The common future of Europe’s peoples is being played out in Greece. Not only that of our economies, but also that of our democratic institutions.
The Greeks are not responsible for a crisis produced by the blindness of a Europe that abandoned political vision in favour of the interests of finance. We are bound in solidarity with the Greek people, because such unity is necessary to reach true change.
While the world of finance is indeed a reality - with its bankers, its stock markets and its speculators – it is nevertheless an aberration for democracy, because it is unconcerned with what a society is about, its social cohesion, its hopes, its collective memories or its dreams.
Two years ago, in his last work, Film Socialisme ('Socialism'), French film director Jean-Luc Godard asked in prophetic manner Quo vadis Europa (Where are you going, Europe?). With all the visionary sharpness of so many poets and painters, Godard’s screenplay illustrated how our societies have become lost by the quest for profit, all aboard a cruise ship made over as a floating casino, they navigate on a bubble of speculation towards catastrophe. “Democracy and tragedy were married together in Athens under Pericles and Sophocles,” said Godard in an interview with Mediapart. “There was only one child, civil war.”
The Greek crisis, is as much a political problem as a financial one, if not more so. Far from being marginal, it is at the centre of the earthquake shaking the continent, the European Union and its 27 member states. Beyond the obvious economic and financial aspects, the Greek crisis is also one of civilization, of confidence and of hope. Greece might currently be a weak link in the European chain, but it is an essential part of it, and if we let it go the rest will fall apart in turn.
The future of Greece, the country which invented democracy and which is now the theatre of a European tragedy, is also our own. For it is in Greece where the political forces concerned with the well-being of humanity are confronted by those of a new barbarianism that have no interest in such matters. The rise in political movements of hate and violence, which are developing across Europe amid the absence of a democratic political alternative, is the responsibility of those who have long been satisfied by an amoral situation created by economic policies led by the world of finance; the spoliation of public institutions, the increase in inequalities, the confusion of wealth and values, all of which has demoralized populations and fuelled corruption.
Their blind ideology, one of belief and imprecation, has no political element. They don’t think, they count. They don’t dream, they accumulate. They don’t invent, they hoard money. It is as if their figures were disembodied from any human element.
Greece has become an experimental lab
In an editorial dated May 23rd, French daily Le Monde summoned the Greeks to choose between the euro and the drachma, in much the same way as a school teacher giving a bad pupil an ultimate warning before his exclusion from class. Full of clichés, the editorial described Greece as a “little country” in which “each Greek has already received the equivalent of 31,000 euros since January 2010”. This statistical imposture means absolutely nothing, apart from insinuating a lie that “each Greek” had pocketed the money. The daily stressed the need to blindly respect the EU’s “interior regulations” imposed on member states, as if ignoring the fact that the EU has had to modify its sacrosanct rules in parallel with the development of the economic crisis. “It is for the Greeks to choose,” concluded the editorial. “Let’s hope that they make the right choice. If not, Europe should draw its conclusion, without any qualms.”
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was famously nick-named TINA, an anagram of her recurrent dogmatic suggestion that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to her often socially brutal economic policies. Today, TINA is alive and well, reincarnated by a seemingly endless line of apostles. While populations might tirelessly vote amid successive elections, their opinion is of no interest to all those blinkered, unquestioning apostles of the world of finance. For them, unpredictable and insubordinate populations are an annoying obstacle to be disposed of, especially if they vote for what the apostles regard as the wrong choice, if they have the gall to imagine other solutions to those policies imposed upon them without consultation. Let us remember, for example, how the majority ‘No’ vote in the 2005 French referendum called to approve the European constitution treaty was simply ignored.
Europe is not threatened by a Greek people who therefore must be punished. No, it is threatened by its own irresponsible leaders who have led it into an impasse. Greece has become a sort of experimental laboratory for some, within which are tested policies supposedly aimed at disarming the crisis but which have no other logic than that of above all preserving the interests of a minority of the privileged and the dominating forces. The editorialist of Le Monde would do well to remember that the policies being imposed upon Greece do not affect the Orthodox Church, the country’s largest owner of wealth, while they also protect its bankers and ship owners despite their responsibility in fraud and tax evasion. These same policies maintain Greece’s huge military budget which serves to enrich the country’s European suppliers who include, at the top of the list, France and Germany.
There is an alternative
The EU has been shaped, over these past decades, to replace political solidarity with economic rivalry, its economic policies encouraging competition to the detriment of cooperation. None of its priorities concern the harmonization of broad fiscal policies, the fight against tax evasion, or an end to tax havens. Yet the equality of tax policies, their fairness, is fundamental to a citizen’s freedom. Making competition the unique element of economic dynamics, the 2009 European Union Lisbon Treaty even prohibited eurozone countries from aiding another member state.
Subsequently, these ideological certitudes were blown apart by the financial crisis, which saw the urgent improvisation – in contravention of the Lisbon Treaty – of solidarity mechanisms that had previously been judged dangerous. In the spring of 2010, the European Financial Stability Facility was invented to allow Greece and Ireland to continue to honour their public debts. But in this same process, the old ills were perpetuated by reaffirming the leading role of financial interests in defining economic policies.
One doesn’t need to be an expert in economics to realise how ridiculous it is that states are prohibited from seeking low interest financial loans directly from the European Central Bank (ECB). What lies behind this is quite simply the enrichment of private banks through speculation, and to the cost of those populations subjected to austerity policies. Because amid the catastrophe of the current system, it is private banks which are reaping record profits by lending to debt-ridden countries at prohibitive rates, while enjoying low-rate financing from the ECB. This discordant game of musical chairs is nothing other than a fraud, the victims of which - as illustrated in Greece - are the worst-off and the least protected, the ordinary ranks without a voice; the pensioners whose income is devaluated, the sick who are unable to seek treatment, the public service employees who have lost their jobs, the small businesses that have gone bust, the young jobless.
In their latest published work, 20 ans d’aveuglement, l’Europe au bord du gouffre (‘20 years of blindness, Europe on the cliff edge’) the group of left-wing economists known as ‘The Appalled Economists’ set out the irrational thinking of prevailing economic policies. “The strange ‘no bail-out clause’ introduced as of the Treaty of Maastricht (1992) which founded the euro, appears incomprehensible to the ordinary citizen,” they wrote. “Why are states which unite their currency prohibited from helping each other? In fact, this clause reflects the neo-liberal obsession of imposing the discipline of financial markets on states […] By prohibiting states from helping each other, they are forced to present themselves alone before a tribunal of the markets, and to vigorously respect their laws: fiscal reforms which are favourable to capital income, public spending cuts, flexibility, privatizations.”
That is why we must show total solidarity with Greece, its people, its economy and its debts, and to put an end to this infernal vicious circle that will lead to a defeat not only for the Greeks, but for all of us.
As the ‘Appalled economists’ remind us, this perverse system, one that demonstrates that the markets are neither efficient nor rational, but are perfectly capable of brutally digging debts and deficits, is the one that is still designated as the “tutor of the economic policies of states”
In this experimental laboratory that has been made of Greece, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund are imposing privatizations and job losses with the sole aim of guaranteeing private lenders the prompt repayment of public debt. Instead, European and world summits should be placing priorities on growth and productive economic activity, under an umbrella of policies of solidarity. Far from being a utopia, this is the only realistic way forward.
Questionable debts, corrupt politicians
The depth of the economic crisis, and the interdependence of us all before it, demands radical and pragmatic answers. Answers that attack the problem at its roots rather than making do with a pruning of sorts above the surface. The proof that they exist can be seen in France where, for the past year, they have been the subject of debate within the Socialist Party and among its allies on the Left.
Let us remember the case of Iceland, which finally found a way out of the pit into which it had been thrown by the economic crisis. The economy of this island state collapsed in 2007 with the onset of the subprime crisis - which heralded the banking crisis in 2008, following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. The people of Iceland found a radical and effective answer to their situation by making the lenders themselves pay off most of the debt. This simple move broke the vicious circle. Today, Iceland is witnessing a fall in inflation, a drop in unemployment and a return to growth.
The question of debt is at the top of the list of illusory issues which are sending peoples into bankruptcy. Not debt as such, but debt as an accountant’s figure, something that stands alone without history. “The Greek people are told they have a debt, but no-one knows from where it comes nor what we are paying,” said Sofia Sakorafa, Greek Member of Parliament for the Radical Left coalition Syriza, in an interview with Mediapart earlier this year. She rightly called for an international audit of the Greek debt, for one can well imagine there are very questionable debts that could be annulled; questionable because the lenders act as both poachers and gamekeepers, questionable also because there may be debts created by corrupt governments, with financing of spending that never reached its stated target.
Ignoring the most elementary expression of international solidarity, the French Socialist Party made no effort to meet with Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras when he visited Paris in May. Was it because, as a member of the Socialist International, the French party had not wanted to upset its Greek ally, Pasok? This was a bad sign, as was also a statement by the new French socialist government’s foreign affairs minister, Laurent Fabius, who appealed to the Greek people not to pronounce themselves in favour "of parties which, as a result, would make them leave the euro”.
Should one deduce from this that the new French government calls upon the Greeks to vote for the two parties that led the country into the mess in the first place, New Democracy on the Right, and Pasok, on the Left, both of which are tainted by corruption? It appears that the French Socialist party regards the European policies of Syriza as negligible because its programme is incompatible with the current requirements of the EU, those imposed by the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and which France’s new president François Hollande so clearly opposed during his election campaign.
'No man is an island'
It is difficult to understand how this new political force that is Syriza, with all its audacious and innovative policies, can be ignored, just as the crisis in Greece illustrates the political monsters that feed from the disaster, namely Golden Dawn, an explicitly neo-Nazi movement. One cannot and one must not ignore those who come up with novel answers to the crisis, answers that are best placed to meet the demands of the broad population, while the Far Right addresses messages of xenophobia. This at a time when, across the western world, from France to the United States, the economic crisis is creating a rise in new, profoundly un-democratic reactionary forces that challenge liberty, are in horror of equality and which hate fraternity.
The late Cornelius Castoriadis, an economist and philosopher who began life as a Greek before adopting French nationality, once commented: “ I want to shake people up, and I want to make it understood that man is not, by divine right, a democratic being. That democracy was a creation, a historical conquest, that it is constantly in danger and that, indeed, it is in the process of disappearing.”
In his books and during his conferences, Castoriadis never ceased to sound the alarm about the potential catastrophe ahead, exhorting us to take good care of what is our debt to Greece - true democracy, that of citizens and offered to everyone, free of oligarchs and the privileged. Shortly after World War II he founded, with French thinker Claude Lefort, the movement Socialisme ou Barbarie (Socialism or Barbary), and never ceased to pursue this reflection about true democracy and new barbarian regimes.
In a preface to Castoriadis’ posthumous work Ce qui fait la Grèce, the late French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, a specialist on Ancient Greece, underlined that the ancient city-states were not islands, meaning that the democratic ideal was one of interdependence, between peoples and nations, and which required mutual solidarity. Paying homage to the Greece of Castoriadis, and to Castoriadis’ dual sentiments of hope and worry, Vidal-Naquet cited a text by the English metaphysical poet John Donne (1572-1631). It was For whom the bell tolls, an excerpt from Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII, and which American author Ernest Hemingway also cited in his book about the Spanish Civil war and which borrowed the same title.
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” wrote Donne. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
In Europe today, the bell tolls not for the Greeks. It tolls for all of us.
- Edwy Plenel is Editor-in-Chief, and a co-founder, of Mediapart, and was formerly editor of French daily Le Monde.
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This is an abridged version of Edwy Plenel's original text published in French under the title 'Nous sommes tous des grecs'.
English version: Graham Tearse