Greece
has revealed the true face of the Europe we no longer want
by Serge
Halimi
The
Eurogroup and the International Monetary Fund have crushed the hopes
of a youthful movement that sought to transform a nation and rouse a
continent. Beyond the shock that events in Greece have given
supporters of the European project, there are other noteworthy
features. The EU is becoming increasingly authoritarian, as Germany
imposes its wishes and obsessions unchecked. Though founded on a
promise of peace, the EU seems incapable of drawing lessons from
history, even when recent and violent; what matters most to it is
sanctioning bad debtors, and the headstrong. This amnesiac
authoritarianism is a challenge to those who saw the EU as the place
to experiment with going beyond the framework of the nation state,
and achieving democratic renewal.
At
the outset, European integration lavished material advantages on its
citizens, against a backdrop of the East-West confrontation. In the
immediate post-war period, the project was driven forward by the US,
which sought a market for its goods and a buffer against Soviet
expansion. The US recognised that if the “free world” wanted to
compete effectively with the “democratic” republics of the Warsaw
Pact, it had to win hearts and minds, which meant demonstrating its
goodwill through social policies. Since this strategic lifeline
disappeared, Europe has behaved like the board of directors of a
bank.
Some
participants in the cold war, such as NATO, survived the fall of the
Berlin Wall by inventing new monsters to destroy on other continents.
The EU’s institutions have also redefined their enemy. The peace
and stability they claim as their objective now demand peoples be
politically neutralised, and their remaining tools of national
sovereignty destroyed. This means integration at the pace of a forced
march, the burial of political questions in a one-size-fits-all
treaty, a federal project. This venture is not new, but the Greek
case illustrates the brutality with which it is now being pursued.
“How
many divisions does the pope have?” was reportedly Joseph Stalin’s
dismissive response to a French leader who urged him to deal
tactfully with the Vatican. The states in the Eurogroup now seem to
be applying the same approach to Greece; reckoning that the
government they find so exasperating would be unable to defend
itself, they have destabilised it through enforced bank closures and
import suspensions. Relations between members of the same union, who
belong to the same institutions, return representatives to the same
parliament and use the same currency, should preclude such
machinations. Yet the Eurogroup countries, with Germany at their
head, safe in the knowledge of their superiority, imposed a diktat on
a weakened Greece which everyone acknowledges will worsen most of its
problems. This whole episode exposes just how deep the cracks in the
EU go.
When
Syriza won January’s election, it was right on almost every single
count. Right to link the collapse of the Greek economy to the
austerity programme administered for five years by both socialists
and the right. Right to argue that no state with a crumbling
manufacturing sector would be able to rebuild itself if it had to
devote increasing sums to paying off its creditors. Right to point
out that in a democracy sovereignty belongs to the people and that if
a policy is imposed on them despite what they decide, it constitutes
an act of dispossession.
Can’t
pay, won’t pay
Syriza
appeared to have an unbeatable hand, but success depends on who you
are playing with. In the EU, Syriza’s aces were turned against it;
Syriza was compared to southern Marxists, so out of touch with
reality that they dared question the economic assumptions that
underlie German ideology. The weapons of “reason” and conviction
are useless in such circumstances. What’s the good of pleading your
case in front of a firing squad? During the months of “negotiations”,
the Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis noticed his European
counterparts stared at him as though they were thinking: “You’re
right in what you are saying, but we are going to crush you anyway”.
However,
the success (for now) of Germany’s plan to relegate Greece to the
status of a Eurogroup protectorate is also the result of failed
gambles by Greece’s leftwing majority, in the over-optimistic hope
of changing Europe. The gamble that the leaders of France and Italy
would help Greece overcome the German right’s monetarist taboos.
The gamble that other European peoples, overwhelmed by austerity
policies, would pressure their governments into a Keynesian
reorientation (Greece thought it was the torchbearer for this). The
gamble that this change would be conceivable within the eurozone;
noexit scenario had been envisaged or prepared. And the gamble that
intermittent hints of a “Russian option” would, for geopolitical
reasons, contain Germany’s temptation to punish Greece and
encourage the US to stay Germany’s hand. At no point did any of
these gambles seem likely to pay off. It’s not possible to hold off
a tank with violets and a catapult.
Greece’s
leaders, guilty only of being too innocent, thought that creditors
would heed the democratic will of the Greeks, especially the young.
The legislative election of 25 January and the referendum of 5 July,
however, provoked dumbfounded outrage among the Germans and their
allies. They had only one remaining aim: to punish the rebels, and
anyone who might be inspired by their bravery. Capitulation was no
longer enough; there had to be apologies (Greece has admitted that
its economic choices caused a breakdown in confidence with its
partners) and even reparations: public assets, capable of being
privatised, to a value equal to 25% of Greek GDP are to be pledged to
the creditors. Everyone claims to be relieved: Greece will pay.
“Germany
will pay” was the phrase French finance minister Louis Klotz
whispered to President Clemenceau at the end of the first world war.
It became the watchword of French savers who had lent to the Treasury
during the conflict. They had not forgotten that in 1870 France paid
the whole of the tribute demanded by Bismarck, though the sum was
higher than Germany’s costs. This precedent inspired French prime
minister Raymond Poincaré when, frustrated at not receiving the
reparations stipulated in the Treaty of Versailles, he decided to
occupy the Ruhr in 1923.
John
Maynard Keynes had already grasped the vanity of such a policy of
humiliation and seizure of securities: Germany did not pay because it
could not pay, and the same goes for Greece now. Only through time,
with a positive balance of payments, could Germany have paid off its
massive debt. France refused to allow its rival’s economic rebirth,
which would have enabled it to pay, but also to finance an army,
risking the possibility of a third bloody conflict. The economic
success of the Greek left would hardly have had such dramatic
repercussions for Europeans, but it would have scotched eurozone
leaders’ justifications for austerity.
A
‘totally non-viable debt’
After
a year, Poincaré had to raise taxes by 20% to fund his occupation, a
cruel paradox for a rightwing leader opposed to taxation who had
insisted Germany would pay. He lost the next election and his
successor evacuated the Ruhr. No one has yet imagined such
consequences in any of the countries that have crushed Greece to make
it settle a debt that even the IMF admits is “totally non-viable”.
Yet the Eurogroup countries’ fixation on punishment has already
obliged them to commit three times the sum (around €86bn) required
had funds been released five months earlier; in the meantime the
Greek economy had collapsed through lack of liquidity. So the price
of German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble’s inflexibility will
be almost as high as Poincaré’s. But Greece’s humiliation will
serve as an example for other potential offenders. (Spain, Italy,
France?) It will be a reminder of the “Juncker theorem”
formulated by the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker,
four days after the Greek left’s electoral victory: “There can be
no democratic choice that is counter to European treaties”.
One
bed is too narrow to accommodate 19 different dreams. It was an
almost imperial undertaking to impose the same currency on Austria
and Cyprus, Luxembourg and Spain, on peoples who do not have a shared
history, political culture or standard of living, the same alliances
or languages. How can a state conceive an economic and social policy
that is open to debate and democratic negotiation if all the
mechanisms of monetary regulation are outside its control? How can
peoples who may not even know each other accept a degree of
solidarity comparable to the inhabitants of Florida and those of
Montana? The whole thing rested on a hypothesis: that federalism at
an accelerated pace would bring European peoples together. Yet 15
years after the creation of the euro, animosity has never been
greater. So much so that, when Tsipras announced his referendum, he
used language like a declaration of war — “a [Eurogroup]
proposition in the form of an ultimatum addressed to Greek democracy”
— and accused some “partners” of seeking to “humiliate an
entire people”. The Greeks massively backed their government and
the Germans rallied behind the quite opposite demands of their
government. Could their destinies be any more closely linked without
risking domestic violence?
But
the hostility is no longer just between Greece and Germany. “We do
not want to be a German colony,” insisted Pablo Iglesias, leader of
Podemos in Spain. Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi — whose
reticence throughout has been noteworthy — let slip: “I say to
Germany: that’s enough. Humiliating a European partner is
unthinkable.” According to German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, “in
Mediterranean countries, and to some extent in France, Germany is
more hated than at any time since 1945. ... Economic and monetary
union, which was supposed to consolidate European unity once and for
all, now stands a good chance of shattering it”.
‘You’ve
done too little, too slowly’
The
Greeks are attracting hostility, too. Junker is said to have told
Tsipras: “If the Eurogroup functioned like a parliamentary
democracy, you would already be out, because that is what nearly all
your partners want”. Using a well-known conservative mechanism, now
deployed at nation-state level, poor states have been encouraged in
their mutual suspicion that others, like the proverbial “welfare
chiselers” of Ronald Reagan’s speeches, are living at their
expense. The Estonian education minister castigated Greece: “You’ve
done too little, too slowly, and much less than Estonia. We have
suffered much more than Greece. But we didn’t stop to complain; we
just got on with it” . The Slovaks were aggrieved at the level of
pensions in Greece, which should be “finally declared bankrupt in
order to clear the atmosphere,” as the Czech finance minister
kindly suggested.
Pierre
Moscovici, the French Socialist and EU commissioner for economic and
financial affairs, eagerly repeated an anecdote to any listening
journalist: “At a Eurogroup meeting, a Lithuanian socialist
minister told Varoufakis, ‘It’s very nice that you want to raise
the minimum wage by 40%, but your minimum wage is already twice ours.
And you want to raise it with money you owe us, with debt.’ And
that’s a pretty strong argument”. A strong argument indeed,
especially coming from Moscovici whose party had announced only a
year earlier: “We want a Europe which protects its workers. A
Europe of social progress, not social roll-back.”
At
a European Council meeting on 7 July, several EU leaders conveyed
their exasperation to Tsipras: “We can’t take any more. Greece is
all we’ve talked about for months. A decision needs to be taken. If
you’re incapable of taking it, it will be taken for you” . Is
that not already a rough and ready brand of federalism? “We must go
forward,” Hollande concluded from this. In which direction? The
same as always: “economic governance”, “a eurozone budget”,
“convergence with Germany”. In Europe, when a medicine severely
damages the economic or democratic health of a patient, the dose is
doubled. Therefore, since, according Hollande, “the eurozone has
been able to reaffirm its cohesion with Greece, the circumstances are
leading us to speed up”.
To
leftwing activists and trade unionists, stopping and thinking seems a
better option. Even for those who fear that an exit from the euro
would encourage the break-up of the European project and the revival
of nationalisms, the Greek crisis demonstrates that a single currency
stands againstpopular sovereignty. Far from containing the far right,
such an obvious realisation encourages it, since the far right mocks
its enemies’ lectures on democracy. How can anyone imagine that the
single currency could one day accommodate a progressive social
policy, having seen the plans that the Eurogroup states gave Tsipras
to force this leftwing prime minister to implement rigid
neoliberalism?
Once
Greece raised big, universal questions. Now it has revealed the true
face of the Europe we no longer want.
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