The topic of my talk is so bitterly contested
that I feel I should start with a confession – which is also a health warning:
I am not that excited by the rise of
SYRIZA. In fact, there are several things about it that absolutely terrify me.
And I am saying this in spite of the fact that I consider myself ‘a man of the
Left’, and even though I have always been highly critical of the parties that
ruled the country in coalition or in competition with each other since 1974.
This is hardly the place nor the time to go very deeply into
why and how a defeated minority of Greek progressives (to which I belong) have
come to feel alienated from the current ascendance of the radical left, or into
the reasons for so much ‘bad blood’ between radicals and moderates within the
Left. I really cannot see how anyone in the audience can possibly want to know
more about the fine details of this quarrel between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks.
On the contrary, I believe it is important to acknowledge that recent developments in Greece
cannot be fully made sense of as a straightforward triumph of leftists over
conservatives. A move along a Left/Right axis, in this case brought about by an
appalling economic and social crisis, has certainly taken place. But cutting
across that familiar cleavage, there lies a very different one, crystalized
around attitudes to Europe (and the ‘West’), national identity, the role of the
Orthodox Church and so on and so forth. These are partly overlapping, seldom
articulated, yet highly divisive questions that are steeped in history – the
history of the unresolved conflicts that have accompanied Greece’s perennial,
often half-hearted, always incomplete efforts to be a modern country.
I am not a historian, so I won’t go much further into all this. But it seems to me
that, over the longue durée, the
latter cleavage is about as equally deep as the former, and under certain
circumstances it may actually dominate. I would argue that this is crucial to
understanding the ‘present conjuncture’ in Greece.
The other introductory statement I would also like to make at
the outset is that in my talk today I will not dwell on the brighter side of
the rise of SYRIZA: the revitalization of democracy; the punishment of
incumbents for failing to deliver; the renewal of political elites; the return
of hope in place of despondency; a restored sense that ordinary people can take
control of their fate. Not because I do not consider this brighter side to
exist, or to be relevant to our theme: it does, and it is – and in fact goes a
long way towards explaining the engagement of so many younger Greeks, their
elation with the election result, and even their apparent satisfaction with the
way the new government has so far handled the negotiations with Greece's
European partners. I will only leave these positive aspects aside because I
find them obvious, and because I expect this audience to be sufficiently familiar
with them to render much further discussion superfluous.
Let me then turn to the first question I have been asked to
address: What is my overall assessment of how the economic crisis has altered
the political landscape/ electoral dynamics in Greece?
The answer to that can only be “very profoundly”. The
combined vote of conservatives and socialists was 5.3 million (76.4%) in the
October 2009 general election. In January 2015, the two parties received between
them a mere 2 million votes (32.4%). The socialist party PASOK was nearly wiped
out, going from 3 million votes to below 300 thousand, and from 44% to 4.7%. On
the contrary, SYRIZA grew exponentially, from 4.6% to 36.3%.
What is the secret of SYRIZA’s success? Here answers diverge,
depending on one’s reading of the situation. My one view is that the party
flourished because it adopted a deliberately nationalist-populist
strategy: one enemy (the Troika of foreign creditors and their domestic
servants), one solution (end austerity by repealing the bailout agreement with
a single act of parliament on day one). This simple message has enabled the
party to tap into a vast reservoir of wounded pride. To some extent, that such
a reservoir was created, and became vast, is rather understandable: it really is humiliating for any sovereign country
to have the details of government policy dictated by unelected middle-ranking officials
in Brussels, Frankfurt or Washington D.C. But in the case of Greece wounded
pride went much further. To a very great extent, it resulted from a sort of
cognitive dissonance: the incongruence between (i) the painful reality of near
bankruptcy, and (ii) long-held, widely-shared beliefs about Greece’s proper
place in the world (“cradle of civilization”, “birthplace of democracy” and all
that).
Exploiting ‘the politics of resentment’ turned out to be a resounding
success for SYRIZA. But it was achieved at a price. The social coalition
assembled at grassroots level blended left-wing anti-imperialists with
right-wing nationalists. The two groups suddenly discovered they were fighting
on the same side, against the same enemies. The visual symbol of this new
brotherhood became plain for all to see in the summer of 2011, during the
protracted occupation of Athens’ Constitution Square by a multitude of ‘Indignados’:
leftists waving red flags in the ‘lower square’ coexisted happily with nationalists
(including neo-Nazis) waving Greek flags in the ‘upper square’, and occasionally
joined forces to shout abuse at parliament (and mob the occasional MP). The
political coalition emerging victorious from the recent general election
mirrored that social coalition quite faithfully (minus the neo-Nazis of Golden
Dawn).
Given the above, it should hardly come as a surprise that, on
closer inspection, Greece’s ‘first Left government’ of young charismatic Alexis
Tsipras is actually replete with reactionary/unsavoury personalities holding
key cabinet portfolios. (Our new minister for defence, Panos Kammenos, is the
rabidly nationalistic leader of Independent Greeks. Our new minister for
foreign affairs, Nikos Kotzias, is the self-styled ideologue of the ‘patriotic
Left’, whose latest book explains why Greece is a ‘debt colony’. Having emerged
as the hardline instructor of the
Communist Party of Greece in the 1980s, distinguishing himself as a staunch
defender of martial law in Poland, he later reinvented himself as an apologist
of Vladimir Putin.)
Now, some commentators at home and abroad have argued that
one should not pay too much attention to such trivial details. All of this and
more can be simply written off as an unfortunate necessity, to be archived under
the label of political expediency. I am not so sure myself. The people of SYRIZA
(leaders, rank-and-file, and voters) have in recent years grown fond of their
anti-austerity allies, even when they are right-wing nationalists. This
explains why the latest opinion polls
show that as many as 70% of SYRIZA voters have a positive view of Kammenos. But
there is plenty of other evidence, too, on the intellectual affinity between
leftists and nationalists.
What is more, the last few years – and the January 2015
general election – have catapulted SYRIZA from backwater obscurity to the
international limelight. Party leaders had long been accustomed to air their
opinions with the license accorded to an irrelevant political force, by a
public opinion inclined to lend an ear to conspiracy theories of all sorts. Now
that these opinions are widely publicised the moment they are aired, the
cultural identity of SYRIZA leaders and their allies is revealed for what it really
is: a shallow, bitter, narrow, ugly ethnic nationalism, with racist overtones.
So, in the space of a single week, we have been officially informed
that if Germany denies Greece a loan extension with no strings attached, Greece
will retaliate by sending Third World migrants and jihadists to Germany (thus
spoke minister of foreign affairs Kotzias); that if Germany fails to pay war
reparations, Greece will confiscate German properties including the historic
site of Goethe Institute (minister of justice Paraskevopoulos); that the
ministry of defence will be involved in the history curriculum to ensure that
Greek primary schools teach children a more extensive course in German WWII
atrocities (minister of defence Kammenos and parliament chair Konstantopoulou);
and that Poland’s sceptic attitude towards Greek demands in current bailout
negotiations should not be surprising, given that the country had collaborated
with Nazi Germany in WWII (coordination minister Flabouraris).
Summing up, to a great extent SYRIZA is a mutant Left: unfamiliar to western eyes
(and hence poorly understood by many western observers), but all too
terrifyingly familiar to those living in that unhappy corner of the world
otherwise known as ‘the Balkans’. To stretch an analogy, the nationalistic left
ruling Greece today is in many respects far more akin to the ethno-bolshevism
of Slobodan Milošević than to Spain’s Podemos.
Now, it would be unfair to SYRIZA (and outright wrong) to
claim that nationalistic, xenophobic, anti-western sentiments are confined to
the current ruling coalition. As I have argued elsewhere,
it goes far deeper than that. (It also incidentally explains why so many Greeks
across the political spectrum are thrilled by the negotiating stance of the new
government.) My point is rather that the recent election has been won not by
“the Left” but by a broad nationalist-populist coalition, whose partners are
not reluctant allies but comrades in arms.
Let me now briefly address the next question: How has the
economic crisis been framed in the political arena (e.g. as emanating from
internal vs. external causes)?
In Greece (as, I imagine, elsewhere), the soul-searching
began as soon as the crisis erupted. Most people went into denial: ‘crisis,
what crisis?’, ‘our fatherland has been betrayed’, ‘foreigners are trying to
turn us into a colony’, ‘this is not our debt’, ‘can’t pay won’t pay’. Yanis
Varoufakis himself famously suggested in 2011 that Greece bears as much
responsibility for its woes as the State of Ohio had been responsible for the
Great Depression in 1929. Hence, according to our current finance minister, the
crisis was caused by the bailout agreement, rather the other way round.
Some (including myself) objected that a fiscal deficit of
15.4% (in 2009) and an external deficit of 14.9% (in 2008) suggested that
something must have got seriously wrong with Greece’s political economy. For 12
long years preceding the bailout, GDP per capita had grown by almost 4%
annually, resulting in a broadly shared improvement in living standards. At the
same time, Greek firms continued to lose ground in international markets. In
view of that, we argued
that some austerity at least was
inevitable. The task of domestic actors (including unions and the Left) should
not be to resist it, but to make it as equitable as possible, fight corruption
and clientelism, reform institutions, and renew the country’s growth model.
It must be clear by now that, while SYRIZA and its
anti-austerity allies administered instant absolution (‘it’s not your fault’),
the best we moderate progressives could offer was blood, sweat and tears. There
was hardly a contest.
An added complication was that the austerity programme was implemented
by the same conservative and socialist elites who had ruled Greece for 35
years, and therefore were most to blame for making a bailout necessary in the
first place. Why should they fight
corruption and clientelism, the secrets to their
success? No reason at all. In fact, they didn’t.
A curious aspect of the anti-austerity narrative (‘the
crisis was caused by the 2010 bailout’) was that it completely let off the hook
the disastrous conservative rule of 2004-2009 (during which Greece’s twin
deficits more than doubled). The anti-austerity bloc generally holds Kostas
Karamanlis, then PM, in high esteem, while it treats with absolute contempt the
hapless George Papandreou (whose arguably main fault was that he failed to see
the hot potato that was handed to him until it was too late). This is part of
the reason why Alexis Tsipras offered the post of President of the Republic to
Prokopis Pavlopoulos, who as minister for home affairs under Karamanlis had
authorised the creation of a staggering 865 thousand public sector jobs. (Later
Pavlopoulos also reinvented himself as a fierce critic of austerity and the
EU.)
Time is running out, so let me only make a brief comment on
the last question. What are the implications of these developments for Europe
as a whole?
In spite of everything I remain a
European federalist, so it is my belief that the best way to relaunch the
European project is to address its many imbalances, and explain to European
citizens why a closer union is preferable to the status quo, and to no union.
What worries me is that the revival of the European project
requires citizens who feel proud to be European as well as Greek, German etc. Instead,
a key development of recent years is growing mutual incomprehension, at times
verging on outright hostility, between Greeks and Germans (and other
Europeans). It would have been nice if Greeks accepted responsibility for the disconnect
between rising living standards and deteriorating economic performance pre-crisis,
of which the fiscal deficit was only one manifestation. And it would also have
been nice if other Europeans accepted that the Greek bailout was (at least
partly) a bailout of German and French banks, who had been unwise enough to
throw huge amounts of money into loans to Greeks (and other south Europeans). As
we all know, none of this happened. Greeks went into denial, and Germans reverted
to the moralistic finger-pointing which eventually proved so successful in
paving the way for the rise of anti-establishment / anti-EU forces in Greece
and elsewhere.
And this could well turn out to be the greatest political
failure of all.
