My friend Jan Techau shared Judy Dempsy’s latest post on Carnegie’s excellent webpage. It is titled “Alexis Tsipras and Greece’s Miserable Foreign Policy”. While I do not share all of Judy’s take on the Greek situation I do share her legitimately critical views on the foreign policy impact of the new extreme left-extreme right coalition government in Greece. What I mainly disagree with is how austerity impacted this. The road Greece was traveling on was a social catastrophe. The Greek society was suffering to a degree that is hard to understand for outsiders. Simply saying that it needed to cut “bloated state sector and services” is both an understatement and a mistake. Some of the country’s serious problems are all of its own making. They have been there and emerged while Europe tolerated the rape of Greece during and after the second world war, a military dictatorship, a corrupt elite that was busy doing business with European banks and corporations and feeding lies to the Greek public. All these have made Western European individuals, corporations and banks very very rich. The price is not payed by corrupt Greek elites but by Greek workers and pensioners. I have seen how Greeks work. Very very hard! The country needs reforms and difficult ones too. But a country cannot be eviscerated for the sake of reforms. It is neither fair nor sustainable. My view is that the austerity model imposed to Greece by Europe and its failed logic are part of the story. The unchallenged neoliberal economic mantra is part of why irrational and dangerous extreme views are suddenly getting traction all over Europe. On the left and on the right, anti-liberal views are pandered by nationalistic rightists and extreme leftist leaders because we sacrificed to much and too easily. Germany is not alone in this and singling out Angela Merkel is stupid. If anything Germany was just sticking to a mantra that it did not invent but was benefiting from. EU as a whole acted based on ideologically charged policies that failed to have their purported effect. Saving the Euro was never the objective. Saving Europe was! Yes the former was and remains instrumental to the latter but not to the price of making the extreme right and left popular and electable to government. The entire economic and political model in Europe is rigged in favour of a few. This needs to change fast if we are to have a real Europe of its citizens. The reason crazy foreign policy ideas can be tabled and risk dividing Europe is not just because irresponsible people have been elected.This happens precisely because the people are loosing trust in the very values Europe is supposedly built upon. Europeans left and right feel tricked and punished by a rigged game. That is the real danger not Tsipras and his right wing defence minister. Their foreign policy may be miserable but so is the life of too many Europeans. We were so busy bailing out banks using pension cuts and and reducing social services to finance it that we forgot that other budget items may be next. People are now not willing to trust our policies based on fundamental values. I share with Judy, and Jan, the view that Europe needs a more robust security and defence posture. We know this in turn requires more spending. NATO needs that! Europe’s frontier needs that! Both increased growth and higher taxes are required to finance that. This will not happen in an austerity driven model. Neither will the public back any such policies. So strap your seat belts for the bumpy road ahead for Europe’s common foreign and security policy and outlook. It is all our own making. AT
A note on “Alexis Tsipras and Greece’s Miserable Foreign Policy”
29 Thursday Jan 2015