Yanis Varoufakis – Guardian op-ed 3 May 2017
“It’s yours against mine.”
That’s how Wolfgang
Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, put it to me during our first
encounter in early 2015 – referring to our respective democratic mandates.
A little more than two years
later, Theresa
May is trying to arm herself with a clear democratic mandate
ostensibly to bolster her negotiating position with European powerbrokers –
including Schäuble – and to deliver the optimal Brexit deal.
Already, the Brussels-based
commentariat are drawing parallels: “Brits fallen for Greek fallacy that
domestic vote gives you stronger position in Brussels. Other countries have
voters too,” tweeted Duncan Robinson, Brussels correspondent of the Financial
Times. “Yep,” tweeted back Miguel Roig, the Brussels correspondent of Spanish
financial daily Expansión. “Varoufakis’ big miscalculation was to think that he
was the only one in the Eurogroup with a democratic mandate.”
In truth, Brussels is a
democracy-free zone. From the EU’s inception in 1950, Brussels became the seat
of a bureaucracy administering a heavy industry cartel, vested with
unprecedented law-making capacities. Even though the EU has evolved a great
deal since, and acquired many of the trappings of a confederacy, it remains in
the nature of the beast to treat the will of electorates as a nuisance that
must be, somehow, negated. The whole point of the EU’s inter-governmental
organisation was to ensure that only by a rare historical accident would
democratic mandates converge and, when they did, never restrain the exercise of
power in Brussels.
In June
2016, Britain voted, for better or for worse, for Brexit. May suddenly
metamorphosed from a soft remainer to a hard Brexiteer. In so doing she is
about to fall prey to an EU that will frustrate and defeat her, pushing her
into either a humiliating climb-down or a universally disadvantageous outcome.
When the Brussels-based group-thinking commentariat accuse Britain’s prime
minister, without a shred of evidence, of overestimating the importance of a
strong mandate, we need to take notice, for it reveals the determination of the
EU establishment to get its way, as it did when I arrived on its doorstep,
equipped with my mandate.
When I first went to Brussels
and Berlin, as Greece’s freshly elected finance minister, I brought with me a
deep appreciation of the clash of mandates. I said as much in a joint
press conference with Schäuble in 2015, pledging that my proposals for an
agreement between Greece and the EU would be “aimed not at the interest of the
average Greek but at the interest of the average European”. A few days later,
in my maiden speech at the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers, I argued:
“We must respect established treaties and processes without crushing the
fragile flower of democracy with the sledgehammer that takes the form of
statements such as ‘Elections do not change anything’.” May will, I presume, go
to Brussels with a similar appreciation.
When Schäuble welcomed me with
his “it is my mandate against yours” doctrine, he was honouring a long EU
tradition of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them.
Like all dangerous hypotheses, it is founded on an obvious truth: the voters of
one country cannot give their representative a mandate to impose upon other
governments conditions that the latter have no mandate, from their own electorate,
to accept. But, while this is a truism, its incessant repetition by Brussels
functionaries and political powerbrokers, such as Angela Merkel and Schäuble
himself, is intended to convert it surreptitiously into a very different
notion: no voters in any country can empower their government to oppose
Brussels.
There is a long EU tradition
of neglecting democratic mandates in the name of respecting them
For all their concerns with
rules, treaties, processes, competitiveness, freedom of movement, terrorism
etc, only one prospect truly terrifies the EU’s deep establishment: democracy.
They speak in its name to exorcise it, and suppress it by six innovative
tactics, as May is about to discover.
The EU runaround
Henry Kissinger famously
quipped that when he wanted to consult Europe, he did not
know whom to call. In my case it was worse. Any attempt to enter into a
meaningful discussion with Schäuble was blocked by his insistence that I “go to
Brussels” instead. Once in Brussels, I soon discovered that the commission was
so divided as to make discussions futile. In private talks, Commissioner
Moscovici would agree readily and with considerable enthusiasm with my
proposals. But then his deputy in the so-called Eurogroup Working Group, Declan
Costello, would reject all these ideas out of hand.
The uninitiated may be excused
for thinking that this EU runaround is the result of incompetence. While there
is an element of truth in this, it would be the wrong diagnosis. The runaround
is a systemic means of control over uppity governments. A prime minister, or a
finance minister, who wants to table proposals that the deep establishment of
the EU dislike is simply denied the name of the person to speak to or the
definitive telephone number to call. As for its apparatchiks, the EU runaround
is essential to their personal status and power.
Picking opponents
From my first Eurogroup, its
president, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister, began an intensive campaign
to bypass me altogether. He would phone Alexis Tsipras, my prime minister,
directly – even visiting him in his hotel room in Brussels. By hinting at a
softer stance if Tsipras agreed to spare him from having to deal with me,
Dijsselbloem succeeded in weakening my position in the Eurogroup – to the
detriment, primarily, of Tsipras.
The Swedish national anthem
routine
On the assumption that good
ideas encourage fruitful dialogue and can be the solvents of impasse, my team
and I worked hard to put forward proposals based on serious econometric work
and sound economic analysis. Once these had been tested on some of the highest
authorities in their fields, from Wall Street and the City to top-notch
academics, I would take them to Greece’s creditors in Brussels, Berlin and
Frankfurt. Then I would sit back and observe a symphony of blank stares. It was
as if I had not spoken, as if there was no document in front of them. It would
be evident from their body language that they denied the very existence of the
pieces of paper I had placed before them. Their responses, when they came,
would be perfectly independent of anything I had said. I might as well have
been singing the Swedish national anthem. It would have made no difference.
The Penelope ruse
Delaying tactics are always
used by the side that considers the ticking clock its ally. In Homer, Odysseus’
faithful wife, Penelope, fends off aggressive suitors in her husband’s absence
by telling them that she will announce whom among them she will marry only after
she has completed weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father. During
the day she would weave incessantly but at night she would undo her work by
pulling on a loose string.
In my negotiations in
Brussels, the EU’s Penelope ruse consisted, primarily, of endless requests for
data, for fact-finding missions to Athens, for information about every bank
account held by every public organisation or company. And when they got the
data, like the good Penelope, they would spend all night undoing the spreadsheets
that they had put together during the day.
Truth reversal
While practising the Swedish
national anthem and Penelope ruse tactics, the Brussels establishment utilised
tweets, leaks and a campaign of disinformation involving key nodes in the
Brussels media network to spread the word that I was the one wasting time,
arriving at meetings empty-handed; either with no proposals at all or with
proposals that lacked quantification, consisting only of empty ideological
rhetoric.
Sequencing
The prerequisite for Greece’s
recovery was, and remains, meaningful debt relief. No debt relief meant no
future for us. My mandate was to negotiate, therefore, a sensible debt
restructure. If the EU was prepared to do this, so as to get as much of their
money back as possible, I was also prepared for major compromises. But this
would require a comprehensive deal. But, no, Brussels and Berlin insisted that,
first, I commit to the compromises they wanted and then, much later, we could
begin negotiations on debt relief. The point-blank refusal to negotiate on both
at once is, I am sure, a colossal frustration awaiting May when she seeks to
compromise on the terms of the divorce in exchange for longer-term free trade
arrangements.
So what can Theresa May do?
The only way May could secure
a good deal for the UK would be by diffusing the EU’s spoiling tactics, while
still respecting the Burkean Brexiteers’ strongest argument, the imperative of
restoring sovereignty to the House of Commons. And the only way of doing this
would be to avoid all negotiations by requesting from Brussels a Norway-style,
off-the-shelf arrangement for a period of, say, seven years.
The benefits from such a
request would be twofold: first, Eurocrats and Europhiles would have no basis
for denying Britain such an arrangement. (Moreover, Schäuble, Merkel and sundry
would be relieved that the ball is thrown into their successors’ court seven
years down the track.) Second, it would make the House of Commons sovereign
again by empowering it to debate and decide upon in the fullness of time, and
without the stress of a ticking clock, Britain’s long-tem relationship with
Europe.
The fact that May has opted
for a Brexit negotiation
that will immediately activate the EU’s worst instincts and tactics, for petty
party-political reasons that ultimately have everything to do with her own
power and nothing to do with Britain’s optimal agreement with the EU, means
only one thing: she does not deserve the mandate that Brussels is keen to
neutralise.
This is an adapted extract
from Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis
Varoufakis published by The Bodley Head.
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