How long can the Eurocrats in Brussels keep the dinnerware
in motion?
The outcome of the June 17 Greek election—a narrow victory
for the conservative New Democracy over the leftist Syriza party, and the
prompt formation of a “pro-European” coalition government—predictably unleashed
a gigantic sigh of relief all over Europe. The catastrophe was averted,
European unity had prevailed, etc. But, in fact, a great opportunity was
missed, a unique chance for Europe to finally confront the depth of its
economic and political deadlock. The sigh of relief effectively meant: We
avoided the awakening. We can continue to dream.
CNN’s Richard Quest recently offered a metaphor for this
dream when he compared the European officials to:
[T]he proverbial “plate spinners” from the circus. Those
talented artists who balance spinning plates on sticks, ever increasing the
number of sticks, rushing from one to the other, giving them a tug and pull to
keep them moving, always aware that if they are too slow or too fast, one of
the plates will crash to the ground.
That is exactly what we have in Europe
today. Only the artists are European Central Bank president Mario Draghi,
Eurogroup head Jean-Claude Juncker, European Commission president José Manuel
Barroso et al, while the plates are Greece, Spanish banks, Italian deficits,
eurobonds and German chancellor Angela Merkel. … Daily it seems there are more
plates spinning, and the antics of the spinners become more frantic as they
rush from one to the other, ever proclaiming that the act is coming to a close.
Unfortunately that is not the case. The plate spinning is likely to continue
for some time to come.
Spinning plates is effectively what the Brussels Eurocrats
are doing: endlessly postponing the critical reckoning by way of adding new
plates and thus making the balance more and more fragile. Syriza was accused of
promoting leftist fictions—but it is the austerity plan imposed by Brussels
that is a fiction. In a strange gesture of collective make-believe, everyone
knows that the Greek state cannot ever repay its debt, and everyone ignores the
obvious nonsense of the financial projections on which the plans are based.
So why does Brussels impose these plans? What matters in
contemporary capitalism is that agents act upon their putative beliefs about
future prospects, regardless of whether they really believe in those prospects.
And, as we also all know, the true aim of these rescue measures is not to save
Greece, but to save the European banks.
There is a wonderfully dialectical joke in Ernst Lubitsch’s
classic comedy Ninotchka: the hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without
cream; the waiter replies: “I’m sorry, sir, we have no cream. Can it be without
milk?” In both cases, the customer gets coffee alone, but this single coffee is
each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-no-cream, then
coffee-with-no-milk.
Greece is in the same predicament: The situation is
difficult, and Greeks will get some kind of austerity—but will they get that
austerity without cream or without milk? It is here that the European
establishment is cheating. It is acting as if Greeks will get the coffee of
austerity without cream (that the fruits of their hardship will not profit only
European banks but also themselves), but they are effectively offering Greeks
coffee without milk (only the banks, and not the Greeks, will profit from this
hardship).
To illustrate the mistake of enacting austerity measures as
the main strategy to combat the crisis, Paul Krugman often compares them to the
medieval cure of blood-letting. That’s a nice metaphor that should be radicalized
even further. The European financial doctors, who are themselves not sure about
how the medicine works, are using the Greeks as test rabbits and letting their
blood, not the blood of their own countries. There is no blood-letting for the
great German and French banks—on the contrary, they are getting continuous and
enormous transfusions.
Syriza is not a group of dangerous “extremists.” Rather, it is bringing
pragmatic common sense to clear the mess created by others. It is those who
impose austerity measures who are dangerous dreamers, who think that things can
go on indefinitely the way they are, just with some cosmetic changes. Syriza
supporters are not dreamers—they are the awakening from a dream which is
turning into a nightmare. They are not destroying anything, they are reacting
to a system that is gradually destroying itself.
Syriza is a radical Left movement that stepped out of the
comfortable position of marginal resistance and courageously signaled their
readiness to take power. This is why, according to some, the Greeks should be
penalized—or, as Bill Frezza recently wrote in Forbes, under the headline,
“Give Greece What It Deserves: Communism”: “What the world needs, lest we
forget, is a contemporary example of Communism in action.
What better candidate
than Greece? … Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of
free Euros, and hand them back the printing plates for their old drachmas. Then
stand back for a generation and watch.” The old story of Haiti after 1804
repeats itself here: Greece should be exemplarily punished to block once and
for all any temptation for a radical Left solution to the crisis.
Some have argued Syriza lacks the proper experience to
govern, and this should be admitted: Yes, they lack the experience in how to
bankrupt a country, in how to cheat and to steal. This brings us to the
absurdity of the European establishment’s politics: They preach the dogma of
paying taxes—and against Greece’s institutional corruption—and put all their
hopes on the coalition of the two parties that institutionalized that
corruption in the first place. The New Democracy victory was the result of a
brutal campaign full of lies and scare-mongering—the politics of fear at its
purest, drawing a picture of Greece with hunger, chaos and police state terror
in the case of the Syriza victory.
The EU pressure on Greece to implement austerity measures
fits perfectly with what psychoanalysis calls superego. Superego is not an
ethical agency proper, but a sadistic agent that bombards the subject with
impossible demands, obscenely enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with
them. The paradox of the superego is that, as Freud saw clearly, the more we
obey its demands, the guiltier we feel. Imagine a vicious teacher who imposes
on his pupils impossible tasks, and then takes pleasure in jeering when he sees
their anxiety and panic. This is what is so terribly wrong with the EU demands:
their austerity policies don’t even give Greece a chance—its failure is part of
the game.
There is an (apocryphal, for sure) anecdote about the
exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the
middle of WWI: the Germans sent the message “Here, on our part of the front,
the situation is serious, but not catastrophic,” to which the Austrians
replied, “Here, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious.” This is the
true difference between Syriza and others. For the others, the situation is
catastrophic but not serious; they want to continue with business as usual. For
Syriza, the situation is serious but not catastrophic, since courage and hope
should replace fear.
