efforts to promote the Balkan states to the EU have not always been consistent and fruitful. Moreover, for non-EU member states in the region, Greece ceased to be a model of a successful integration project after the sovereign debt crisis of the 2010s.