In his 1969 play The Mundy Scheme, Brian Friel asked "What happens to an emerging country after it has emerged?" I think I've found Greece's answer.
I've just been reading an article in the new online journal Modern Greek Studies, by Álvaro García Marín, The Origin is Already Haunted.
It's a near-impenetrable example of literary theory, but the author does succeed in identifying the reason why Greece continues to baffle Europe and why Europe continues to exasperate Greece: there is a two-speed Greece or, two kinds of Greece in the same short word.
Europe expected Greece, from its inception, to be modern, docile, complacent. And from that time, many Greeks wanted their country to emerge fully autonomous, taking its past traditions and heritage into its future, a sovereign state rather than a sovereign debt.
The Greeks wanted their freedom: language, culture, religion and land. They achieved only part of these in 1829, but while the territory continued to expand (under international control) so too did its indebtedness in both financial and ethical terms.
Every step of the way has been negotiated with superior powers. From 1897 until 1936 Greece's economy was monitored by an International Financial Commission, the precursor of the IMF, because it had already been bankrupt three times.
It may seem bizarre that the current domestic problems of Greece can be traced back to the 1820s.
But if you think of the debates in Ireland this year about the kind of republic that 1916 and the 1922 Treaty achieved, it doesn't seem so unfamiliar.
It all comes down to “What kind of country do we want, now that we have emerged?”
From 1832 until 1974 there was a constant debate in Greece as to whether it should be a monarchy or a republic, and another about what kind of Greek Greeks should speak: “posh”, based on the classical language, or “demotic”, the way people actually speak today. It took 150 years to resolve it in favour of “demotic”.
Terrorism
And from 1974 onwards, terrorism has questioned the validity of the modern state in much the same way as multiple versions of the IRA have done in Ireland.
In both cases this has polarised the unresolved divisions of their respective civil wars. The Irish language, traditional music, land ownership and, above all, the Six Counties, have been a mirror of Greece’s struggle towards its identity and the integration of its territory.
At the time of the Irish civil war the Greeks were attempting blindly and foolhardily to recapture the heartland of Hellenism – Istanbul – which they had lost in 1453. Such is the power of irredentism in a divided land.
Ever since the 1820s there have been two Greeces: the Greece whose glory everyone wants to restore – classical, democratic, philosophical, heroic – and the Greece on the map: vulnerable, pathetic, already out-dated at the time of its birth.
They are parallel ideas, often coming into collision with one another, because no one is able to answer Friel’s question.
The old-style, traditional Greece is a tortoise. The modern Greece is a hare. The fashionable way to hold them together is to run with the hare but to hunt with the tortoise.
Sinister
But all the time something much more sinister is pushing the world’s economies into second place and making all talk of “sovereign” states and “autonomy” redundant.
In 2005, three Greeks set up a Mossack Fonseca company in Panama. They included Stavros Papastavrou, who seven years later became a close adviser to former prime minister Antonis Samaras. Samaras put him in charge of relations with the EU, the IMF and the European Central Bank: a textbook example of poacher and gamekeeper in cahoots.
Their company was the Green Shamrock Foundation. No Irish person seems to have been connected with it.
The three Greeks obviously didn’t realise that their choice of name was a giveaway. What colour is shamrock except green? But whatever the reason for their choice of name, these three have been joyriding their own country and the onshore system, faster than you can say “wham bam thank-you ma’am”.
Ironically, all this comes just after former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, in an interview with the Economist, warned that "financialisation" – in effect the licence to print your own money – was destroying global economies.
He called it “a colony of termites eating the foundations from within”.
One might say, fiddling in Panama while Athens burns.
