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Greek elections

Diamond said:
First, other voters in other countries have agreed to both (i) their austerity programme and (ii) the bail-out of Greece that is conditional on austerity reforms time and again by voting in their sovereign governments to negotiate terms with Greece. If Greek voters want to vote against those terms, that is fine but there are also consequences around such a decision - any country anywhere can vote in a government that chooses a decision that runs contrary to the wishes of their peers and that's totally correct but it usually carries significant costs with it. This is an extreme example because we have a currency union without any of the superstructure that makes such a grouping work effectively and, now, it has hit the buffers so hard that it is fracturing very quickly.

Second, I would be very surprised if you could find anyone in Brussels among the eurocrats that want Greece to leave the EU. That would be a doomsday scenario from their point of view. I know a few of them and they are pretty scared. The people who do want Greece to leave, foolishly in my view, are the electorates of other eurozone countries who understand perfectly well that they are propping up Greece.
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1. So you will be able to provide examples from the manifestos of the parties making up those sovereign governments which speak directly to the situation in Greece and be able to show that the voters supporting those parties were doing so explicitly with regard to those manifesto commitments. The Greeks have been asked, explicitly and recently.

2. I said nothing about anyone wanting Greece out of the EU; that isn't the big picture...the big picture you are still not getting.

Louis MacNeice
 
Louis MacNeice said:
1. So you will be able to provide examples from the manifestos of the parties making up those sovereign governments which speak directly to the situation in Greece and be able to show that the voters supporting those parties were doing so explicitly with regard to those manifesto commitments. The Greeks have been asked, explicitly and recently.

2. I said nothing about anyone wanting Greece out of the EU; that isn't the big picture...the big picture you are still not getting.

Louis MacNeice
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I'm pretty sure that it would contravene a number of different general conventions on international relations for a party to state that they would act in a specific way in reaction to another country's negotiating stance with an international body though I could be wrong. May well have a look later.

But the wider point is that it is well documented that the franchises of other eurozone countries have little patience with the current situation.

You may well say - what do they have to do with it, it's not their country? However, it is their currency, which is the root of the issue.

That's the big picture.
 
Diamond said:
I'm pretty sure that it would contravene a number of different general conventions on international relations for a party to state that they would act in a specific way in reaction to another country's negotiating stance with an international body though I could be wrong. May well have a look later.

But the wider point is that it is well documented that the franchises of other eurozone countries have little patience with the current situation.

You may well say - what do they have to do with it, it's not their country? However, it is their currency, which is the root of the issue.

That's the big picture.
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No it's not. The Euro is a consequence of much larger concerns; can you really not see this?

Louis MacNeice
 
Louis MacNeice said:
1. So you will be able to provide examples from the manifestos of the parties making up those sovereign governments which speak directly to the situation in Greece and be able to show that the voters supporting those parties were doing so explicitly with regard to those manifesto commitments. The Greeks have been asked, explicitly and recently.

2. I said nothing about anyone wanting Greece out of the EU; that isn't the big picture...the big picture you are still not getting.

Louis MacNeice
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Yeah, I don't remember being asked in a referendum whether I wanted the masses to bail out irresponsible lenders.

Nor do I remember being invited to ponder whether, even if banks are too big to fail, certain ideologies are too big to go bankrupt. Diamond would have us bail out repugnant, failed ideologies whilst being oh so grateful that the responsible ones have guided us away from the folly of The Wrong Change.

Even if you decide that austerity is unavoidable then that still leaves very many choices. Perhaps, if leaders ask the masses to endure hardship for decades to pay for hideous mistakes, the least they could do is offer us something in the long-term in return. Debt is hardly the only thing that can and should be restructured, and don't ever ask people to accept hard work, insecurity, low living standards and humiliation with weary acceptance and no genuine light at the end of the tunnel.
 
Athos said:
Is it just habitualisation, though? Isn't legitimacy derived, at least in part, from sense of commonality? And, since there isn't a society of people who feel, first and foremost that they are European, then any 'state' which purports to pertain to that group is correspondingly weak in authority, notwithstanding that it may have power over a wider group.
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Yes - Berger also talks about commonality in terms of cohesiveness & 'meaningful reciprocity' as vital parts of the societal set up - I was simplifying, for the sake of brevity (& because I'm not especially confident using this kind of language, a bit tentative).
 
That new habermas i mentioned: The Lure of Technocracy

In the title essay Habermas addresses the challenges and threats posed by the current banking and public debt crisis in the Eurozone for European unification. He is harshly critical of the incrementalist, technocratic policies advocated by the German government in particular, which are being imposed at the expense of the populations of the economically weaker, crisis-stricken countries and are undermining solidarity between the member states. He argues that only if the technocratic approach is replaced by a deeper democratization of the European institutions can the European Union fulfil its promise as a model for how rampant market capitalism can once again be brought under political control at the supranational level.
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Diamond said:
No, certainly not.

But, as referred to before I think on this thread, it takes a remarkable amount of arrogant obstinance to unite almost everyone out of perhaps 30+ major players that you are negotiating with against you.

And then you, most probably, ride off on a motorbike into some cushy new academic tenured position where you can lecture a bit more, publish more books and generally avoid the economic shitstorm that you have helped bring down on your nation that you were supposed to serve.
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One negotiator is an economist of a particular stripe, the other is not an economist but a corporate lawyer cum politician who represents a particular ideology: i.e. one that submits to the foolish economism of neoliberal cultism. It's easy to see who the bully is in this relationship. Clue: it isn't Varoufakis.

Varoufakis is an academic. Why shouldn't he work in that field? What's so bad about having tenure? Your rant sounds like something gleaned from the pages of the Daily Mail. Btw, Varoufakis is staying in Parliament as a backbencher. You sort of missed that in your haste to chuck ordure at him.
 
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Diamond said:
And then you, most probably, ride off on a motorbike into some cushy new academic tenured position where you can lecture a bit more, publish more books and generally avoid the economic shitstorm that you have helped bring down on your nation that you were supposed to serve.
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J Ed said:
Eurasia was, and always has been, communist...

Watch right-wingers 'forget' that the crisis was instigated by and accelerated under neoliberal governments.
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Louis MacNeice said:
Surely they are waiting to see what the tensions in the rest of the Eurozone are before playing their hand?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice
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Not turning up with anything weakens the support of those who are sympathetic. And they need more anyway if they are going to try the same stunt again: of emergency bridging past a deadline, whilst proper agreement sort.
 
gosub said:
Not turning up with anything weakens the support of those who are sympathetic. And they need more anyway if they are going to try the same stunt again: of emergency bridging past a deadline, whilst proper agreement sort.
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What do you think the Greek government can bring to the table that would not have the effect of further immiserating the people, lowering aggregate demand and deepening their recession?
 
gosub said:
Not turning up with anything weakens the support of those who are sympathetic. And they need more anyway if they are going to try the same stunt again: of emergency bridging past a deadline, whilst proper agreement sort.
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Who are you referring to as being sympathetic? And how do you know what they think?
 
Diamond said:
This is not a zero sum game but we have ended up in a place where greek banks have been closed now for seven days.

I met up with a Greek friend with German heritage who grew up in Britain and currently works for the ECB in Frankfurt, although perhaps for not much longer, and the one thing he said to me and other friends via whatsapp before we met up is that he did not want to talk about Grexit because it was too painful on a personal level - he knew too many people wrapped up in it.

But the one thing that he did say was that Syriza are complete eejits and that Varoufakis is a preening tool who has systematically managed to piss off every person of any influence (possibly in the same way that I have on these boards!).
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This is obvs silliness. Rather like your institutional name-dropping on the internet. ( :facepalm: )

Syriza have likely achieved one main objective, which is really pissing off rightists like yourself. Staying in power.

If Syriza had accepted a deal from the creditors pre-referendum, any deal, the party would probably - sadly - have split and new elections been called. Syriza only got 36pc vote.

Instead not only have Syriza quashed that possibility they now have the other Greek parties in tow. It is a pretty obvious event, after all it was Syriza that summoned the others together to back them in negotiations.

Perhaps a lot of people in Syriza, and voters too, see little to choose between a deal and decades of poverty, or leaving the Euro and riding out the calamity in a shorter time frame. After all they would still be inside the EU.

My one hope at this point is that Syriza have prepared properly - or even half way properly - for the second event.
 
kebabking said:
their twattery - their language, their arrogance in dealing with people who'se support they need - has made a bad situation worse. the EZ's proposals are unsustainable, and its probable that a mutually acceptable deal was never going to be achievable, however amusing little quips about Merkel 'acting like a concentration camp guard' have ensured that an otherwise amicable and mutually supporting parting of the ways is now not going to happen. Germany will, in a fit of pique, give Greece the finger. Greeces' problem is not now whether that is right or wrong, or how it got there - but dealing with it. heroic dignity does not feed babies.
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So what roll over and put even more of their citizens into poverty. Fuck that.
 
butchersapron said:
I'm wondering if there's any mileage to be got out of looking at this via the idea of 'legitmation crisis' concept. Briefly, via habermas + gramsci, modern democratic states are ran around the principles of authority rather than (open imposition) of power, authority is the acceptance of power as legitimate. In the classical sense the idea applied to states, but here i think we have something interesting taking place - namely, the state retaining it's authority but wider bodies losing theirs and being forced back into power.

Within the states based theory that Habermas came up with society (note, not the state) had a number of adaptive, learning mechanisms that could be used to return legitimacy to the state if the state responded adequately (He actually says that the states reaction to this is one way that social progress is made, that it can elevate social organisation to higher level though collective debate and action) - but there simply is no such european society to drive these processes, there is only power. The EU (and the IMF) have no access to the authority-producing stablisation mechanisms that states may develop - and those states that failed to develop them ended up in real crisis, that actually often passed into insurrectionary or revolutionary periods. (Often over many years, see the long Spanish 20s and 30s).

i think a lot of this - if relevant - will be lost in the pared down economic debate. The splitting of the political and economic.
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Really interesting post BA
 
Supposedly today: "Thumping the table, Juncker demands to know how Greek officials dared to call the EC terrorists."

:D Sounds like that one stung... I guess they must genuinely be worried about how its making them look
 
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