Greek turmoil plays out as crisis of national identity

At such a stressful time for Greece, with the country facing an election that might bring a decisive change in its politics, it is disturbing and instructive to see just where it’s coming from.

Greece is hugely in debt to foreign creditors, has lost much of its sovereignty to external forces and is almost incurably divided in people’s views of what it means to be Greek.

A glance at the history books shows that it was ever thus. First, in the war of independence (1821-30) Greece incurred debts to Britain of £5 million (about €300 million today). The situation had become so drastic by 1897 that the powers controlling Greece (Britain, France, Germany) established an International Commission to oversee its economy – the forerunner of the IMF and the troika.

Second, the modern Greek state owed its existence to the powers that conjured it up as a geopolitical gambit against Russia and Turkey. After the second World War, Britain and the US established their influence over Greece in exchange for Soviet influence over the rest of the Balkans. Greece remains a pawn in the US’s Mediterranean and Middle East policy.

Hostage to fortune

Greece is thus financially and politically a hostage to fortune and always has been.

The division between those who see Greece as a player in the global marketplace and a modern society, and those who cling to an older, more precious identity (however backward and conservative) can be traced back to the discords in the war of independence and the many subsequent periods when Greece came close to civil war.

The elections on January 25th are not merely about the formation of the next government – widely expected to be led by the current opposition of leftist Syriza with Alexis Tsipras as prime minister – which proposes to renegotiate the bailout.

The repercussions could be more far-reaching: there remains a possibility of Greece leaving the euro zone, which calls into question the viability and acceptability of a single currency and the ways in which it was (ill)conceived.

Tsipras makes no secret of the fact that under his government things would get worse before they get better, but insists that the central issue is self-determination. Current prime minister Antonis Samaras calls this “blackmail”, alleging that only his coalition can maintain stability at home and in the world markets.

Foreign influence has been exercised in recent weeks by senior European figures such as German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker and EU economics commissioner Pierre Moscovici, arguing that Greece's perilous financial prospects would be damaged by a Syriza-led government.

The message could not be clearer: “Continue with our puppet Samaras, and we will continue to look kindly on your weaknesses.”

But with both partners in this coalition equally responsible for the mess the country is in, voters are likely to look for alternatives that offer a move away from the conventional wisdom that has dominated Greece for the past 40 years.

The mis-match between the ideal and the real is more acute, more divisive and far more dangerous in Greece than elsewhere in Europe.

Greece has always been at war with itself as a state that is only partly responsible for its own existence.

The civil war of 1943-49 was a long time coming. Its roots lie in the war of independence. Its legacy is part of today’s divisions. Terrorism, anarchism and fascism are all parts of the same problem that was unsolved at the end of the civil war and unsolved again at the dissolution of the military junta which ruled from 1967 to 1974.

Bourgeois values

Whether Samaras or his rival Tsipras forms the next government will not solve these divisions, chiefly because both represent bourgeois values and aspirations that cut no ice with extremists at either end of the spectrum, nor with those at the bottom of the social heap, who make up about 30 per cent of the population.

Rural citizens, who make up the vast majority of the population, know nothing of cities or shopping malls, but know everything about tradition and older (possibly outmoded) values. They just want to get on peacefully with their lives.

The unemployed – 25 per cent and rising – merely want an end to misery.

So the terms of the election, clearly dictated by the EU, disguise the dissension and the questions that have been part of the Greek psyche since at least 1821. Should Greeks continue to espouse their vulnerability to the likes of Merkel, Schäuble, Juncker and the IMF? Or should they explore once more the paths to freedom on their own terms?

Today’s “war” persists because it is the motor of both tradition and change.