Thoughts on Greece

In a famous 1858 speech, future President Abraham Lincoln darkly warned that America could not exist “half slave and half free”. He might have been talking about Europe in 2012, where Germans benefit from high wages, low unemployment, and strong exports, while Greece and Italy are forced to undergo harsh austerity measures imposed on their already fragile economies by unelected technocratic administrations. While Italians wait until next year to choose who will succeed Mario Monti’s non-partisan cabinet, Greeks went to the polls last week. The result was indecisive – the conservative New Democracy finished first and claimed the fifty-seat winner’s bonus (there are three hundred seats in Greece’s parliament), but scored less than twenty percent of the vote. SYRIZA, the equivalent of Australia’s Socialist Alliance or Germany’s Die Linke, came in second. And, of course, the chattering classes have their knickers in a knot about the rise of Golden Dawn, a party which the Lamestream Media invariably describes as ‘neo-Nazi’ yet in the same breath claims it trades on anti-German bigotry. Negotiations to form a cabinet (the most likely combination being New Democracy-PASOK-Democratic Left) have been unsuccessful.

(Side note: one of the most interesting things I learnt about Greek politics during the campaign is the origin of PASOK’s green colour, which differs from the reds and pinks used by other social-democratic parties around Europe. It comes from chariot racing in the Byzantine Empire, when the masses would support the green chariots and the elites the blue ones; this is also why top Greek soccer club Panathinaikos play in a green and white strip.)

One thing has been made clear by all oracles of the technocrat-banker elite: that the austerity measures imposed on Greece are holy writ, and cannot be renegotiated or repudiated, no matter the will of the Greek people. Ongoing protests against austerity have been met with the sort of police repression not usually seen in western Europe (the linked article mentions tear gas, stun grenades, and police brutality). In the negotiations regarding the formation of a government, New Democracy and PASOK have portrayed themselves as the only serious people in the room, and used as leverage their acceptability to Brussels, Frankfurt, and the bond markets. To be sure, none of this is new – economic elites have always had the means to subvert the democratic will of the people – but one can’t help but feel that Angela Merkel and her ilk are much more brazen about it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell captured the sometimes hopeless nature of political disenchantment when he has his protagonist, Winston Smith, furiously and repeatedly scribble ‘down with big brother’ (in lower case letters, with no punctuation) in his diary. Haunted by a sense that all is not right in his world, but prevented by the totalitarian state from ingesting the knowledge necessary to make an intelligent case against Ingsoc, Winston is reduced to emotional, meaningless, and disorderly ranting. Are sizeable chunks of the European electorate not doing the same? Across the continent, well-meaning people are drawn to far-right and Stalinist parties with unsavoury ideas and histories, to old-school socialists with little chance of exercising power (eg. SYRIZA or the French presidential candidacy of Jean-Luc Mélenchon), or to protest parties who may turn out to be passing fads (eg. the Pirate Parties of Germany and Sweden). There is a movement afoot against the inhuman, anti-democratic managerialism of the neoliberal state. Its problem is that its electorate is disorganised and prone to low turnout and low levels of activism, and that its anti-neoliberal energy is channelled by existing political actors with their own agendas (such as the far-right parties who scapegoat immigrants and minorities, thus letting the economic elites off the hook). No wonder it commands as little respect from the austerity set as Winston’s scribblings did from the rulers of Oceania.

As I write this, three party leaders (Samaras of New Democracy, Tsipras of SYRIZA, and Venizelos of PASOK) have failed to form a viable governing coalition, and the narrative has shifted to the need for a government of national unity. The great fear of the defenders of neoliberalism is that a second election would result in gains for anti-austerity parties, and that SYRIZA could make up the few percentage points needed to snatch the fifty-seat bonus from New Democracy. Their hand-wringing belies two feelings: a contempt for democracy and an admission that their preferred parties (ND and PASOK) are unable to win back the authority that they once commanded. The same is true across the developed world. The last few decades have witnessed drastic declines in political participation (measured in terms of party membership and voter turnout), generating the creation of new supposed threats to civilisation as elites seek to win the attention and the allegiance of ordinary people. And so, instead of positive appeals to the Greek people to be inspired by the visions for their country’s future offered by the two once-dominant parties, they are reduced to playing on fears – fears of Greece incurring the wrath of the EU and the bond markets, fears of the instability caused by a government not being formed, and fears of further electoral gains by Golden Dawn.

This is where Europe’s political scene stands today. An elite lacking confidence in its own authority, hiding behind a technocratic, apolitical mode of governance facing down a public increasingly wary of the self-indulgent scheming of those in power. Yet when faced with serious challenge to their rule, the elites respond with tear gas and Mario Monti-style Vichy regimes. How this ends is anyone’s guess, but no realistic observer can continue to believe that neoliberalism and austerity-ism are any longer compatible with democracy and human rights.