The beleaguered nation may soon find that the EU is rather ambivalent about its problems
IN A couple of months, holidaymakers will be draping themselves across Greek beaches and marinas, and queuing for its cultural heritage sites, bringing an income of almost 20 per cent of Greek gross domestic product, a vital ingredient in the resuscitation of the economy.
But sunshine and low-cost alcohol obscure the realities of life in Greece today. These tourists cannot be unaware of the crisis that Greek finances have precipitated for the euro, but they may not realise that they are entering a war zone – an economic war zone – that is highly complex. The civilisation that gave “Greek tragedy” to the world has done it again – but with dramatically different results, making it clear, perhaps for the first time, how serious a factor Greece really is in the international context.
We have an ambivalent attitude to Greece: we are Philhellenes in cultural and sentimental terms, but hellenosceptics in the face of the crisis. The credibility problem is enormous: internationally, the joke is: “there are lies, damned lies, and Greek statistics”. But Greeks are themselves ambivalent. Greece has a dual character: partly a go-ahead, cosmopolitan, sophisticated city-based society; partly a traditional, rural-based subsistence economy – not unlike Ireland in the 1960s.
Neither seems to have understood what it means to be part of Europe, or what is expected of it by the Brussels mandarins. Resistance to both internal and external authority is the norm.
The political and financial pages of the world’s press discuss four different segments of this crisis: the danger to the euro zone; the vulnerability of the nation’s economy to international speculation; Greece’s lack of credibility on its financial position; and its internal structural weaknesses in matters of administration and accountability. But it’s when you put all four factors together that the complexity of the situation becomes evident.
As an Athenian said recently, “Greeks love their country, but they don’t trust it.” It just about sums up this dichotomy between essential Greekness – cultural and ethnic pride, and fierce independence – and the ability to translate that Greekness into positive action. But at last, the admission that “Greece is not a functioning state”, within the meaning of the Nice, Maastricht and Lisbon treaties, has become widespread and overt, and many are glad to accept that this has come out into the open.
The Exarcheia area of Athens exemplifies one of Greece’s organic dichotomies: regarded by the security forces as a hotbed of the anarchism which drives terrorist attacks on politicians and banks, it is also home to book clubs, bookshops, street markets and affordable art – a bohemianism that eschews chic. Not that those are incompatible with protest and violence. Imagine Dublin’s Liberties or Temple Bar having that same combination of flair and radicalism, and you’ve got the picture.
The crisis has two advantages: it will necessitate a rethinking of the organisation of Greek society, the alternative to which, in the words of prime minister George Papandreou, is “the abyss”; and it means that the danger of default on its massive debts has called into question the financial stability of the EU itself and the way that international capital is allowed to operate. The concept of “sovereign debt”, a government’s obligation to honour its debts, is itself under threat when there is such a question mark over the sovereignty of individual nations. In a sense, the fact that the Greeks live in a “fake world” only epitomises the larger make-believe of Europe as a social and cultural entity.
As one of the directors of the Foundation for Economic and Industrial Research puts it: “The state has an irrational control of the economy. We need nothing less than a revolution in the public sector.” But that is less than half the story. Although public finances are crippled by the fact that 50 per cent of the workforce is in the public sector, it is unfair to blame these workers for the problem which they personify: many civil servants in Athens are double-jobbing as waiters, for example, simply to pay the high apartment rentals.
The educational system is so inadequate that parents ambitious for their children’s futures pay huge sums for private “cramming”, and the cost of being in hospital is exorbitant.
The temptation for Papandreou is to promise everything to Brussels, relying on refinancing current and future debts, and then to hope the problem will go away. It’s a standard procedure for any politician, especially a Greek one.
But Papandreou has come to power on a different basis to most – especially his father and grandfather, previous prime ministers, with whose political framework and personal vision he would profoundly differ. That partly explains why the EU is prepared to trust him, but it also explains why, as a safety measure, it has imposed an unrealistic 28-day deadline for him to demonstrate that his fiscal measures will have the required effect. In the face of France’s pro-Greek stance, it was the only way that Angela Merkel, the Teutonic tortoise, could mollify her country’s widespread feeling that Greece shouldn’t get a pfennig of German money.
By the middle of March we will know more about the EU’s own ambivalence towards the problem Greece has presented it.