Northern Europe needs to listen to hardy Greece

Amitabh Mukhopadhyay

In Athens, not just the ruins of the Acropolis or of the Temple of Zeus but the walls of the bustling city also speak. And the writing on them reflects a grand constant in Greek thought — individual virtues, not robust bank accounts, make for good citizens. Whether the right-wing Golden Dawn, the radical left-wing Syriza or the spanking New Democracy has a better appreciation of what constitutes virtue is of course problematic, but it remains a quintessentially Greek discourse. The walls don’t echo the financial language of TV channels, of interest rates, exchange rates, growth rates and graphs.

During a short holiday in Greece this October, I could not shake off a throwback to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Timon, a nobleman of great virtue, generously shared his riches, to a fault, and was reduced to a pauper. Then, hounded by creditors, he went off to a desolate cave, only to discover a treasure of gold with which he repaid them, remaining generous, though somewhat bitter, towards the end of the manuscript.

Merkel visit

Apparently, the play was never completed. Nor is the worst of the present financial crisis in Greece by any means over. In the run-up to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s visit to Athens on October 9, news broke that Greek officials had located a list containing the details of some 2,000 Greeks who were account holders in Swiss banks. Apparently, the list was received two years ago from the then French Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, by the Greek government and was delivered to a special prosecutor by the head of Greece’s economic crimes unit. Along the streets and cafes of Plaka, the question asked that evening was: could this treasure not suffice for the bailout that the government needed?

Obviously, the treasure is big, but not big enough for the Greek government debt, reckoned at €346 billion or 179 per cent of its GDP. The financial crisis is unmistakably spilling over into an economic depression that threatens to engulf the euro zone. In the perception of the Greeks gathered at Syntagma Square to protest Ms Merkel’s visit, it was the portents of the latter, rather than the former, which had propelled her to Athens. They were demanding that their national leadership drive a harder bargain with the troika of the International Monetary Fund-European Union-European Central Bank (IMF-EU-ECB) that Merkel seemed to represent on this occasion and not capitulate to the power of finance capital. Further austerity cuts in wages, pensions and social security, on which Prime Minister Antonis Samaras had already garnered a parliamentary consensus, were unacceptable to them.

Did the Greeks misread Ms Merkel’s motives on this mission? Her advocacy of patience with Greece and success in persuading the IMF to allow more time for deficit reduction might suggest it was simply a supportive gesture. However, the German Chancellor runs deeper than that. Most likely, she senses what others in northern Europe do not — the long-term bargaining strength of Greece vis-à-vis the northern countries in the euro zone and the need to work with the people rather than a recently trussed-up government, for the EU to survive.

Displaying grit

What are the strengths of Greeks to tide over the crisis? A young Greek woman in Monastiraki offered me some insights. Her father, she said, was a fisherman who owned a boat and a bit of land in north Greece. He lamented the fact that 80 per cent of the fish eaten in Athens came from Chile and Argentina. She did not reckon her parents would be thrown out on to the streets as it might happen to families in many north European cities in case of a depression. They would fish and grow crops and survive.

This sounded a bit like the grit of The Old Man and the Sea, but I had to admit that throughout history, the Greeks have shown an extraordinary ability to struggle and survive turns in fortune. Thanks to the 19th century land reforms, most Greeks own small farms and the idyllic climate along with the long coastline supports agriculture. Time and again, they have weathered financial turbulence. During the depression of the 1930s, protectionist policies and a weak drachma helped Greek industry to grow.

The economic miracle from the 1950s on was spectacular. Its glorious islands today attract hordes of tourists. Greece continues to excel in shipping. With bread and fish to eat and olives and grapes to sell, they will survive even if their bloated modern services sector takes a blow. If they were to be thrown out of the euro-zone, they would revert to a very weak drachma, good for their exports, even if useless for any imports. For the rest of the euro-zone, this would mean even greater anxieties about the euro surviving, the collapse of several French banks that routed derivatives-driven loans and a rising spiral of unemployment in the northern cities, with little for them to fall back on.

With 30-odd years of a protester’s career behind her, perhaps Ms Merkel looked beyond the negotiating table at the righteous indignation of the demonstrators on the streets. She may have been astute enough to recognise their economic strength or wonder, at any rate, if the government she was dealing with was at all representative of the public weal, which sang a tune very different from the parliamentary consensus on austerity cuts.

Mirroring Hazare

The outrageous arrest and release of Kostas Vaxevanis, the intrepid editor of Hot Doc, on October 27, for publishing names from the Lagarde list, bear an uncanny resemblance to the ham-handed manner in which Anna Hazare was treated by the Indian government two years ago when he stepped out for his fast against corruption in high places. The high-handedness of government in the case of Anna led to such public anger that Parliament was forced ultimately to swallow its pride and issue a “Sense of the House” resolution guaranteeing three essential features of the institution of an ombudsman that Anna had been demanding. The repressive act in Greece not only adds to the public distrust of the newly elected government led by New Democracy, but also thereby, queers the pitch for any meaningful negotiations between the elite troika of the IMF-EU-ECB and the present government whose credibility is at stake.

While the troika needs to realise its own vulnerability and appreciate the difference between the real and the money economies it is dealing with, the government in turn needs to be mindful of the will of the people to reclaim economics as a moral science. Hopefully, the charges of breach of privacy that Mr. Vaxevanis faces will be viewed by the magistrate not only in the context of the public outcry against tax evasion by the rich and powerful but also in the light of Aristotle’s famous dictum: “Privacy is idiocy, the breeding ground of all criminality.”