Power to Resist: Services Liberalization in Greece, 2006-2016

This paper assesses whether and how services providers have been able to resist the implementation of services liberalization in Greece since 2006. Greece’s entrenched closed shop system protecting professions against competition has come under attack by the European Union and other international actors, first with the EU’s 2006 Services Directive and, since the onset of the country’s fiscal and economic crisis in 2010, with several Memorandums of Understanding signed by the Greek government, all of which have included requirements to liberalize services provision. At a time of increasingly bitter conflict between winners and losers of globalization, the paper aims to provide a political economy contribution to the literature on implementation by analyzing the politics and the actors’ strategies surrounding the implementation of liberalization. Interest groups differ in the resources they can muster to resist reform, and this paper aims to assess if, and through which strategies, more powerful groups have indeed been able to defend by thwarting the implementation of liberalization measures. We have chosen three professions that differ in terms of their political, legal, and technical resources: lawyers, engineers and tourist guides. The first two are powerful actors that can draw on their legal and technical expertise as well as on their established links with political parties, a fundamental resource in the Greek system, characterized as it is by a politicized and poorly skilled public administration. Tourist guides, are weaker actors in that they lack the legal and technical skills of lawyers and engineers and have only loose partisan connections . The paper is based on primary documents and interviews with interest group associations in the three sectors and with public administrators and representatives of parties and of the relevant international organizations.