The EU, which boasts that solidarity is its founding principle, is forcing Greece into destitution and chaos.
Greek democracy is being destroyed. Not by soldiers marching with insane slogans on their lips about the inevitable triumph of the German master race, international proletariat or global jihad, but by moderate men and women who think themselves immune to ideological frenzy. Greece’s enemies are novel, but no less frightening for that: extremists from the centre ground; the respectable running riot.
Which ever way you cut it, Greece can’t win. The EU “bailout” cannot perform the first function of a rescue and save the sufferer from suffering. The Germans, with Dutch and Finnish assistance, are pushing Greece into a death spiral. The EU demands that Greece cuts 150,000 public jobs over three years – the equivalent in terms of population of our government taking 800,000 jobs from the UK public sector. Greek politicians must also accept without a quibble a 22% cut in the minimum wage and further reductions in the welfare state.
Greece is in permanent recession. The economy shrank by 7% in the three months to December 2011. Tens of thousands of family businesses have gone bust. Europe is now offering to revive Greece by impoverishing it; to heal it by harming it. As Tacitus said of the Roman legions’ earlier attempt to impose a European union: “They make a desert and call it peace.”
Whether Greek society can stand the pressure remains an open question. The parties of the far left and right are flourishing in the polls as the public comes to see its centrist politicians as traitors for trying to appease a hostile EU. Once the Grecian fringe was reserved for the unhinged. The last time I asked Liana Kanelli, spokeswoman for the Greek Communist party, about her country’s crisis, she flew off into a rage about how the 1999 Nato intervention to stop Serb nationalists slaughtering Kosovo Muslims was an imperialist plot to extend capitalism into the Balkans. Nothing I could say could wake her from her land of make-believe and return her to the subject at hand.
Her fellow citizens no longer see Kanelli and her kind as dangerous fools, however. Because they oppose the EU, cranks from the left and racists from the right now make more sense to Greeks than their mainstream politicians. The parallels with the 1930s are too obvious to labour.
Whatever the political consequences, every sensible financial commentator understands that the Greek economy can take no more. The “bailout” will merely push it deeper into the mire. The EU’s terms do not begin to match the altruism the United States showed to the defeated Germans after 1945. America did not pauperise West Germans as many in France and indeed Washington wanted. America guaranteed their security, then gave them loans from the Marshall Plan that allowed the West German economic miracle to begin. Greece has invaded no one and committed no crimes against humanity. Yet the EU, which boasts that solidarity is its founding principle, is forcing it into destitution and chaos.
The alternative to bowing to the demands of their German overlords is not noticeably better. If Greece were to leave the euro, there would be hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of law suits, as parties argued whether contracts should be honoured in the old or new currency. Hyper-inflation might set in. The European banking system might collapse. As William Hague says, the euro is a burning building with no exits.