The period since 1990 is difficult to label. Was it an ‘age’? Were the 1990s and 2000s a continuation of the twentieth century, or did they mark the beginning of something new? It seems too early to tell. Of course, there are some ways in which these decades undoubtedly represent a departure. Recent global histories have highlighted dramatic environmental degradation and climate change and have considered the impact of digitisation and the global economy’s financialisaton as critical developments of the new millennium (e.g. Iriye 2014). Many of these changes are associated with accelerated globalisation. Although worldwide interactions and interdependencies have shaped political and cultural life throughout the world since the eighteenth century (Conrad and Osterhammel 2018), what was different about this period was the scale and intensity of transnational and global connectivity.

What is more, the benefits and drawbacks of international entanglements were experienced more acutely than ever at the everyday level. Ordinary Greeks felt the extremes of globalisation. They basked in the global spotlight during the 2004 Olympics, but they also found themselves at the sharp end of the worldwide economic crisis that began in October 2008. This chapter considers what on balance was modern Greece’s golden age, but which was also the period in which the causes of the economic crisis of the 2010s took root.

Greece’s ‘1989’

The year 1989 marked a significant moment in world history. The Berlin Wall fell unexpectedly, and soon after, communism in Europe collapsed, the Soviet Union was dissolved, and new states emerged in its place. For Greece, the Cold War had already ended sometime during the 1980s. In the June 1989 elections Synaspismos, a far-Left coalition that included KKE, held the balance of power, and it briefly formed a coalition government with ND. The very idea of the Communists in power would have been unthinkable to the generation that fought the Civil War. Moreover, both in Greece and elsewhere, the dominant economic system had also changed with the opening up of national markets, the internationalisation of financial systems, and the privatisation of public assets and services, all of which heralded the rise of neoliberal free-market capitalism.