Publications
Partners
DEPENDING on people’s ideological orientation, the “agreekment” (as European Union President Donald Tusk put it, tongue in the cheek), keeping Greece in the eurozone, was greeted with a sigh of relief or an explosion of anger.
The agreement provides for a sum of €82-85 billion in loans to keep Greece from sinking into the Mediterranean, in exchange for the country surrendering its fiscal sovereignty for a period. During this period, the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund will run a new body, based in Athens, to restructure Greece’s economy so that it ceases being a bottomless pit where billions are simply swallowed.
WATCH: Greece rewrites economic textbooks
The politicians who hammered out the agreement early on Monday morning after an all-night marathon summit, lasting 17 hours, will have their work cut out for them.
First, they will have to convince their skeptical parliaments why there is no alternative. Then there is the laborious work of actually reforming and restructuring the notoriously corrupt Greek economy.
In order to do that, a sea-change in Greek political culture will, however, be necessary. During the past weeks, several experts on Greece have explained how the Greek approach to politics differ from that of Western Europe, something EU leaders apparently grasp only poorly, if at all.
Several points are relevant here.
First, one has to remember that the glorious Greek past of antiquity – the flowering of reason and democracy – is just that, in the past. Besides, that past has been widely romanticised, because Athenian democracy did not have the boundaries built into modern Western democracy. All too often, it amounted to a dictatorship of a wildly wobbling majority. Not for nothing philosophers like Socrates and Plato were highly critical of the Athenian system.
Secondly, after the fall of the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century, Greece was cut off from the West. The Greek writer Nikos Dimou told the German news magazine Der Spiegel in an interview last week:
“Greece actually belongs to a different cultural circle; it isn’t a Western country. It did not experience the Reformation, the Enlightenment or the Renaissance. In the 19th century we still were caught up in feudalism, and were catapulted in much too short a time into the modern world.”
Instead, Greece came under the heavy hand of the Turkish Sultanate. Modern Greece’s political consciousness was born in the crucible of repression and resistance.
Professor Heinz Richter, retired historian at the University of Mannheim and one of the greatest living experts on Greece in Europe, recently explained in an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
“The Turkish domination led to the Greeks experiencing the state as exploiter. While a self-conscious civil society was created in Western Europe, which identified itself with its own state system, for the Greeks the state was identical with foreign domination against which one had to defend oneself and which one hated. Tax evasion and theft of state property were typical defensive reactions. This attitude to the state has been active till today.”
Another important result of Turkish domination was the development of what academics call clientelism. Under Turkish rule, bandit leaders became community leaders to whom people looked up to and who looked after their followers’ interests.
In a different way this still applies. Politicians, business people, trade union leaders – they all promote their own constituents’ interests. The general good is no factor.
(To be honest, Western democracy in general has this problem as well to a certain extent, although by far not as intense as in Greece and other Balkan countries who suffered under Turkish rule.)
This has given rise to an attitude of me-and-my-friends-first-and-to-hell-with-the-rest. Powerful people like millionaires with connections make sure that they and their companies are exempt from tax. For the rest, everyone tries to cheat the state. Only fools pay taxes in compliance with the law!
This is what happens when the population does not experience the advantages of law and order, guaranteed by people they themselves elected.
In Western Europe, of course, the reverse mostly applies. Having gone through a centuries-long historical development, people mostly obey the law and pay their taxes (although, of course, many are not averse to seeking loopholes!)
Nevertheless, especially in Germanic Europe with its Protestant ethos of frugality and hard work, there is little understanding or patience for the Greeks. Consecutive Greek governments, especially including the present Marxist one of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, have lied their way through all EU agreements and rules. And, finally, their credibility ran out.
Which is why German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other European leaders decided: Enough is enough. We will take charge of your affairs and see to it that the billions we are about to pump into your economy to prevent it from becoming a permanent black hole, is wisely spent.
One may have sympathy for the Greeks, who will no doubt be experiencing great hardship in the years to come. And one may recommend European leaders to try to understand the Greeks better.
But, in the end, Greece has to adapt itself to Europe, not the other way round.
* Leopold Scholtz is an independent political analyst who lives in Europe. Views expressed are his own.
