Demand the Impossible: Greece, the Eurozone Crisis, and the Failure of the Utopian Imagination

Abstract

In January 2015, voters in Greece—the eurozone nation hit hardest by austerity and the site of an extraordinarily militant anti-austerity movement—elected a government led by Syriza, the newly influential, decade-old party of the radical left. Hopes ran high. Syriza pledged to roll back austerity and restore Greek pride. The telegenic new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his irrepressible finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, negotiated with Greece’s stern, German-led creditors in an entirely new spirit—unapologetically, with more than a hint of defiance.

Appendices

Epilogue

Outrageous Fortune: Further Reflections on Austerity, Resistance, and the Utopian Imagination ⁴

David Norman Smith

Athens in July 2015 was the site of the Democracy Rising World Conference, a gathering of intellectuals and activists who came together in the afterglow of syriza’s triumph in January to consider the future of the radical anti-austerity left. Announced in March, the conference took direct aim at the anti-utopian premises of the austerity ideologues. The conference manifesto opened with these stirring words: “Margaret Thatcher’s slogan ‘There is no alternative’ was a declaration of war that installed the horrors of neoliberal policies….”

It is now abundantly clear that neoliberalism has accelerated radical inequality and…forced the world to conform to unquestionable, anti-democratic policies, lest even greater disasters befall us. [But] the recent historic victory of syriza brings forth the message that citizens must decide their own future…. In the wake of syriza’s victory and the hope it articulates for the world, we propose a conference with academics and activists from the birthplace of democracy, Athens, Greece. ⁵

But hope was already fragile by the time the conference opened on July 17th. Just days before, syriza’s parliamentary majority had stunned the world by accepting the eurozone’s harshest and most stringent austerity plan to date. The anti-austerity sentiment of the national referendum on July 5th was disregarded. syriza’s left wing, like much of the Greek public, was incensed, and the controversial finance minister, Varoufakis, resigned. The philosopher and critic Creston Davis, one of the principal organizers of the conference, said that Democracy Rising convened amid “riots, fires, and demonstrations… One conference participant said, ‘Athens is literally burning, my eyes still sting from the police’s tear-gas, and I will be giving my talk in just a few minutes.” With a hint of bravado, the speaker added: “This is what a conference on democracy should be.” ⁶

Slings and Arrows

Not everyone was equally sanguine. On July 17th, dissident syriza MP Costas Lapavitsas asked to address the opening plenary session of the conference. His speech was “combustible,” one observer wrote, sparking “pandemonium in the lecture hall.” ⁷ Greeted with fierce enthusiasm by an overflow crowd, Lapavitsas was blunt: “The syriza government has just signed up to a new bailout agreement. This bailout agreement is a very bad deal.” He went on:

Inequality will increase because the measures will take away 800 million euros annually from…pensioners, who are typically among the poorest layers of the population. Inequality will also increase because, of course, unemployment will again rise this year and next.

…Taxes have also been increased on enterprises, and they’re going to hit small and medium businesses primarily, which are the backbone, still, of the Greek economy. Taxes have also been imposed on agriculture, and they’re probably the most severe increase in taxes, doubling the income tax for farmers and imposing a raft of other obligations on them.

…the agreement is also bad because it will do nothing for the national debt. There is no restructuring of the debt. [And] the measures will do nothing for development. There is nothing developmental in these measures. The so-called package of 35 billion Euros doesn’t exist. These are monies that already have been allotted to Greece…—there’s no new money in this. ⁸

In short, Lapavitsas concluded, “The government of the left has signed up Greece to a neocolonial agreement.” The agreement is not a rational necessity, a “Brest-Litovsk,” but rather “a disastrous capitulation” to neocolonialism as well as neoliberalism. ⁹

A Sea of Troubles

Why did syriza capitulate? To keep Greece in the eurozone. But this is sheer folly, Lapavitsas argued. Staying in the eurozone subordinates Greece not only to the “Troika” of creditors but to the dominion of the euro. “Allow me a digression on the question of money, since this is an academic audience and…I’ve spent more than 30 years studying money. …In its purest and simplest form [money is] a thing… Blindly, mechanically, society subjects itself to the thing. We’ve known that for a long time. Keynes called it the slavery of the yellow metal.”

For Lapavitsas, the alternative is obvious—to break the hegemony of the euro. “What we need to do is to withdraw our consent to this agreement [and] to redesign a radical program that is consistent with our values, our aims, and what we’ve told to the Greek people…all these years. And that radical program is impossible without Euro exit. The only thing that we really need to do is focus on developing a plan for Euro exit that will allow us to implement our program. It is so obvious I’m amazed that people still don’t see it after five months of failed negotiations.” ¹⁰

The philosopher Costas Douzinas, urging “critical support” for Tsipras and the bailout agreement, was caustic in his response to Lapavitsas. “…Yesterday we were here when the minister for education told us that if we were to leave the euro there would be no water in the islands. ¹¹ And [Lapavitsas], my friend, spoke in the past about rationing food and pharmaceuticals and energy…. Can a left government that [elicits] the hope of the Greek people and the Greek left and the European left, can it take that risk? And my answer, in pure economic and risk theory terms, is that it cannot. It could be, it could be perhaps, I would say, the longest suicide note in the history of the left.” ¹²

I would argue that, given the terms of this debate, Lapavitsas was clearly in the right at this juncture. syriza’s bailout agreement was already the longest suicide note in Greek left-wing history, as bankrupt politically as it was economically. In the short run, only Grexit could have prevented Greece from hemorrhaging further—and that remains true, even now. Each new ‘bailout’ only deepens the overall Greek debt, and the bailout funds go almost entirely to the banks, including (often) German banks. Reinstating the drachma would permit Greece to devalue its currency and prevent domestic industries from being overwhelmed by Franco-German imports. The risks of Grexit, as Lapavitsas convincingly demonstrates, are modest and limited. ¹³ The true danger is not exit but failure to exit—addiction to the euro, incomplete anti-austerity politics.

To Take Up Arms?

The ultimate question, then, is why syriza opted for austerity and dependence rather than exit and autonomy. In “Demand the Impossible,” I traced the likelihood of this choice to the Money World fetishism of syriza’s leaders. Tsipras, Milios, Varoufakis and the others were clearly unable to think beyond the horizon of the Warenwelt—and Tsipras, at least, was well able to calculate the algorithm that would keep him in power even without upholding his anti-austerity promises. But the events after May 12th—the July 5th referendum, the July 13th capitulation, and syriza’s re-election on September 20th—require explanation at the level of public opinion. Deceptions and miscalculations by politicians are comparatively easy to understand. But why was the Greek public willing to settle for symbolic satisfactions? Why, ultimately, did even militant opponents of austerity pay homage to the euro?

Lapavitsas offered a simple but profoundly mistaken answer to this question when he spoke at the Democracy Rising conference: “…the referendum, which said No so powerfully, showed…that the euro is a class issue. It isn’t some impersonal form of money… And people have instinctively understood it. The rich voted Yes, the poor voted No in the referendum, period.” ¹⁴

If only it were so simple. The reality is quite different, and harder to fathom. Upon inspection, it becomes clear that the deeper underlying reality was neither anti-austerity nor pro-euro sentiment, but rather, both at once—that is, ambivalence. And that ambivalence was strongest among working people and the poor. Affluent Greeks, as we will see, were not ambivalent in 2015: they were straightforwardly pro-euro and pro-austerity. But working-class and hard-luck Greeks were torn. They wanted, and still want, an end to austerity along with the euro and eurozone membership—even when the latter plainly and devastatingly conflicts with the former.

Like Lapavitsas himself—for whom the drachma looms so large—the Greek public dreams the dream of money. Although Greece has been the site of important communal experiments in the recent past, including, beginning in 2011, the sustained occupation and self-management of Vio.Me, a building materials plant in Thessaloniki, it remains difficult, it seems, for the Greek public to envision a future without money. ¹⁵ Even the bitter experience of austerity has not been enough to sour them on the euro. Again, the question is why?

Is the Euro a Fetish?

syriza, like most political parties, “leads” by following. Founded in 2004 as a coalition of radical grouplets, syriza was a miniature force until May 2010, when, in the desperate aftermath of the global downturn of 2008, the Greek government accepted a rigorous austerity program in return for a eurozone bailout. The fallout was immediate. Until that moment, Greece had been a stable two-party system for almost four decades, since the revival of democracy in 1974 after an interval of military dictatorship. But each of the two major parties, the Pan-Hellenic Socialists (pasok) and New Democracy (nd), signed off on austerity. A mass anti-austerity movement sprang to life, and the major parties plunged in popularity. syriza’s stock rose accordingly, as syriza came to be perceived as the anti-austerity party par excellence. ¹⁶

The scale of the Greek anti-austerity movement was little short of astonishing. No fewer than 23 % of the entire Greek public reported participating in protests in 2010. In 2011, the percentage rose to 36 %. The latter is a truly remarkable figure, nearly triple the rate in France in the iconic month of May ‘68. ¹⁷ It should thus come as no surprise that, in the national election held on May 6, 2012, syriza vaulted to prominence on the strength of its anti-austerity reputation. pasok and nd, the two formerly pre-eminent parties, won a total of just 32.1 % of the vote while syriza won 16.8 %–5.6 % above pasok and just 2.1 % below nd. But since neither nd nor syriza was able to form a government, a new election was slated for June 17th. In the intervening six weeks, syriza underwent a metamorphosis. The character of that “Ovid-like” change merits scrutiny. ¹⁸ According to the political scientists Sofia Vasilopoulou and Daphne Halikiopoulou, syriza became increasingly “incoherent.” They point to syriza’s “inconsistent” and “ambiguous” stance on the euro in particular—and it is certainly true that Alexis Tsipras was not a paragon of consistency in this phase. ¹⁹ When he stressed his opposition to austerity, he voiced skepticism about the euro. When he resolved to remain in the eurozone, he warned against the drachma. But I would argue that what appears to be incoherence in this instance is actually a politics designed to play upon ambivalence. Tsipras alternated between positive and negative rhetoric because the public, including opponents of austerity, felt conflicted.

At times Tsipras was blandly reassuring, insisting that austerity could be overcome without exit from the eurozone: “I will keep Greece in the eurozone,” he wrote in the Financial Times—but the very next day, just four days before the June election, he sounded a very different note, stressing, in a televised interview, that “the euro is not a fetish,” to be defended at all costs: “Our priority is to save the country in the euro, not to save the euro in Greece, destroying the Greek society and the Greek people.” ²⁰ Since opinion polls already clearly showed that the Greek public wanted to overcome austerity within the eurozone, it would have been imprudent for syriza to campaign for Grexit, default, and a return to the drachma. So the nimble Tsipras, in 2012 and afterwards, consistently—and I would argue, coherently—steered a course between anti-austerity militancy and pro-euro hesitancy. Like any accomplished politician, he spoke the language of ambivalence fluently.

That was still clear on the eve of the January 2015 election, when syriza’s main slogan remained ambiguous: “No sacrifice for the euro, no illusions in the drachma.” ²¹ This was a pledge to end austerity without tears. The euro would be preserved, since restoring the drachma would be worse—and this would be possible without sacrifice. This begged the question—What if keeping the euro required sacrifice? What if the sacrificial rituals of austerity could not be reversed without exit and default? Those possibilities were artfully left to one side. syriza promised to square the circle.

Political Magic?

Mixed messages from politicians often mirror the mixed feelings of the public. The mystery is not why Tsipras pandered to ambivalence but why public ambivalence remained so strong—and why, when Tsipras ultimately chose compliance over defiance, his base stood by him. This is not to say that protests have been infrequent since syriza accepted the task of imposing austerity on Greece. Strikes and general strikes, marches, and many other forms of urban and rural protest have been rife. But as recently as May 2016, more Greeks said that they would prefer to keep syriza in power than vote for nd, which is now the main opposition party. ²² “Despite dissatisfaction with the government at 86.5 %, 44 % would prefer to see the coalition continue its four-year term whereas 41 % would like snap elections.” ²³

syriza has managed to remain in power despite its chameleon-like oscillations. The secret to this success is that Tsipras has appealed simultaneously to anti-austerity and pro-euro sentiments. By striking a theatrically anti-austerity stance in negotiations with the Troika while reassuring the electorate that Greece would stay in the eurozone, Tsipras and his negotiator-in-chief, Varoufakis, dramatically improved syriza’s standing with the public during the early months of 2015. Winning the January election with just 36.3 % of the vote, Tsipras’ approval ratings soared in the ensuing months, rising to 77 % in May. ²⁴ Since, in that same month, 78 % of syriza’s base firmly opposed ‘backing down’ in dialogue with the Troika, ²⁵ observers might have guessed that syriza’s support would plummet after the reversal of July 13th. The No vote of the July 5th referendum had lifted Tsipras to new heights, making his subsequent surrender all the harder to swallow. Yet, even so, when a new election was held on September 20th, syriza won 35.5 % of the vote—a drop of less than 1 % since January. ²⁶

Tsipras, who had once famously said that he was “not Harry Potter,” now inspired researchers to wonder, tongue-in-cheek, if he had, in fact, worked a kind of magic. ²⁷ How else could he have been elected in January on an anti-austerity platform, only to be re-elected, eight months later, with undiminished support, after spectacularly reversing course despite ardent and rising anti-austerity feeling?

No magic, of course, was involved. But the underlying psychology that yielded this result is no less challenging to fathom. The key fact is that, despite its intense and consistent opposition to austerity, the Greek public has been even more intensely and consistently attached to the euro. While majority opinion has always opposed austerity—55 % in 2010, 71 % in 2011, 63 % in 2012, and 68 % in 2015—support for the euro has been even stronger and more consistent, holding constant from 78 % in 2011 to 79 % in 2012, 79 % in January 2015, and 76 % in September 2015.

The capacity of the Greek public to hold anti-austerity and pro-euro opinions simultaneously was strikingly shown by a poll in June 2015. Asked if they approved of the Troika’s two most recent demands, respondents said No to pension cuts (90 %) and No to the relaxation of rules concerning mass layoffs (82 %). Asked if, given the trend of recent history, they expected Greece to go bankrupt in the near future, 33 % more agreed in June than in February. A slight majority now held negative opinions of the European Union. But when asked about the euro, the answers were again positive. nd and pasok, predictably, were 96 % positive. But even syriza supporters were significantly pro-euro: 59 % to 35 %. ²⁸ And in fact, over the course of 2015, supporters of nearly every Greek party became more committed to the eurozone.

On a scale of 1-to-10, where one means “exit” and 10 means “stay,” syriza supporters went from 4.11 in January (leaning away from the eurozone) to 7.85 in September. ²⁹ pasok and nd went in the same direction, 7.23 to 8.57 and 8.12 to 9.11, as did similar, lesser parties. And even the ultra-right supporters of Golden Dawn and the far-left supporters of the Communist Party, who had always strongly resisted austerity, followed the same path, shifting from 3.73 to 5.37 and 2.28 to 3.78, respectively.

In other words, even those who voted for fascists now favor staying in the eurozone!

The Euro is a Fetish

What we see, in short, is ambivalence. Opposition to austerity is strong and genuine, but so is reluctance to default and return to the drachma. The pollster Yiannis Mavris had detected this duality as early as September 2011, writing that “Greek public opinion…reveals certain contradictions. …The feeling of outrage still prevails…and yet, at the same time, increased attachment to the euro. Acceptance of the euro…remains high with 63 % expressing a ‘positive opinion’…Indeed, [in the past four months, as the protest movement rose to unprecedented levels], the percentage…has risen +5 % [and] the highest increase…is where one would expect exactly the opposite, i.e. among the social strata that have been hit more severely by the crisis and the measures taken.”

Support for the euro was up 11 % among workers, 14 % among the jobless, 8 % among voters 25–34, and 11 % among voters 35–44. ³⁰

The euro, in short, certainly appears to exert fetish-like appeal. Even those who suffer most as a consequence of Money World’s austerity policies, and those who favor militant protest to bring austerity to a halt, have been reluctant to risk the experiment of life without the euro. That may cease to be true in the future, perhaps even in the near future—the Greek story is far from over. But to date, ambivalence and euro fetishism have proven stronger than resistance to austerity.

Many of syriza’s critics propose solutions of their own to the crisis. I offer a question: How can we explain ambivalence? How can we explain, and counter, the influence of euro fetishism? If we hope to defeat austerity in the future, we need to better understand what stands in our way. Ambivalence is not the least of these obstacles.

Notes

• 1. Or footnotes. Specific lines from the texts cited here can be found via keyword searches online, and I have appended a reference list, below.

• 2. In January, 2016, Oxfam released a report showing that this number has fallen from 80 to 62. In 2010, the equivalent number was over 200.

• 3. Varoufakis, televised interview with the Associated Press, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaNhxClzfAUSee also Dalton and Dendrinou, March 3, 2015, below.

• 4. I offered remarks parallel to those presented here in a talk to the International Social Theory Consortium at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, on June 9, 2016. For a video upload of that talk, see https://panopto.its.iastate.edu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=2c6f3cc4-8d5d-4d83-84a3-05c2ef333193

• 5. Call for Papers: Global Center for Advanced Studies Conference “Democracy Rising,” March 7, 2015: https://gcasblog.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/call-for-papers-gcas-conference-democracy-rising-athens-july-2015/

• 6. Creston Davis, July 26, 2015, “GCAS’ First World Conference, ‘Democracy Rising… Just the Beginning.” https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/gcas-first-world-conference-democracy-rising-just-the-beginning/

• 7. Chloe Wyma, August 8, 2015. “Debating democracy in a European debt colony,” ROAR Magazine. https://roarmag/essays/democracy-rising-conference-report/

• 8. See the transcript: July 17, 2015, “Lapavitsas Calls for Exit as the Only Strategy for Greek People,” http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14278. See also the live Twitter feed a by Craig McVegas, https://storify.com/CraigMcVegas/costas-lapavitsas-at-the-university-of-athens

• 9. Brest-Litovsk was the site where the Bolsheviks negotiated a peace treaty with Germany in early 1918. Although this treaty was criticized as a “separate peace,” the Bolsheviks defended it on the ground that they need time, and an exit from World War 1, to bring the revolution to fruition.

• 10. See the transcript, cited above.

• 11. Wyma (cited above) quotes Aristides Baltas, the Education Minister, as saying that if Tsipras hadn’t capitulated to the Troika, “bank closures would have prevented ships from delivering drinking water to the Greek islands.”

• 12. See the transcript, cited above. Douzinas, long a faculty member at Birkbeck College in London, borrowed this phrase from a dissident luminary in the British Labour Party, who, in 1983, famously accused the left-wing party majority of adopting suicidally radical positions.

• 13. Lapavitsas and his collaborators have argued this position for years. See, e.g., their early and many-sided discussion in Crisis in the eurozone, introduced by Stathis Kouvelakis (London and New York: Verso, 2012).

• 14. See the transcript, cited above.

• 15. Theodoros Karyotis has several excellent online articles that cogently explain the communal experiments now underway in Greece, and possible on a wider scale in the future.

• 16. A neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, also won a modest anti-austerity following. But Golden Dawn’s extremism has restricted its influence. After winning 7 % of the national vote in May 2012, Golden Dawn appeared to many observers to be en route to major influence. But in fact, despite all the upheavals of Greek politics in the years after 2012, Golden Dawn’s influence, and vote tally, has remained static.

• 17. These figures are drawn from two texts by Georgios Karyotis and Wolfgang Rüdig: “The Three Waves of Anti-Austerity Protest in Greece, 2010–2015” (2016, unpublished); and “Protest Participation, Electoral Choices and Public Attitudes towards Austerity in Greece,” in The Politics of Extreme Austerity: Greece in the eurozone Crisis, edited by Karyotis and Roman Gerodimos (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, pp. 123–141). My thanks to Georgios Karyotis for sharing the first of these papers with me.

• 18. This was the expression used by nd spokesman Simos Kedikoglou to characterize syriza’s ‘mutations.’ See the Athens News Service, 14 January 2013, http://www.hri.org/news/greek/ana/2013/13-01-14.ana.html

• 19. Sofia Vasilopoulou and Daphne Halikiopoulou, 2013, “In the Shadow of Grexit: The Greek Election of 17 June 2012,” South European Society and Politics, 18 (4): 523–542. Reprinted in Protest Elections and Challenger Parties, edited by Susannah Verney and Anna Bosco. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.

• 20. Alexis Tsipras, interviewed by Antonis Sroiter May 17, 2012, “Euro is not a fetish and I am not Harry Potter,” http://en.protothema.gr/alexis-tsipras-euro-is-not-a-fetish-and-i-am-not-harry-potter/

• 21. «καμιά θυσία για το ευρώ, καμιά αυταπάτη για τη δραχμή»

• 22. 22 % favor continuing the present government; 21.1 % say they will vote for ND in the next election. http://greece.greekreporter.com/2016/03/20/latest-poll-shows-71-of-people-do-not-trust-tspiras-greeks-want-change-in-government/#sthash.eM3QV1jG.dpuf

• 23. http://greece.greekreporter.com/2016/05/28/poll-almost-nine-in-10-greeks-are-dissatisfied-with-the-govt/#sthash.OuyiUl02.dpuf

• 24. Public Issue, Political Barometer 144, May 2015, http://www.publicissue.gr/en/2090/pol-bar-144-may-2015/

• 25. Yiannis Mavris, 26 May 2015, “Yes to negotiation, no to retreat, no to elections: How the political climate and the parties’ influence are shaping up, four months after elections,” http://www.mavris.gr/en/654/4-months-after/print/

• 26. Public Issue, Political Barometer 148, Greek General Elections, September 2015, Wave 3: 14-17/9/2015, http://www.publicissue.gr/en/2869/pol-bar-148-sep-2015-3/

• 27. Georgios Karyotis, Wolfgang Rüdig, Niccole Pamphilis. 2016. “A Kind of Magic? Explaining Syriza’s Victory in the September 2015 Elections.” PowerPoint, Political Studies Association. 66th Annual Conference, Brighton, 22–23 March.

• 28. Public Issue, Political Barometer 145, June 2015, http://www.publicissue.gr/en/2768/pol-bar-145-june-2015/

• 29. This was partly, but only partly, because syriza’s left broke away to form Popular Unity, which, in September, was slightly less sympathetic to the euro than syriza had been as a whole in January.

• 30. Yiannis Mavris, September 26, 2011, “The contradictory attitudes of Greeks toward the euro,” http://www.mavris.gr/en/22/euro-analysis-2011/