Yanis Varoufakis has moved smoothly from radical professor to failed finance minister to international celebrity. His latest triumph is to get Noam Chomsky to join DiEM25, the international political movement he is trying to get off the ground. In America, this puts him into superstar territory. In Greece, he remains principally a theorist of the Greek economic catastrophe, speaking in technical terms about the specifics of the country’s endless-seeming negotations with the ‘troika’ of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF. But as Great Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union approaches, I would like to focus on another version of Yanis Varoufakis: the English version.
One of the main reasons that Varoufakis has been so successful is that his command of the English language is magnificent. He speaks with a Greek accent, which makes his rhetoric still more impressive, as he has clearly learned English rather than being brought up speaking it. In fact he owes this mastery of the language to the fact that his university studies were in England: undergraduate and graduate degrees at the universities of Essex and Birmingham from 1978 to 1987, with teaching duties at the universities of Cambridge and East Anglia as well. He moved to another English-speaking country, Australia, teaching economics there until eventually moving back to Greece and getting involved in his country’s politics; but his first political involvement was in the student politics of England in the late 1970s and 1980s. This was the same training ground as many of the current British political elite.
His early political adventures were on such issues as Northern Ireland, South Africa and Palestine: the normal radical agenda for students at that time. He also joined the Communist Society of the University of Essex. So now that Varoufakis has started appearing on British television screens debating with his contemporaries, he appears not as a foreign commentator, but more or less as a native British political figure.
Last week he presided over a chaotic all-day meeting of the London branch of DiEM25. The name means ‘Democracy in Europe Movement 2025’, and the idea is that by 2025 a new kind of democratic system will be built from the ground up to replace the undemocratic structures of the European Union. The movement was launched in Berlin, and the whole idea is that it is pan-European: but in London it could hardly avoid being about the Brexit issue. While Varoufakis does repeat the fairly simple message of DiEM25 – a key policy goal is transparency for EU decision-making – he has in fact taken an original position on the Brexit question and has therefore, temporarily, become a British politician.
At the DiEM25 meeting, speaker after speaker was encouraged to make grand statements about all the wonderful things the movement should achieve. While speakers included representatives of Podemos from Spain and Britain’s Green Party, there is an obvious problem in that most influential activists are already members of political parties. The solution proposed by the new movement’s leaders is the slippery one of saying that they are not a party, so members of all parties are welcome. This is rather similar to the tactic adopted by Civic Forum, Václav Havel’s dissident ‘movement’ in Czechoslovakia. ‘We are not a political party’ is a good message to attract people who don’t like political parties, but the problem is that the only way you can compete with established parties is through elections, and if you are not a political party you will not be able to win elections. That is what happened to Civic Forum. Its refusal to act as a political party led to total failure.
But the message everyone was waiting for came not from the assembled radicals, but from Varoufakis: his line on Brexit.
The arguments about the referendum are becoming focused on the problem of immigration. The open borders of the European Union led to a massive movement of East European economic migrants to Britain – .1.5 million between 2004 and 2009 – and for some reason the English reacted very badly to these white Europeans coming to the country. David Cameron made an election promise to reduce immigration to ‘tens of thousands’ per year, but new figures for 2015 put net immigration to the UK at 333,000, of which 184,000 were from EU member states. It is a complicated issue. Many of the first wave of Poles and Lithuanians have since left, for one thing: but immigration remains the number one political issue in people’s minds, and although the logic is not at all clear, it has become the central issue in the last weeks before the referendum: as if the real question is now whether you like foreigners or not.
Varoufakis proposes a very different argument. He says that leaving the European Union will be economically catastrophic first for Britain, and then for Europe. It will, he says, lead to the collapse of the Euro and lead to the kind of depression that Greece is experiencing spreading all across Europe, including Britain. This will in effect be another triumph for the banking elites, who will be exempt from this impoverishment when the remaining European Union financial structures adapt to the new situation. His argument is therefore logically connected to his view of Europe generally, including Greece.
Does anybody in Britain believe him? His is the only voice with this particular message of doom. Not even his partners in DieM25 are repeating it. Unfortunately, British voters have no experience of the Euro and are not likely to see this as a central issue. The mainstream economic message put by Cameron and the Remain group is that Britain will lose markets and be less competitive outside the EU, but even this seems somehow unimportant compared with the immigration question. But Varoufakis has been right before, and such is the Greek’s eloquence and popularity that his message, repeated on television and in newspaper interviews, has become a significant element in this confusing debate.
Christopher Lord has lived in nine countries and speaks seven languages. His books include Politics and Parallel Cultures, and his journalism has been published world-wide.
