" Cuál es el punto de la reducción de este país a escombros?"
The idea that Greece partly deserves its fate reflects an order in which wealth trumps democracy. We should fight a narrative that enfeebles us all
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‘This is our political alternative to neoliberalism and to the neoliberal process of European integration: democracy, more democracy and even deeper democracy,” said Alexis Tsipras on 18 January 2014 in a debate organised by the Dutch Socialist party in Amersfoort. Now the moment of deepest democracy looms, as the Greek people go to the polls on Sunday to vote for or against the next round of austerity.
Unfortunately, Sunday’s choice will be between endless austerity and immediate chaos. As comfortable as it is to argue from the sidelines that maybe Grexit in the medium term won’t hurt as much as 30 years’ drag on GDP from swingeing repayments, no sane person wants either. The vision that Syriza swept to power on was that if you spoke truth to the troika plainly and in broad daylight, they would have to acknowledge that austerity was suffocating Greece.
They have acknowledged no such thing. Whatever else one could say about the handling of the crisis, and whatever becomes of the euro, Sunday will be the moment that unstoppable democracy meets immovable supra-democracy. The Eurogroup has already won: the Greek people can vote any way they like – but what they want, they cannot have.
On Saturday the Eurogroup broke with its tradition of unanimity, issuing a petulant statement “supported by all members except the Greek member”. Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek finance minister, sought legal advice on whether the group was allowed to exclude him, and received the extraordinary reply: “The Eurogroup is an informal group. Thus it is not bound by treaties or written regulations. While unanimity is conventionally adhered to, the Eurogroup president is not bound to explicit rules.” Or, to put it another way: “We never had any accountability in the first place, sucker.”
More striking still is this line of the statement: “The Eurogroup has been open until the very last moment to further support the Greek people through a continued growth-oriented programme.” The measures enforced by the troika have created an economic contraction akin to that caused by war. With unemployment at 25% and youth unemployment at nearly half, 40% of children now live below the poverty line. The latest offer to Greece promises more of the same. The idea that any of this is oriented towards growth is demonstrably false. The Eurogroup president,Jeroen Dijsselbloem, has started to assert that black is white.
And that brings us to the crux of the troika’s programme: what is the point of reducing this country to rubble? The stated intention at the start of the austerity package was to restore order: allow Greece to take a short hit to its GDP in the interests of building a stronger, more balanced economy in the long run. As it became clear that growth was not restored and that even on its own terms – the creditor must come first – the plan was failing, the line changed. It became a moral crusade, a collective punishment of the Greeks.
In 2012 the head of the IMF, Christine Lagarde, said in an interview with this newspaper, “Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax. And I think they should also help themselves collectively.” How? “By all paying their tax.” At the time, it sounded strange: how, in a country of cripplingly high unemployment, with whole families living off the depleted income of one pensioner, was the answer going to come from tax?
She was offering not a solution but a narrative: the Greeks were in this situation because they were bad people. They wanted a beneficent state, but they didn’t want to pool their resources to create one. The IMF was merely the instrument of a discipline they dearly needed. This line has broadly held – the debtors are presented as morally weaker than the creditors. To give them any concessions would be to reward their laziness and selfishness. The fact that debt is a two-way street – that the returns on debt exist because of the risk that the money might be lost, and creditors have their own moral duty to accept losses when they arise – is erased by this telling of the events.
Also airbrushed out of that story is what the late economist Wynne Godley called(in 1992!) the “lacuna in the Maastricht programme”: that while its single-currency proposal made provision for a central bank, it had nothing to say on the matter of what would replace the democratic institutions – the national governments whose power, once they had no control over their own currency, would be limited. Now we have our answer: the strongest takes control. At the moment, Germany knows best. How do we know they know best? Because they are the richest. The euro was founded on the idea that the control of currency was apolitical. It has destroyed that myth, and taken democracy down with it.
These talks did not fail by accident. The Greeks have to be humiliated, because the alternative – of treating them as equal parties or “adults”, as Lagarde wished them to be – would lead to a debate about the Eurogroup: what its foundations are, what accountability would look like, and what its democratic levers are – if indeed it has any. Solidarity with Greece means everyone, in and outside the single currency, forcing this conversation: the country is being sacrificed to maintain a set of delusions that enfeebles us all.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/28/greece-europe-imf-democracy
La razón de Berlín de tomar una línea dura ante la deuda en Grecia está arraigada en los capítulos más oscuros de la historia alemana.
The Real Reason Germans Can’t Stomach Greek Debt? Nazis.
The reason Berlin is taking a hard-line on Greek debt is rooted in the darkest chapter of German history.
Earlier this week, it looked like Athens’s plan to raises taxes on businesses and wealthy Greeks would be enough to satisfy the European Union’s austerity demands. It’s now clear that’s not enough for Germany.
German officials spent the week crisscrossing Europe, telling anyone who would listen that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras needs to make more spending cuts if it want to keep getting money from the $270 million European bailout trough. Without more cash, Greece is widely believed to be unable to pay back the $1.8 billion it owes the IMF by the end of the month. If Athens defaults, it could get kicked out of the eurozone.
It’s now increasingly obvious that the Germans and Greeks are on completely different pages when it comes to moving forward together. And there’s a very specific group to blame: Nazis.
Now, no one outside of Greece is suggesting German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is anything like one of the most horrible regimes in world history. Protesters in Athens waved signs with the Nazi swastika to welcome Merkel during her 2012 visit to Greece. The historic reference here is specific to the role debt played in the rise of the Nazi party after World War I.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War, Germany was forced to pay 132 billion gold Reichsmarks, or $33 billion, to neighboring countries it invaded. Having just finished a war, German coffers were empty.
This forced the government to borrow. Albrecht Ritschl, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics, told Der Spiegel that from 1924 to 1929, “the Weimar Republic lived on credit and even borrowed the money it needed for its World War I reparations payments from America.” He was referring to the name modern-day Germany was called after the war.
This created a credit bubble that burst when the stock market crashed in 1929. American dollars needed to pay bills were sucked out of Germany. Chancellor Heinrich Brüning raised taxes and slashed wages in an attempt to get his country back into the black, hoping this would get American money flowing again. It didn’t happen.
Because of the demand for U.S. money, the German currency was worthless, and hyperinflation took hold. According to Marion Deshmukh, a German history expert at George Mason University, at the height of the German crisis, 4.2 trillion Reichsmark — yes, trillion — were worth one U.S. dollar.
“German society in general just went into a tizzy. Savers became losers because the value of the Reichsmark kept going down,” Deshmukh told FP Thursday.
German banks began to fail in the summer of 1931. Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, which had been on the German political scene for less than a decade, seized on the chaos. Over the next two years, he and his party consolidated power. He became chancellor in 1933, and the rest is ugly, violent, tragic, history.
“Many respectable Germans did begin to gravitate to right-wing parties,” Deshmukh said. “Hitler used the argument the government is doing nothing, kowtowing to the allies and foolishly chasing dollars.”
Because of these experiences, Germans associate debt with their worst chapter. To this day, they avoid it at nearly all costs, Deshmukh said.
“It’s sort of in the DNA from generation to generation,” she said. “The Germans almost look at it in a moral sense; they think it’s morally abhorrent.”
Photo Credit: Milos Bicanski/Getty Images
http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/06/25/the-real-reason-the-germans-cant-stomach-greek-debt-nazis/?utm_content=buffere7bb8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
