Challenges Facing Southern Europe: Migrants, Structural Change, Regime Transformation

Abstract

Southern European countries are facing numerous pressures, including those related to migration, structural change, and regime transformations. This panel uses diverse perspectives to analyzed the causes and consequences of these pressures. An interdisciplinary and comparative approach is employed to provide insights into the education, training, and labor market opportunities available for young Syrian refugees in Greece, in comparison with Lebanon and the UK. Spain also faces challenges related to migration, and the panel looks at the way in which economic policies has contributed to insecurity for migrants in Madrid, and what the opportunities for political contestation are in this context. Greece is also the focus of an analysis of the structural reform program implemented in that country; the paper explores the distributional consequences of the reforms and the accompanying political economy dynamics to explain the existence of widespread opposition to structural reform policies. Turkey, in contrast, faces several challenges. For one, its civilianization policy appears to have failed to strengthen the country’s democracy. One the other hand, the linkages between political culture and regime transformation remain understudied.