The Chinese are interested in airports, harbours and railways. The Russians are determined to infiltrate the energy market. The Qataris have made clear they want to invest in property. Three years to the month after becoming the first eurozone country to be bailed out by the European Union (EU), European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF), Greece has finally got its long-delayed privatisation campaign off the ground, and the programme has turned the debt-choked country into a battleground for nations seeking access to the EU trading bloc. "We have to transmit the message that this is a different Greece," the development minister, Kostis Hadzidakis, said in an interview. "We have to surprise in a positive way. Privatisations will send the message that we are a business-friendly country." The prime minister, Antonis Samaras, took that message to Beijing this month, urging China to participate in what he described as Athens' success story. He was buoyed by a raft of unusually good news: international creditors had agreed to prop up the economy with another €8.8bn (£7.5bn) in rescue funds, Fitch had upgraded Greece's credit rating, while borrowing costs on 10-year bonds in May fell to their lowest level since the outbreak of the debt crisis.

PIRAEUS, Greece — The captain gazed from his elegant office overlooking this port on the Aegean Sea and smiled as towering cranes plucked container after container from a giant ship while robotic transport vehicles fanned out to transfer the cargo to smaller vessels bound for the Mediterranean. The cargo volume here is three times the level it was two years ago, before the captain, Fu Cheng Qiu, was put in charge by his employer, Cosco, a global shipping giant owned by the Chinese government. In a 2010 deal that put 500 million euros ($647 million) into the coffers of Greece’s cash-starved government, Cosco leased half of the port of Piraeus and quickly converted a business that had languished as a Greek state-run enterprise into a hotbed of productivity. The other half of the port is still run by Greece. And the fact that its business lags behind Cosco’s is emblematic of the entrenched labor rules and relatively high wages — for those lucky enough to still have jobs — that have stifled the country’s economic growth.

I’d like to begin with a point that Damon also stressed in his introduction which is putting this in some global context. I think it goes without saying that the United States at this moment is facing a world full of tremendous global challenges. The conflict in Syria, the transition in Afghanistan, the economic slowdown in Europe, the challenges in North Africa, and we’ve been obviously responding to those challenges on a day-to-day basis -- but the point I want to begin with, that again Damon you alluded to, is even as we face these tremendous challenges all over the world, we have never lost sight of the fact that we maintain a deep and historic interest in the Western Balkans, which is a part of the world where the United States has invested so much and where we have so many friends and interests, and I think the Secretary’s most recent visit to the region just a couple of weeks ago reaffirmed that abiding American commitment to supporting democracy and stability and prosperity in that region. Just as the United States and the European Union are working hand in hand on these global challenges, as some of you have heard me address our partnership and cooperation with Europe globally here and elsewhere, we’re doing so in the Balkans, and I can’t stress that point enough.....