Some Thoughts on the Greek Crisis
It’s a shameful gap in my knowledge and experience. I know nothing of Greece. When I see TV reports from most parts of the world, I know what lies around the corner from the Red Square, Pariser Platz, Tiananmen Square or White House vantage point from which the reporter is speaking. I know this actually and metaphorically. I have some sense of the history, some acquaintance with the political balance and the level of freedom, just as I know what it smells like, how cold it can get in January and how it feels when a little breeze blows down that little street that is just out of shot, where the reporter and his crew will go for a cup of coffee after the piece to camera is over.
But when it comes to Athens, I’m quite blank. I’ve never been there, or to anywhere in Greece, never having come any closer to Greece than Cyprus, which contains a lot of Greeks but is really in the Middle East. Partly as a result, I have a very sketchy idea of Greek politics and history, a sort of kaleidoscope of Costa-Gavras’s film ‘Z’, not seen for at least 45 years, Colonels, an exiled King, and a seemingly endless string of Papandreous. I’m also a little haunted by the Second World War, the miserable scenes in Athens in Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, the even more miserable scenes in Crete in Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ , oddly merging in my mind with Mary Renault’s astonishing recreations of Athens in the classical era and the astonishing Elgin Marbles, reminding us in our 21st century pride that others came before us who perhaps knew *more* than we did about the world, and whose skills we have lost.
So I can say nothing remotely authoritative about internal Greek politics, or why Greek voters did as they did, or the influences on Syriza or anything like that.
I can only examine it as an EU matter. It seems strange now but during much of the Cold War there were still several Western European countries which did not precisely follow the model of France or Germany. They were all poor – Portugal, Spain, Greece, Ireland. They were all socially conservative. Three, or sometimes two of them, depending on the current state of Greece, were also politically conservative and had openly authoritarian governments.
I say ‘openly authoritarian’ because it seems to me that almost continental governments with their Civil Codes, examining magistrates, institutionalised official corruption, national police forces, identity cards, juryless trials, semicircular non-adversarial parliaments and gutless newspapers are authoritarian anyway, but have learned in recent years to look as if they’re not. These are improvements, and I’m glad of them, though they seem to me to be superficial. As a visiting journalist or a well-off traveller, I’m always aware of floating on a shiny surface. The real hard nature of these countries is seen only by those who live and work in them. I used to be absolutely astonished, for instance by the contempt which middle-class French people felt for their police force. Now that our police force has become so much more like theirs, I understand it all too well. The improvements in continental countries have been matched by a dreadful weakening of my own country’s liberties, so this is not in any way a smug assertion of superiority.
It was a bit embarrassing to have such openly authoritarian countries on ‘our’ side, especially General Franco’s Spain, whose survival into the modern age seems increasingly unbelievable. Greece joined NATO in 1952 ( as did Turkey, the country that never quite made it into the EU and now, I suspect, never will) , Portugal in 1949, Spain in 1982 (Though Spain had quietly hosted large US Naval and air bases since the early 1950s under the ‘Pact of Madrid). Ireland, of course didn’t join NATO at all because she was neutral. Greece joined the EU in 1981. Spain and Portugal did so in 1986.
There was an assumption that membership, and the resulting dependence on credit and subsidy, would somehow anchor them in ‘democracy’, or at least in ‘democratism’, the obeisance to the external aspects of government by the people, which is the ideology of the New Europe and indeed of the new globalism, and which is a very different thing from freedom. It seems to me to mean that , if one goes through the required motions, of regular contested elections, one is approved of – provided one does not vote for the wrong people. The key to discovering who the ‘wrong’ people are is the word ‘centre’. A party may be of the ‘left if it is ‘centre-left’, or of the right if it is ‘centre-right’, but not otherwise.
Until now, the left has been more ‘central’ than the right, because old-fashioned pre-1939 sovereigntist nationalism is pretty much banned on the Continent, where it is associated with ‘Fascism', Falangism and authoritarian government, or with collaboration with the German occupation.
In Britain, where it has no such associations (though frequent attempts are made to smear it as if it did) conservative patriotism is only tolerated in a symbolic ‘Last Night of the Proms’ and ‘pint-of-bitter’ way in Britain. If it starts making actual demands for independent action, it is derided and marginalised. The single exception to this rule has been the defeat of the attempt (failed so far, but far from over) to get the United Kingdom to join the Euro. By doggedly treating this question as if it is an economic issue (because hardly anyone understands the political issue it really is) , opponents of the Euro have managed to keep us out until now. When economic crisis strikes this country again, as it must, that protection may prove remarkable weak.
An interesting test of EU ‘democratism’ was the success at the polls of the Austrian Jorg Haider, whose controversial career ended in a car accident in 2008. Let’s be clear why the EU’s treatment of Mr Haider was so disturbing. It’s not because Mr Haider was nice, and the EU nasty. Mr Haider was horrible. I did not like the look of Mr Haider. I have an unshiftable prejudice against populist right-wing leaders in German-speaking countries. I have a lingering suspicion that Germany’s own de-Nazification was not wholly complete, but there’s no doubt that Austria, having somehow attained victim rather than aggressor status in the post-war settlement, has done significantly less to confront its tricky past.
But the EU’s boycott of Austria when Mr Haider joined a coalition with Vienna’s more mainstream ( ‘centre right’?) conservative party, and entered government was also very worrying, a multinational power denying voters the freedom to choose their government.
Yes, they did this. See, for example http://www.theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/01/austria.ianblack . What was it really about? There was no doubt Mr Haider’s rise was ‘democratic’. The voters had, embarrassingly, voted for him, much as they now vote for the French National Front. Many bad things are, always have been and always will be democratic, and popular.
But the EU still boycotted this freely-elected and constitutional government on its territory, so making clear that its principles were not in fact ‘democratic’ but something else altogether (‘centrist’?). The easiest word is ‘liberal’, though of course it’s also not very liberal to boycott a foreign country because you disapprove of its people’s choice of government. Mr Haider’s offence, I think, was to reject by implication the EU’s ideas of open borders and multiculturalism. You do not have to accept Mr Haider’s rather gamey version of Austrian nationalism to be concerned about those.
Which brings me back to those fringe EU states, rescued from blatant authoritarianism by the EU, and defended against a relapse by the EU. For their poorer citizens ’Democracy’ was completely associated with a new prosperity, rising standards of living, infrastructure, greater freedom to travel and work abroad.
Huge amounts of money began to flow into the former fringe states, in transfers and easy loans. I’d love to know how much, and how much of it, in the end, came from Britain. When I was in Andalusia last autumn, I was amazed to see the pristine white concrete of the new high-speed railway lines, the vast subsidised olive groves stretching from horizon to horizon and the new motorways, far beyond the apparent means of Spain itself to pay for such things.
As these societies were transformed, I didn’t initially connect it with the EU, or the Common Market as it then was. Only later did it seem to be a sort of imperial process, by which these fringe provinces, the loyalty of their elites bought with rivers of EU gold, were helped to become markets for the manufactured goods of the North, and producers of raw materials and agricultural products, and also suppliers of cheap labour, either in situ or as migrants within the EU.
It wasn’t just avuncular generosity. It was a way of buying power, of turning poor, dictatorial or theocratic but independent countries into affluent but subservient provinces, whose economies and cultures were reordered to suit the rich north of the EU. In all of these countries, religious social conservatism has been routed by waves of apparently easy money. The old hard question, ‘Who whom?’ once again discovers the reality . A loan, like a gift, can also be a chain and a fetter, even if it is made of gold or silver. Bonds aren’t called bonds for nothing.
Old-fashioned conservative nationalists couldn’t fight this on the continent because of the Fascist and collaborationist past. Even in France I have a feeling that the National Front is unable (for that reason) to break into the second rounds of the Presidential and Parliamentary elections, and so elbow aside the French Tories, currently known as the ‘Republicans’
The enjoyable paradox now is that a far stronger threat to the EU’s centralised democratism now comes from the Left, especially from Syriza in Greece and their Spanish equivalent Podemos.
So many paradoxes follow. It is the Utopian Marxist left, not the conservative patriotic right, that has actually come into full-scale national conflict with the imperial power of the EU, even though the EU is. at heart, a leftist utopian project. The trouble is that, while these movements quite rightly resent the imposition of mad Procrustean economic policies on them, weirdly punitive and deterrent given the liberal relativism that lies at the heart of the EU, they are fighting against their own globalist anti-national ideals.
In fact the purest exposition of modern Greek nationalism is left-wing. The hardline nationalist right is by contrast a sideshow. You might claim this has always been so because of its Byronic, radical origins. But it hasn’t. The last Greek government to say ‘Oxi’ (no!) to an arrogant continental neighbour was that of General Ioannis Metaxas, a monarchist tyrant, who refused Italian demands for occupation rights to parts of Greek territory.
The EU’s response to this rebellion has so far been imperial far more than it has been leftist. France has been more willing to see the problem from Greece’s point of view. But Germany, and its many desperately sycophantic self-abasing clients in the ‘new’ formerly Soviet-dominated EU states, whose leaders would have been ready for their people to eat thistles if it was the price of getting into the Euro, continues to support a policy of exemplary punishment for rebels. I think all this gives us a clue as to what the EU really is, deep, deep down.
As I write, I have no idea how or where it may end, but I am reminded of Dominic Cummings’s warning about Britain’s government.
‘Everyone thinks there's some moment, like in a James Bond movie, where you open the door and that's where the really good people are, but there is no door.’
There is no door in Brussels or Berlin either. These people are human, they lack sleep, they don’t understand economics, they let petty ambition or dogma blind them to obvious facts. They may not even have been very bright in the first place.