Don’t blame the Greeks

One can’t help but admire the Greeks. To be sure, they lied and cheated their way into the euro, and even the threat of a referendum on the bailout may yet tip the eurozone into a financial abyss. But there is something to be said for actually consulting the people about their future. Greece faces a choice: a decade (or more) of Frankfurt-enforced austerity, or bringing back the drachma and defaulting on their loans. Neither option is attractive. But this is about sovereignty, not just about money. This needs to be seen as a choice of the Greek people, not a deal imposed from outside and aimed primarily at saving eurozone banks.

No wonder that George Papandreou, Greece’s American-born prime minister, gave Brussels no prior notice of his decision. The idea of a referendum goes against the whole modus operandi of the EU project, whereby the people are there to be invoked, not actually consulted. Papandreou knows that the issue of popular consent is pivotal. His country does not have the longest democratic record, and it is not known for civil obedience. He picks up the newspapers and sees the reawakening of animosities once thought buried, from Nazi cartoons to the anti-cuts crowd talking about the bailout as the economic equivalent of the Versailles Treaty.

Angela Merkel was right when she warned that another 60 years of peace cannot be taken for granted in Europe. And she ought now to ask whether this euro project is not stoking the very nationalist tensions it was supposed to eliminate. From the start, the euro has never been about economics. People do not debate it in calm, dispassionate terms. They spice their speeches with emotionally charged clichés such as ‘if the euro fails, Europe fails’.