Πέμπτη 1 Νοεμβρίου 2018

Greece shows Britain a maverick state can recover from disorder


31/10/2018

By Tony Barber

Athens’ painful struggle with the EU has lessons for the Brexit tangle

The EU is a bully. The EU is inflexible and unjust. Our proud nation must no longer submit to the diktats of Brussels and its accomplices. These complaints of Brexiters in the UK resemble the indignation of some Greeks about their nation’s treatment during the eurozone’s sovereign debt and financial sector crises.

The British government and people, still unable to settle on a definition of Brexit, can learn from Greece’s long, painful struggle. Some lessons offer grounds for hope. It turns out that a democratic political system and society can emerge, bruised but fundamentally intact, from the most severe of peacetime challenges. Other lessons, showing how an oddball nation on the edge of Europe can rediscover a constructive role for itself, may be less musical to Brexiters’ ears.

Greece’s agony began in the closing months of 2009 when the newly elected government of George Papandreou, the centre-left prime minister, uncovered the terrible truth about the nation’s imploding public finances. In 2010 there began eight years of emergency bailouts, led by the EU and the IMF, and the transformation of Greece into a de facto protectorate of its creditors. The bailout era ended in August, but a surveillance regime is in place that requires strict adherence to fiscal discipline, ­economic reform and administrative overhaul in return for the creditors’ ­support.

During the bailout years, the Greek economy and political system came under tremendous pressure. The country lost a quarter of its gross domestic product. Unemployment soared. Voters abandoned Mr Papandreou’s Pasok party, a pillar of the democratic order restored after the end of military rule in 1974, and turned to the radical leftist Syriza movement. On the far right, an ultra-nationalist party known as Golden Dawn emerged from the shadows.

Although Greece still faces formidable economic challenges, and concerns remain about the quality of public administration and the rule of law, the nation has entered the post-bailout era in better shape than sceptics predicted. During the debt crisis Greece was depicted, not least by anti-EU British politicians and commentators, as a dystopia whose political and social meltdown presaged the collapse of a rotten EU order. Yet the worst never happened.

Extremism did not prevail in Greece. Despite being on the frontline of Europe’s refugee and migrant crisis in 2015-2016, Greece did not spawn a major anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim party, unlike some other EU states. Golden Dawn never made significant inroads. Syriza, having retreated from its radical experiment in power in the first half of 2015, is no longer an anti-system party but simply the natural replacement for Pasok.

Stathis Kalyvas, a professor at All Souls College Oxford, contends that Greece today is in a phase of “post-populist politics”. In this sense, it is ahead of the European cycle. While other countries grapple with variants of populism, Greece has already reverted to a classical two-party system in which power alternates between moderate left and right. Next year’s parliamentary elections, which the opposition centre-right New Democracy party is the favourite to win, may illustrate this point.

Consider, too, the career of Alexis Tsipras, prime minister and Syriza leader. He was once feared in EU capitals as a kind of Lenin of the Aegean. Now he is a darling of the EU establishment but not only for swallowing his bailout medicine and helping to keep Greece inside the eurozone.

He wins applause in EU capitals, and in Washington, for his statesmanlike initiative in trying to solve Greece’s name dispute with the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia. This is one of the most intractable, potentially dangerous disputes in the Balkans. Mr Tsipras is not only giving it a go but has shown that he is prepared to stand up to Russia, traditionally close to Greece, and even to expel Russian diplomats in order to keep a Macedonian settlement alive.

In short, Greece is finding its way back to domestic stability and a secure place in the European order. The British ship, by contrast, is sailing away from the EU, though neither its disputatious crew nor its bemused passengers know where it is going. Viewed from EU capitals, the UK looks like an acutely polarised, chaotically governed nation that has gone slightly off its rocker, losing global influence in the process.

Yet the lesson from Greece is that such disorder need not last for ever. The UK’s strong traditions of political moderation, pragmatism and a weighty diplomatic role should eventually reassert themselves. Clearly, the UK must free itself first from the Mad Hatter’s world of endless debates about the meaning of Brexit. Dare I suggest that this liberation cannot come a moment too soon?

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