Just hours before it flouted its repayment deadline of €1.6bn to the IMF last night, Greece formally requested a restructured two-year bailout programme. Athens showed it still wants to work within Europe.
The Greek crisis isn’t rocket science. It’s not all about advanced mathematics and game theory. And it’s not all about credit and debt. It’s not even all about left-right ideology.
These media models narrow the narrative into quasi-intellectual debates – ideological discourse; political dialectics; international finance; the grey fog of European institutional dynamics.
However, the core of the Greek crisis is now straightforward. And it can still be resolved if mass political intent outweighs elite financial profit.
It’s about values of humanity. It’s about dignity, fairness, equality, accountable power – values of social justice. And it’s about sustainable development, creating a system of society that works. The old one has failed.
At the time of writing, Greece still faces a referendum on Sunday to reject or accept the latest bailout conditions from the so-called Troika. And three things are certain.
First – whatever the referendum outcome – when Europe awakes on Monday morning, the sun will still have risen, the earth will still be spinning, and the sky still won’t have fallen. (It never does.)
So the supposed sense of impending nuclear doom over unpaid debts or unfinished negotiations is primarily just a tactic of human design to pressurise outcomes. Time comes, time goes. Tick-tock. (That’s not to dismiss the intolerable grind for Greek citizens as they literally struggle to put food on the table.)
Second – whatever the referendum outcome – the existing scaffold of global capitalism will not have collapsed. It’s worth remembering that broad opposition to ‘austerity’policies mainly argues for greater fairness within an ongoing macro framework of global socio-economic capital streams.
That’s why the White House was relaxed on Monday and simply urged all sides in Europe “to contribute to pragmatic discussions” and “develop a package”, pushing for some further Greek debt relief.
“The fact is the US exposure to Greece is small,” White House spokesperson Josh Earnest said.
The US (like China) is only strategically concerned about the possibility of cascading global instability. Europe’s local problem is currently small beer (and maybe an opportunity).
Third – whatever the referendum outcome – Greece’s economy will still be an unfathomable mess after decades of greedy mismanagement and five years of blundered ‘bailout’. It will take a generation of structural reform and systematic rebuilding to become sustainable.
So with those three facts as certainties next Monday morning, one needs to ask why the Troika – driven hard by German financial interests – seems so determined to roast Greece on a spit. And this is where the values of humanity enter the equation. The international doctrine of self-serving inequality has been confronted with the domestic democracy of social conscience.
Greece makes a liar out of the false economy that a rising tide lift all boats. Greece’s bailout loans go to paying off Germany’s bankers – with interest. The Troika’s poverty of morality is causing Greece’s reality of poverty. And the future values of tomorrow’s European citizens are now at stake.
On one hand, Alex Tsipras, his party Syriza and Greek democracy, is fighting to hold a sovereign lifeline, not conquer a continent.
Mr Tspiras’s best outcome is to live politically for another day – quite literally, Monday of next week. But even if he wins, on every subsequent day for the rest of his political life as prime minister, Mr Tsipras will still face all the same practical issues of historical poverty and legacy deprivation. And he can’t keep calling weekly referenda. That gambit’s gone.
On the other hand, the Troika is making the mistake of undermining any rationale strategy with reckless superiority. It’s part of the human condition of obnoxious and arrogant power – individually and institutionally.
Like a champing bully pounding the poorest kid in the political playground, the Troika is relentlessly trying to make an example of Greece. And that explains what’s happening this week. Europe’s big boys are intent on breaking Greeks psychologically and isolating Mr Tsipras politically, because any alternative doctrine represents a threat. Bullies always isolate and exclude those who disagree.
The EU president Jean Claude Junker this week urged Greeks to vote against Mr Tsipras and Syriza on Sunday, saying: “You shouldn’t commit suicide because you’re afraid of dying.”
For a country with spiralling deaths by suicide which are intensified by poverty, Mr Junker illustrates the appalling insensitivity of a detached European elite.
Democrats in Ireland are watching Greece intensely. But Greece is not Ireland. Nor is it a European Cuba. It is a nation being needlessly driven towards a cliff-edge. And it’s an economy that can only now be rescued with basic values of humanity.
The Troika needs to bottle its neoliberal mania. Greece’s proposal last night is an olive branch that should be grasped.
j.kearney@irishnews.com
