Greece's New Government
A Look At Why Greece's New Government Is Not The Radical Revolution You Were Looking For
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Greece has elected a new government, and there is much speculation about its ostensibly radical plans. From the cold-eyed debt calculators at The Economist to the outlandishly romantic (“at Syriza’s HQ, the cigarette smoke in the cafe swirls into shapes”) Paul Mason at The Guardian, spectators to the latest Greek drama appear convinced that something world-changing is afoot. I am less convinced.
As headline-writers and Europeans terrified of returning to the first half of the 20th century are both aware, it is possible to call something “radical” when it isn’t. One might think that, on a continent whose history is essentially a procession of every political system ever proposed by anyone, punctuated by intermittent bouts of extreme violence, there might appear a kind of jadedness about what, exactly, deserves hyperbole.
This is not the case.
Even France’s dreaded Front National, when you examine their platform, is essentially your grandfather with two beers in him. Britain’s UKIP party are the sort of far-right extremists whose regional chairs say things like “we need a fairer system of capitalism that favors small and medium-sized businesses.” And over on the left, in that still-smoky café space so close to the sixties dreams of baby boomer journalists, the “far-left” politician who is about to shatter the European Union is a trim, professional man who in 2012 told an audience of US academics that “an exit by Greece or any other crisis country would be a disaster for Europe… This is something that deep down everyone knows.”
So this is hardly, say, 1905, when major European newspapers would publish “manifestos” containing lines like “we will glorify war — the world’s only hygiene.” But as everybody who has spent much time around the elderly knows, even slight movements can seem quite shocking, and the Europe of 2015 — united, defanged, sedated — is nothing if not old.
So let’s agree for a second that Syriza are radical, adjusting our definition of the term to signify the tiny, hedged little policy-swings that qualify as disruptive under globalism or corporatism or whatever it is that the entire West has seemingly agreed to live under. It’s the 21st century, and this is radical. So what do they want to do?
Syriza came into power because Greeks were tired of the budget cuts and the austerity program that had been imposed on them by what is called “the troika” — the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — following the EU’s bailout of the Greek economy in 2010.
On the surface, this could easily lend itself to a certain, unfavorable-to-Greeks narrative: they have mismanaged their funds and are now seeking refuge in the claims of some dubious firebrand. This is simple stuff, essentially the Greek grasshopper versus the German ant, but like most simple and emotionally satisfying narratives, it skips a great many things en route to its moralistic concision.
For many Greeks, austerity was something very far from the just reward of pre-crash idleness. Not only did the EU-led program not improve Greece’s economic fundamentals — the bailout program saw the country’s economy contract by a further 25% after the crisis, and youth unemployment rise to over 60% — but there was a widespread belief that the sins of previous oligarchs were being visited upon the common man.
Pre-crisis Greece was not, according to this narrative (and I would argue, the truth), some sort of thriving meritocracy whose only fault was some sort of populist overreach. Instead, it was a place where major industries such as shipping operated in an essentially tax-free environment, the result of strategic oligarchical ins-and-outs.
The heirs of the great shipping firms did things like date Paris Hilton while Greece hurtled into its debt crisis; large construction companies with French and German partners billed their clients millions more than France or Germany would ever have permitted, and when the debt-man came knocking it was down to the man in the street to pick up the tab.
It had to have pissed people off.
So this, rather than some sort of comical, “hey wouldn’t it be funny if we never paid our bills”-style environment, was the context of Syriza’s rise to power. Initially, Syriza was a coalition of hard-left groups, from Greens to Communists, who felt that their country’s financial entanglements were laying unjust costs at the feet of Greek civil servants and citizens, and who demanded a change.
“Change” is a word that excites both hardliners (read: people who know what they want) and average citizens (read: people who just want life to be slightly better by whatever means possible) alike. “Change”, tragically, can mean an entire re-ordering of the very nature of a society and what it seeks to provide or a small series of tweaks to existing arrangement. Paired with “hope,” it can be a very powerful narcotic. I trust Americans will be familiar with what came next.
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