Killing the European Project
Suppose you
consider Tsipras an incompetent twerp. Suppose you dearly want to see
Syriza out of power. Suppose, even, that you welcome the prospect of
pushing those annoying Greeks out of the euro.
Even if all of that is true, this Eurogroup list of demands is madness. The trending hashtag ThisIsACoup
is exactly right. This goes beyond harsh into pure vindictiveness,
complete destruction of national sovereignty, and no hope of relief. It
is, presumably, meant to be an offer Greece can’t accept; but even so,
it’s a grotesque betrayal of everything the European project was
supposed to stand for.
Can anything pull
Europe back from the brink? Word is that Mario Draghi is trying to
reintroduce some sanity, that Hollande is finally showing a bit of the
pushback against German morality-play economics that he so signally
failed to supply in the past. But much of the damage has already been
done. Who will ever trust Germany’s good intentions after this?
In a way, the
economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what
we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the
eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step
out of line. This has no bearing at all on the underlying economics of
austerity. It’s as true as ever that imposing harsh austerity without
debt relief is a doomed policy no matter how willing the country is to
accept suffering. And this in turn means that even a complete Greek
capitulation would be a dead end.
Can Greece pull off a
successful exit? Will Germany try to block a recovery? (Sorry, but
that’s the kind of thing we must now ask.)
The European project —
a project I have always praised and supported — has just been dealt a
terrible, perhaps fatal blow. And whatever you think of Syriza, or
Greece, it wasn’t the Greeks who did it.
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