Berlin / Athens – “Greece elects a Euro monster”, screamed Bild Zeitung‘s headlines after Syriza‘s spectacular electoral win, “How many billions is this going to cost us?”. But maybe the Euro monster is the Trojan horse for whom Virgil coined his memorable phrase, better paraphrased as “Don‘t underestimate the Greeks!”, a proverb rarely heeded even now, when Syriza has won a democratic election which represents generation change-over and a more widespread populist challenge to the centrist political parties of Europe. The ruination of Greece through the debt crisis, for which Syriza blames the EU, and particularly Germany, will not go away if they turn a deaf ear. If they do not listen to this government the more likely outcome will be to bring right-wing, and not left-wing populism to power.
Patrick Cockburn reminds us in his article in The Independent on Sunday that this is not the first time a warning of the consequences of Greek economic ruin has been played to the Germans. As recorded in the diaries of Count Ciano (Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law) on 6 October 1942, a year and a half after Greece was occupied by Germany, he warns Mussolini:“Clodius [the Third Reich’s economics minister] is in Rome to discuss the Greek financial question, which is very bad. If it continues at this rate, sensational and unavoidable inflation will result, with all its consequence…” To which Mussolini replied: “All this is absurd, but the German army does not intend to reduce its interest rate.” On 8 October 1942 Ciano again reminded Mussolini of the Greek situation and quotes his reply: “If we lose this war it will be because of the political stupidity of the Germans who have not even tried to use common sense, and have made Europe as hot and treacherous as a volcano.”
As it turned out German policy was the ruination of Greece, and the forced loan the Nazis extracted from Greek banks, worth around €11 billion in today‘s terms, has never been repaid. Unsurprisingly its repayment is among the Syriza‘s demands. Germany in fact paid no reparations for horrendous atrocities committed during the occupation, which began with the heroically named “Operation Barbarossa” in 1940 and lasted for almost the whole war. In total, the Germans executed some 21,000 Greeks, the Bulgarians some 40,000 and the Italians some 9,000. By June 1944 between them the Axis powers had raided 1,339 towns, boroughs and villages, of which 879 were completely wiped out, leaving more than a million people homeless and Greek population today is depleted by an estimated 300,000 people. Such “scorched earth” policies produced many collaborators, of course, and by October 1944, when the mainland was liberated by the British (for which the Russians paved the way), Greek society was so polarized that civil war broke out. Ironically the civil war was the opportunity for many prominent Nazi collaborators not only to escape punishment (as anti-communists), but to eventually join the ruling class of postwar Greece after the communist defeat.
It is noteworthy then that Alex Tsipras‘s first action as PM was to lay flowers on the grave commemorating some 6000 partisans shot by the Nazi‘s just before war‘s end, and that his second was to receive the Russian ambassador! The Nazi legacy is a reminder of the power of humiliation. Spiegel On-line, in an excellent article this week entitled “Merkel‘s Unintended Creation”, notes not only that Alex Tsipras‘s meteoric career has been crafted on the humiliations imposed by the German government under Merkel, but also that this is the cement that binds Syriza to its Eurosceptic right-wing populist partner, Independent Greeks (ANEL). It is astonishing then that Chancellor Merkel and Wolfgang Schäuble, German Minister of Finance, normally cool negotiators, continue to speak to the Greeks like naughty children, chiding them for not honouring promises, and accusing them of “blackmail” for trying to renegotiate loans that are in fact impossible to repay. They overlook the fact that the impossible February deadline for the current Greek debt negotiations is largely a function of Merkel‘s personal decision to accept outgoing PM Samaras‘s December request to extend the current bail-out program by only 2 months instead of by 6 or 9, in the mistaken belief that he would be re-elected. A possibly fatal miscalculation for Germany.
Germany‘s rhetoric is particularly harsh because it hopes to draw the line with Greece. For, Francois Hollande in France, Matteo Renzi, in Italy, and even President of the EU Commission, Jean Claude Juncker, are not so dismayed by the Syriza win, and are even secretly hoping this win will shift the balance of power in Europe away from austerity; while at home Gregor Gysi‘s party, Die Linke, was seen dancing in the streets. In short, as Spiegel On-line reports: “Tsipras is the most extreme manifestation of the growing resistance in large parts of Europe to the German chancellor‘s austerity drive. He belongs to a movement that now extends from Southern Europe all the way to American universities”. A movement, we may add, that on Saturday brought 100,000 people out to demonstrate for Podemos, its Spanish look-alike, founded by a lecturer in Political Science less than a year ago, which is set to trump Spanish establishment parties in the polls later this year.
If antipathy to German austerity is an emotional rallying cry for populist movements, the Nordic reaction is equally emotional, the stereotyping of the Greeks and other “Southern Mediterranean” peoples as lazy and spendthrift, a regrettable throw-back to the past. Take for instance the widely-noted body-language of the Dutch finance minister, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the Eurozone group of ministers, shown on television in discussion with the new Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis last week. Varoufakis, a well-educated and articulate Greek-Australian dual national, the product of Universities of Athens, Essex, and Cambridge, taught economics for 12 years at the University of Sydney. Initially a mathematician and Game Theorist, he has since become a widely published political economist specializing on the problems of inequality, and has set out a clear and convincing programme for the solution of the Greek debt problem that may well be a model for other debt-burdened European economies. Greece‘s problem is not just about debt but about insolvency, he declares, and cannot be solved by throwing good money after bad. It requires decoupling the debt problem from the banking problem and loan repayment based on economic growth. For, despite all the squealing, many banks and private investors, especially in Germany, have profited from the Greek bail-out, which gave them a safe vehicle for high-return investments. Veroufakis is requesting a European debt conference modelled on the London debt relief conference of 1953, called to write down the debt of post-war Germany, and in large part responsible for the German economic miracle. Once Greek debt is reduced to levels at which it is actually repayable, and programmes for immediate relief for the poor are in place, reforms to the tax code, efforts to tax expatriates who have fled Greece for safe havens for capital in London and other métropoles, will follow.
It is not as if the Troika‘s economic strategy has had much success. Based on no sound economic theory at all, as economists more or less universally agree, it has resulted in the Greek economy shrinking by 25%, while general unemployment now stands at 26% and youth unemployment at 57.5%. Greece has long lines at soup kitchens, increasing homelessness, increasingly high infant mortality, and people so poor that they are in fact unable to pay their taxes. Indeed it is estimated that 4 million of the population of 11 million are on the brink of complete poverty. And yet members of the Troika swagger into town in limousines, never see or talk to poor people, deliver some mantras from on high and are gone.
Frau Merkel and the Troika would do well to listen carefully to Syriza. Like Podemos, it may be a sign of things to come. Wild-eyed radicals they are not. Well educated technocrats they mostly are, and because they are not beholden to establishment parties built on coalitions and compromises, they may be capable of enacting the very reforms the Troika has been calling for, but with a strategy that could never deliver. Moreover they understand the logic of new social movements. For instance, three members of the new Greek cabinet are graduates of the University of Essex, home to the late Ernesto Laclau, the Argentinian theorist of social movements who argued that populism is not monopolized by right wing movements, but can bring together those who feel unrepresented across the spectrum. They have learned well! Members of the Troika, by comparison, sound more and more like the bankers they represent. Some have even dared to say they give a fig for elections and that nations, and not governments, owe the debt and must pay! A perfect expression of the democratic deficit! But, in the name of those who invented democracy, “don‘t underestimate the Greeks”!
