The question of whether Turkey should be added to the European Union is rapidly being replaced by the question of whether Greece should remain inside it. The meltdown of government finances in the great stewpot of public debt has made the country an ungovernable shambles, even by its own demanding standards.
Yet while Greece is a special case—every country is a special case, and every one has its ungovernable-shambles aspect, as visitors to every country have observed—it is also a typical, democratic country in the sense that its freely elected governments have gradually assembled a universe of financial entitlements which its taxpayers can no longer keep up with.
I will be writing about this issue more generally tomorrow, but for the moment, let’s just stare at Greece.
In the olden days, when people were fairly free with national, ethnic, racial, and religious stereotypes, the Greeks carried a few. “The problem with stereotypes is that they’re all true,” as a socialist acquaintance once uttered in frustration; but as a rightwing stereotype, I had to correct him. The problem with that statement may be found in the sheer number of stereotypes, for any given nation, ethnicity, race, religion; or sexual orientation for that matter. There are stereotypes within stereotypes, and making sense of the world requires patience in observing this complexity.
Still, people who might consciously reject the old stereotype of the Greeks as a volatile people, who live for the day, will nevertheless casually and unconsciously declare that Greece is not a typical European country.
It is indeed not, in the deep historical sense: it is not part of “the West” in the strict sense of having been part of western Christendom, and was under Muslim rule for many centuries. Modern Greece is an artifact. Its independence from the Ottoman empire was secured by European interventions, and it was constituted as a state in no continuous relation with Byzantine and Hellenic antecedents. Modern Greece is a nation created from one patch of Balkan ethno-geography. Her cultural roots and tendencies remain, in many ways, Middle Eastern, even to the food on her table.
It is important to grasp this, because it is the beginning of wisdom in understanding her modern mess. It begins with tortured romantic pride, no different from that found in many states across Africa and Asia, whose independence was a product of external forces. This comes with the sense that others were always to blame for her fate, and must still be to blame.
A claim to powerlessness, to being the victim of dark conspiracies, was as evident in the 1970s when the supposed masters were “the CIA and their Generals,” as it is today when the supposed masters are “German financiers and their Euro.” Tomorrow there may be other supposed masters; but today the problem is that freely elected governments of socialist tendency have spent the country into perdition.
Worse, as Angela Merkel has been hinting, the Germans have their own deficits and debts, and will not bail the Greeks out. Polls in Germany show the very idea of trying is a non-starter. If there were polls in France and Britain they would show the same: it’s “every sick man of Europe for himself” under present fiscal constraints.
This is the reality, yet Europe’s finance ministers are still blathering assurance that the Greeks somehow “deserve” to be saved. This not out of any compassion, but from fear the whole European Union will begin unravelling when Greece comes apart.
Yet in this respect Greece is nothing special: a vast, unionized public bureaucracy, which is, under quaint Greek arrangements, paid 14 months a year (12 calendar months plus two of guaranteed annual bonus). The civil servants are going berserk because the Socialist government of George Papandreou is trying to cut them back to 13 months of payment. (And can’t afford that.) We have the spectacle of customs officials on strike, and tax collectors threatening to follow; of their trades union umbrella group declaring that the government’s austerity measures are “an act of war.”
The central bankers are not telling the Greek government to cut its unmanageable public debt, but merely to cut its current budgetary deficit from something over one-eighth of the national income to something more like one-twelfth. Imagine if they’d told them a hard fact of life: no annual structural deficit is sustainable. That bad as that may sound, it is rather necessary to run a structural surplus, to prepare for the long rain of basic demographic facts: the usual aging population.
For deep historical reasons, Greece may have moved farther and faster into crisis, but that crisis will be the same everywhere. It is a country that belongs to its bureaucracy, created by elected governments who now can’t face that bureaucracy down.
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