Special Issue on Southern European Countries Facing Neoliberal Globalization: An Introduction

In recent years, different communities of social scientists have debated on the present and future of southern European societies, implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – assuming a comparative perspective of analysis. Started perhaps in the 80s, in the context of the research on multiple development pathways (Arrighi, ed., 1985, Sapelli, 1995), the debate on southern Europe rapidly entered the field of comparative studies on welfare systems (Leibfried, 1992; Siaroff, 1994; Ferrera, 1996). Other scholars worked on southern European societiesin their studies on international migration (King, Black, eds., 1997; King, ed., 2001)and political change (Gunther, Diamandouros and Puhle, 1995; Morlino, 1998). More recently the economic recession, which severely affected southern European countries since 2007-2010, offered another chance to understand theirspecificities in a context that seem to place themonce again on the periphery of European Union. This “Great Crisis”is indeed marking a sort of watershed in the history of southern European societies, changing theirposition in the international division of labor,in the hierarchies of international politics, and in their perceived cultural identity.Therefore, the “discursive construction” of southern Europe as an object of social research (Baumeister, Sala, 2015)has taken many steps forward in the last years, and this macro-regional dimension can be considered very important as a territorial level of analysis in many fields of social research.