Tsipras proclaims the divorce between the UN pact and a disappointed electorate.
Only one thing is certain: the black and white pictures of Wehrmacht soldiers strolling in the shade of the Parthenon were omitted from the photo albums of German families for a long time. Younger generations have hardly ever seen these photos. Retrieving them today and reviving the issue of war reparations, as the Greek government led by Alexis Tsipras has done, has dealt a hard blow to the 70-year-old ‘European dream’, which brought peace to a continent once home to periodic bloodbaths.
This blow strikes an already shaky edifice. Europe has yet to recover from the eurozone crisis – unlike the US, which has now emerged from its own economic difficulties – and has relied solely on the monetary instruments of the European Central Bank (interest rates and quantitative easing) to repair the European Union’s structural flaws and unfinished business. These range from a lack of economic governance and a fiscal union to the more serious delays to the formation of a true political union.
The past few weeks have seen a heated, and at times vulgar, negotiation/conflict (remember Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’ middle finger) between the new Greek government and Brussels, or rather between Athens and the current driving force of the European enterprise, Germany.
The issues of getting Greece’s finances back on an even keel, implementing reforms and paying loan instalments have become dangerously intertwined with old political issues (the Nazis and war reparations) and new threats too. Such as those issued by Greek Defence Minister Panos Kammenos: “If Europe leaves us in the crisis, we will flood it with migrants, and it will be even worse for Berlin if, in that wave of millions of economic migrants, there will be some jihadists of the Islamic State too”. One could view this as a tactical negotiation strategy. Yet it reshuffled the cards and, above all, exposed the frailty of a European pact created to ensure a system of mutual solidarity, which, in the face of the eurozone crisis, proved merciless towards the weakest.
During his first one-to-one meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Greek prime minister toned down the debate, saying “neither are the Greeks lazy louts nor are the Germans to blame for Greece’s ills” and describing a Nazithemed satire of Angela Merkel as “extremely unfair to the chancellor and to the German people. You cannot joke with history”. Though he immediately added that the question of Germany paying for its war damages is “not a material matter and has nothing to do with the economic crisis”, but is rather a “moral and ethical issue”. The chancellor did acknowledge many Germans do not even know what happened in the past, while reiterating that Germany sees the issue as “closed”. Though she did show unprecedented openness to discussing the subject saying that “the talks will continue”.
It is hard to say whether the new Tsipras agenda has affected the balance of power in the negotiations between Athens and Brussels. It was only on the eve of the Tsipras-Merkel meeting of 23 March that news emerged of a somewhat “threatening” letter the Greek prime minister had sent to the German chancellor. It had been sent on Sunday 15 March, four days before the informal mini-summit of seven European power brokers (Merkel, François Hollande, Tsipras, Mario Draghi, Jean-Claude Juncker, Donald Tusk and Jeroen Dijsselbloem) held in Brussels on the fringes of a European Council meeting – and highly contested by those frozen out of proceedings. While the letter was sent to Merkel, it was essentially addressed to Greece’s 18 eurozone partners.
In his letter, Tsipras warned, without mincing words, that it would be “impossible” for Athens to meet upcoming debt repayments due to the “Institutions” (the ECB-EU-IMF, formerly known as the troika) without urgent financial support from Brussels. Straight after this letter, European Commission President Juncker announced Greece would receive €2 billion of unspent EU development funds. In exchange, Athens must present a “comprehensive and detailed” updated list of reforms very soon. This builds on the initial list Greece provided after the agreement on 20 February when the Eurogroup agreed a fourmonth extension to the financial rescue package and said some of the remaining €7.2 billion bailout could be released.
It is also hard to tell if and how Tsipras’ position led ECB President Mario Draghi (who had already ascertained the financial illiteracy of the Greek leadership) to soften his stance when speaking in the European Parliament on 23 March.
“At the present point in time … the general situation is much more resilient than it was a few years ago when the first Greek crisis materialised. We don’t think there is a systemic risk now”. Draghi did add, “But several conditions have to be satisfied, and they are not there yet … and the government of Greece should commit to fully honour its debt obligations to all its creditors”.
A compromise on the reforms and fiscal discipline will be found eventually. What cannot be brushed aside is the strong misalignment, or perhaps it is more accurate to talk about a real divorce, between the European pact that the 28 European governments have formally agreed to respect and the commitments the Syriza party made to its Greek electorate in a fully democratic process. A sort of divorce proceedings had actually already begun in 2005 when a French referendum rejected a new EU Constitution, and since 2008 the eurozone crisis has been exacerbating this process. Poll success for the Podemos party in Spain (only in local elections, for now) might lead to a repeat of the Greek situation and thus pose the crucial question for politics in the coming years: what kind of Europe do European socialists want to build for the future?
Tsipras proclaims the divorce between the UN pact and a disappointed electorate.
