I don’t know whether the joy on the right was worse than the preening on the left last night but as the result of the Greek referendum swept across social media I found myself thinking that any result so cheerfully welcomed by Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and Sinn Fein can’t be thought altogether cheerful.
Of course you needn’t judge a cause by its followers but when a cause is followed and endorsed by such a collection of rogues, crooks and cranks it’s wise to begin to wonder about it.
All this glee seemed especially shabby since, really, it didn’t really seem to be about Greece at all. The Greeks were useful and even, in one sense, vital to the process but the point of it all was to demonstrate that, whatever your views and wherever you sat on the political spectrum, You Were Right All Along. About Everything. The Greeks, the poor little doomed, plucky, Greeks served as a proxy for self-serving arguments closer to home.
For left and right alike the Greek referendum was a means of Sticking It To The Man and it didn’t much matter that the men being stuck were rather different. On the right hand, the villains were the anti-democratic EU; on the left it was Neoliberalism (whatever that means these days) and high finance. The identity of the pig didn’t matter; what counted was the pig-sticking.
Even so, the problem with the Greek crisis is that everyone is (partially) right and none of it matters because Greece has no good options anyway. In the circumstances, I can understand why the Greeks asked How much worse can it get? even if one of the answers to that question is Plenty. The alternatives were hardly attractive either.
There is guilt across the continent here. The eurozone need not be a folly; admitting Greece into it plainly was. A situation exacerbated by the lies and cheating of successive Greek governments. But those eurosceptics cheering the imminent demise of the European Project are, I suspect, likely to be disappointed. The Germans, in particular, are, in poker terms, pot-committed. Asking them to change course now demands Berlin abandons 60 years of German political thinking and development. (It also asks Angela Merkel to forget she has voters like anyone else.) It’s asking, in effect, Germany to cease being Germany. That’s a hefty, even impossible, demand.
It’s true, as many on the left remind us, that governments across europe have essentially nationalised private debts. True, too, that this is galling and that the continent’s political and financial elite – in this country too, by the way – have still not fully grasped how this has discredited them.
In such circumstances, you can understand why so many people are attracted to the idea of blowing everything up and starting again. Easy, comprehensive, radicalism is always tempting. Especially when someone else has to press the detonation button.
But bailing-out RBS, to take but one example, was, at the time, the least poisonous option. If, as it and other banks could have, RBS had collapsed completely the impact on the economy would likely have been vastly greater than the costs of supporting the banks. The problem these last few years has been that we have not fully come to terms, or even admitted, the costs of a policy almost no-one can support with relish.
Austerity has certainly failed Greece but the alternative, as we may yet see, is complete economic collapse that could make recent years seem like seasons of comparative plenty. Syriza is not likely to be the answer either. There is always an alternative; it’s not always better.
The rules of the eurozone club may be stupid but they’re still the club rules and if Greece can ignore them why should other countries not be granted the same latitude? Which is one of the many reasons why everyone saying there’s a simple answer to this quandary is utterly – and even wickedly – wrong. Actions have consequences and politics, in any case, is a branch of psychology. The answer everyone knows is needed – debt relief and economic reform – is not necessarily the answer that is possible.
There is something appalling about the thought that Greece can, if the worst comes to the worst, be sacrificed. But, viewed from Germany, amputating Greece may be the least bad of all the remaining dreadful options. If the Greeks have pride – the kind saluted by so many of their foreign cheerleaders last night – then so do the Germans.
John Emburey’s verdict on a cricket bat that had let him down applies to everything about this mess too: “The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.” But that would, in many ways, have been the case even if the Greeks had voted Yes on Sunday. There are no good answers or easy solutions; if there were some might have been found now.
As it is, the Greeks are testing HL Mencken’s bitter proposition that “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” There’s always been something unseemly about that view but this is a moment, and a crisis, in which there is nothing seemly at all. Pity and fear, indeed.
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