The Greek word “diplo” means “double”, from which we get the idea of “diplomat”, someone who moves between two points of view attempting a compromise. But it is also the root word for “duplicity” – being dishonest to both sides or, to speak diplomatically, making sure something gets lost in translation.
So diplomacy and duplicity have much in common, and Greece is the victim of both.
In the 17th century the British diplomat and spy Sir Henry Wotton defined an ambassador as "an honest man sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country".
Over the past two years we have witnessed a charade of spying and lying aimed ostensibly at solving the refugee crisis, but also using Greece’s economic plight as a negotiating tool.
That it has achieved almost nothing is a sign that diplomacy works: each side lies to the other and to itself, and the result is well-planned chaos.
The shuttle service between Angela Merkel, Alexis Tsipras and Donald Tusk at leadership level, and between Wolfgang Schäuble, Christine Lagarde and Mario Draghi at the economic level, is a model of how to orchestrate a charade.
Dysfunctional state
It’s also a model of
Europe
as a dysfunctional state. In the 1980s the BBC comedy series
Yes Minister
was already demonstrating the chaos. As Sir
Humphrey Appleby
explains to his hapless minister
Jim Hacker
: “The more member states, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes. We call it diplomacy”.
The presence of 50,000 migrants (most of them Syrian) in Greece, 10,000 of them on the Greek-Macedonian border, is proof that diplomacy works – on its own terms, and certainly not for the benefit of the victims of history. It has Greece and Macedonia at loggerheads which is good diplomacy
Only recently the EU abandoned its 20-year-old policy to standardise fruit and vegetables and to breed a eurocumber, a eurocarrot and a eurosprout among other deviants (Commission Regulation – EEC – 1677/88).
It was designed to make us all feel united under a common euromushroom. It offended growers, marketeers, environmentalists, biochemists. It was an offence to reason, but not to Eurothink. It was diplomatically adroit at one time to conceive this fantasy plan, and diplomatically charming at another to kill it off. The refugees are “eurorefugees”; they must be standardised too.
As a result, divisions are appearing, along ethnic lines, among the hostages, replicating the diversity of their supposed benefactors. United in a common cause, they have a case. Divided, they are just like the rest of us.
Not only that, but there has been a falling-out between, on one side, the NGOs such as Médécins Sans Frontières, the Red Cross and Amnesty International and, on the other, the political bosses, as to how the refugees' condition should be addressed. This is pure Yes Minister.
Twin crises
As right-wing anti-immigrant parties rise in popularity across Europe, political instability is grist to the diplomatic mill. With Greece seemingly unable to satisfy the demands of the troika, its continuing financial crisis is almost as serious as the refugees who won’t go away either. The two crises are coalescing in the Greek-Europe charade.
Using refugees as a pawn in the diplomatic (or duplicitous) game is an old trick: hostages to fortune. No one threatens to shoot the hostages; they will probably die of starvation of their own accord. Keeping them in holding pens until one side or the other concedes is a diplomatic strategy.
Yet the issues at stake go beyond the privations of refugees. Turkey saw a chance to speed up its EU membership application, which would be helped by improving its humanitarian image. So it agreed to curb the exodus of refugees to Greece, and to take back some (but only some) of those already in Greece.
But on April 8th, Turkish president Recep Erdogan threatened that if the EU did not free up Turkish visa applications and pay the €3 billion promised to accommodate the refugees, Turkey would quit its obligations. In case it got lost in translation, he repeated this on April 20th. This is diplo-speak for "Give us the dough or the dame gets it".
The refugees, like hostages, stay where they are. The next step? Negotiate visa-free travel for Turks, without conceding Europe’s demands for human rights reforms. That one should run and run, but yet again the refugees sit and sit.
It's ironic that Samuel Beckett's first play was Eleutheria – Greek for "freedom". Beckett saw perfectly the lack of purpose and intention in a hostage situation. At the end of Waiting for Godot his two migrants say :"Well? Shall we go?" "Yes, let's go". The stage direction reads: "They do not move."
Neither does European diplomacy. The stage isn’t designed for that kind of movement.