Strange bedfellows
Sunday’s bizarre, unlawful Greek referendum on a tough bailout offer by the country’s big creditors had an odd effect: it lit bonfires around the world.
Paul Mason, the ex-Trotskyite economics editor of Britain’s Channel 4 News, whooped that, “For the first time in the history of the eurozone, people power has happened.” In Northern Ireland, deputy first minister and ex-IRA gunman Martin McGuinness intoned, “The people have spoken … anti-austerity message wins.”
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman approved coolly of Greece saying “no” to the lenders who are keeping the Greek state on life support. Canadian author Naomi Klein tweeted, and I will try to transcribe this exactly, “YAAAAY!!!!!” Manitoba’s NDP ultra, Niki Ashton, added “NO to austerity! YES to democracy!”
The global hard left seems to have adopted the Greek coalition government as a cherished mascot, much as it once hugged Palestine and decided to never, ever let go. There is rarely any mention on the left of the presence of the socialconservative, populist-right ANEL party in the coalition. There is little acknowledgment that absurdly high Greek defence spending is part of what is taking the bread out of the mouths of Greek oldies — any cuts to the rococo edifice of the Greek state qualify as wicked “austerity” now. And the populist left does not deign to notice that the right-wing populists of Europe, opposed to all the multifaceted manifestations of European Union, are celebrating Greece’s “no” more deafeningly than they.
It would probably be hitting below the belt to suggest that we have seen this sort of redbrown dual attack on a liberal status quo before in European history. The European Union really is an unlovely, profoundly undemocratic thing, and the long Greek crisis does express that unloveliness. Greece was admitted to the European Monetary Union ( EMU) on the basis of lies about its fiscal standing that both contracting parties knew of, and tacitly agreed to ignore.
Warnings of the political pressures that would result — a war of wills between the German people and the citizenries of countries shackled to a German-controlled unit of account — were frequent. They were given by economists and statesmen of the first water. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s prescience, in particular, is being acknowledged (reluctantly, because God forbid the greatest female leader since Joan of Arc should ever catch a break).
But don’t the celebrating left-wingers notice that in cheering this referendum outcome, they are on the same side as conservatives who believe that the worse for all things Euro, the better? Nigel Farage, impish Euro-wrecker and lager-swilling leftie hate figure, tweeted, “I commend the Greek people for calling the EU’s bluff.… It’s fantastic to see the courage of the Greek people in the face of political and economic bullying from Brussels.” Klein or Krugman could easily have undersigned that quote, although whoever writes Krugman’s column would have correctly put the European Central Bank’s HQ in Frankfurt.
The heavy emotional component of the far-left reaction to the Greek “no” vote is obvious, seeing as the actual effect of the “no” is unknowable. Communism and democratic socialism were, by and large, based on the denial of various species of moral hazard. No, disconnecting work from income won’t encourage idleness. No, disconnecting prices from production won’t lead to flagrant irrationality. The allure of such a “no” hurled in the face of what conservatives refer to as “reality” survives: anything that contradicts the impulses of one’s id must be a social construct. These days, the cry has become “no to austerity.”
Greece’s fiscal pickle really is a construct, in the sense that if the Greek people want to keep the euro, instead of re-denominating salaries and pensions in Hellenic Monopoly money, their leaders must satisfy the European Central Bank and its partners in the “troika.” But the ECB is ultimately answerable to the German taxpayer, and Greece was taken under its wing on the explicit premise of no bailouts for member states.
Greeks are telling themselves — it comes up in every interview with a weeping pensioner — that this is unfair. Prior bailouts allowing their government to continue borrowing went, by and large, from the German taxpayer to German banks. Well, is there a Greek word for “duh”? If EMU were a fiscal union it’d be EFU. Germany is allowed to, and apparently content to, rob Germans to pay other Germans.
The anti-austerity left hopes to revise this fact by sheer will. The moral hazard is obvious: if the troika grants Greece a jubilee, the line for others will start forming up within minutes. (And plenty of undeveloped, legitimately impoverished countries will have awkward questions for the International Monetary Fund.) It is not unlike the moral hazard of, say, a government ignoring rampant tax evasion, cooked national statistics and unsustainable pensions until it is in total meltdown. Greece already tried saying “oxi” to that one.
Don’t the celebrating left-wingers notice that they are on the same side as conservatives who believe that the worse for all things Euro, the better?