“However what in regards to the Greeks? Their nationwide character is predicated on the thought of the impoverished and downtrodden little man getting the higher of the world round him by sheer crafty.” – Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell (1945)
The Greek disaster has uncovered existential weaknesses within the Greek financial system and revealed shortcomings within the bigger European system of monetary checks and balances. However the typically emotional responses have additionally confirmed a cultural polarity between north and south. The German journal, Focus, captured this antagonism by a picture of the Venus of Milo suggestively sticking up the center finger at Germany. Angered Greeks in return reminded Germans of the Nazi looting of Greek gold reserves and unpaid battle retributions.
Past this populism within the media, there exists a basic rift in coverage views between Mediterranean international locations on the one facet and Atlantic international locations on the opposite facet. In his influential e book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), the German sociologist Max Weber studied already the connection between tradition and financial efficiency. Weber thought of the Protestant working ethic a pivotal aspect within the growth of capitalist modernity. Behind the state of affairs of the Greek disaster lie causes rooted deeper in Greek tradition than the rapid issues of presidency and financial construction. The traces of those historic roots carve a person psychology and form social norms which might be tough to vary with measures of coverage by politicians responding to the market’s wits.
In conventional Greek dances a gaggle of dancers, interlocked arm over shoulder, type a circle and transfer with a set of prescribed steps. The Greeks don’t simply break with their custom and they don’t possess an innate curiosity for the brand new like Western tradition. Greeks rely upon the bonds with household and their neighborhood. Arms locked, solely the chief of the dance improvises, whereas the remaining don’t break the road of the circle.
The eyes of the worldwide monetary markets are on the fiscal measures introduced by George Papandreou, the primary citizen of Athens, and the reforms to be carried out by the central authorities. The response of Greek society and the financial help by the European Union members will likely be decisive of their success. The query is that if the federal government can implement the brand new insurance policies in a rustic so geographically scattered and with a historical past of tax evasion as Greece. Traditionally Greeks dislike central authorities and have relied totally on native self-governance, strengthened by the geographic distance of the islands from Athens and the isolation of mountainous villages. Not even the chief-god Zeus might rule the lesser Greek gods from the peaks of Mount Olympus, the very best mountain within the nation. Greek historical past justifies distrust in a Greek success. Measures to centralize authorities and represent an environment friendly fashionable state have at all times been resisted, from basic instances with the Delian League that ended within the Peloponnesian Warfare, the occupation by the Ottoman Empire that gave start to the palikare, the Greek people hero, or the rise of the present authorities for which corruption and tax evasion are emblematic.
When the Persian empire threatened the independence of the Greek metropolis states, Athens and the allied Greek metropolis states fashioned the Delian League in 487 BCE. Members of the League had been obliged to contribute troopers for the protection of Greek democracies or might alternatively pay taxes to the League. When Athens began to manage the League, Athens pressured different metropolis states to proceed paying taxes to the League solely for its personal profit. When cities refused, they confronted the wrath of the Athenian military and had been merely annexed by Athens. However when the well-known statesman Pericles moved the treasury holding the paid tax contributions, from the island of Delos to Athens, the remainder of the Greeks defied. The resistance towards dominance by Athens resulted within the Peloponnesian Wars and eventually within the defeat and give up of Athens in 404 BCE. Can Athens guarantee a unique final result now?
Already beneath the Ottoman empire the Greeks resisted taxation, which was a logo of oppression. From the fifteenth century they suffered heavy taxation by the Ottomans. As Christians beneath Islamic rule they had been obliged to pay a land tax and the jizya, a tax for non-Muslims which was symbolic for subjection to the Ottoman rule. Heavy taxation diminished most Greeks to subsistence farming, whereas giant estates fell into the fingers of Ottoman nobles. Resentment towards such taxation accrued over virtually 5 hundred years of occupation. The issues of recent Greece can’t be understood with out understanding this Ottoman occupation of Greece and the lengthy battle for independence that lasted over a century, solely ending bitterly for the Greeks within the disastrous defeat of 1922 towards the forces of Atatürk’s fashionable Turkish state. The 1922 defeat meant an finish to the Greek megali concept or nice concept of a bigger Greece that included Asia Minor and Constantinople, present day Istanbul. This defeat of the Greek state in Asia Minor was a failure by the central state with traumatic penalties.
The Museum for the Macedonian Battle in Thessaloniki is a really small museum however with a deeply vital that means for Greeks. In a nook mansion behind Aristotle Sq., it showcases the historical past of the Macedonian Battle, the guerrilla battle towards the Ottomans from 1900 to 1908, which annexed the Greek populace in Macedonia to the impartial Greek territory. In 1821 the Greeks had gained independence however it didn’t lengthen far past the Peloponnesos and Attica. The annexation of Macedonia gave the Greek state a renewed confidence that outlined the Greek nationwide id and positioned a declare on all territory within the better area with Greek populations.
One room within the museum is dedicated to Pavlos Melas who fought within the Macedonian Battle. Behind a vitrine lay on view relics of Melas and a part of his former private belongings, a Smith and Wesson 38 revolver, an invite card to his wedding ceremony, ribbons from his memorial wreaths, and a tin cup. He’s a nationwide image for the enosi or union of Greece that was exhausting fought and thereby of the Greek nationwide id. He’s the embodiment of the standard Greek people hero, the palikare. As a lieutenant he left the common service within the new military of the Greek state as a way to combat as a brigand or irregular fighter towards Ottoman occupation in Northern Greece. Greece was confined largely to the Peloponnese and consisted of a patchwork of individuals with totally different dialects. The irregular fighters grew to become people heroes to the Greeks, the place the common Greek military appeared incapable to guard the occupied Greeks within the north.
The irregular fighters fought in the identical custom because the Greek Klepths. These males had fled to the mountains within the eighteenth century to keep away from the rule of the Ottomans and had fashioned bands of outlaws that later fought within the Greek Warfare of Independence from 1821 to 1829. But additionally the Ottomans had used irregular forces to manage impenetrable mountain areas. They allowed highly effective native captains in these lawless areas to rule at will beneath oversight of distant Ottoman overlords. Even in our time, using irregular fighters was widespread throughout the current Balkan Wars.
The palikare was in essence no more than a small brigand, who in teams roamed the mountains beneath the banner of irredentism and liberation of the Greeks. They evaded the rule of regulation and depended typically on captains that exercised native energy. The Greek nationwide author, Nikos Kazantzakis, describes this archetype colourful in his novels. In Freedom and Dying the palikare Captain Michales refuses to swallow the occupation of Crete by the Turks, and the unruly Zorba is described within the novel Zorba the Greek, brilliantly enacted by Anthony Quinn within the 1964 movie. The mountain freedom fighter, evading authority and rising a beard in defiance, that is the Greek conventional spirit.
The palikare is a logo of the present Greek monetary disaster, mirrored in a preferred sentiment that rejects the centralized fashionable state and commends the outlaw. The Greeks don’t establish with the politics of central authorities, although one out of each 4 Greeks is a public servant and is immediately depending on the federal government for his or her earnings. The central authorities is taken into account wasteful and corrupt, from which it’s justified to extort cash. Whereas the citizen rejects subjection to the rule of the central state, the central state is a corrupt physique that accommodates a recreation of lies as a way to accumulate financial acquire.
The Greeks cunningly obtain an earnings from authorities, whereas evading taxes and collaborating within the casual financial system, defrauding the central state. This lack of loyalty extends to the much more distant European Union. Greeks gladly settle for the EU subsidies paying lip providers to its calls for, however resent any interference of their lives. This follow goes again to the instances of the Ottoman state, the place Greek topics evaded being taxed however despatched representatives to Constantinople to request fiscal favors. Whereas Ottoman rule had instituted native self-governance because the means for tax-assessment and tax-collection, the system developed native councils that had been dominated by highly effective native captains and rich households with a patron-client dependence.
Since its independence in 1821 the fashionable Greek state that emerged out of the Ottoman system has not been in a position to eradicate this native patron-client system which depends upon counter dealings and favoritism. Quite the opposite, it might solely emerge and survive by favoring such pursuits of the highly effective native patrons or captains in return for his or her help, in an identical course of because the centralized energy of the European Union solely is superior by returning political favors.
Prime-minister George Papandreou understands the Atlantic European perspective and sensitivities. Like many Greeks who labored in Germany or America for the perfect a part of their lives, he lived and studied in America and in Sweden throughout the youth in his life. However though George Papandreou calms European suspicions by vocalizing a agency although nothing however verbal promise of reform, he himself is a vested consultant of these highly effective households which might be symbolic of the centuries-old formalized corruption. Papandreou’s grandfather was 3 times prime-minister of Greece, his father based the social-democratic celebration PASOK and likewise served as prime-minister, whereas the Nea Democratia celebration has been dominated by the patrons of the Karamanlis household.
Greek guarantees and measures of reform have pacified worldwide markets and appeased European political leaders in the meanwhile. Since Greece’s accession to the EU, nevertheless, Greek guarantees and assurances have been supplied constantly beneath very comparable scandals, and there was little assurance from current developments in Greece that this time will likely be totally different. The cotton-growers of Thessaly are maybe exemplary for the issues of the Greek financial system which is solely not appropriate on the worldwide market and for Greek fraud. Cotton growers rely closely on subsidies for profitability, not shunning fraud and corruption, like wetting the cotton crop with water to extend the burden of the cotton. In 1992, as an illustration Greek farmers invented one fifth of its cotton crop as a way to declare further EU subsidies, and in Greece cotton farmers lately blocked a lot of the highways in Northern Greece, demanding funds from the federal government to offset lack of earnings from falling cotton costs on the worldwide markets, whereas having resisted agricultural reforms for many years.
And even whereas prime-minister George Papandreou was on a credibility-building tour round European capitals, amongst different talking on the World Financial Discussion board in Davos to calm unrest on the monetary markets and restore political credibility, his personal Minister of Agriculture Katerina Batzeli reached an settlement with protesting farmers to supply monetary compensation. Among the many key measures was the injection of 5 and a half billion Euro by the Greek state to spice up incomes and liquidity, promising little change in insurance policies at residence. And ask a Greek for an evaluation of the present disaster, they are going to with out exception level on the corruption of distant politicians, solely admitting to some blame themselves in a delayed sub-clause.
However Europe has at all times been blinded by its love for Greece and one should concern that this is not going to change in a single day. It has at all times admired Greece because the ideological and cultural basis of European values. We study from Greece the rules of Athenian democracy and replica Greek structure, our secular thinkers research Heraclitus and Parmenides, our Christian moralists research Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, we study the arithmetic of Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes, our intellectuals study by coronary heart the Iliad and the Odyssey, even European cynics and stoics cling to the Greek. However this impression of Greece is overly romantic and Byronic, and one should hope that it’s quickly changed by a extra northern sense for Actual-Politics.
The Philhellenic concept of a pastoral Greece in good concord with nature disputes the complicated actuality of a twenty first century Greece. The sentiment of betrayal felt in Europe is as a lot a self-betrayal by a European Byronic complicated. As Greece struggles to reconcile Western austerity with its Orthodox Byzantine generosity.
So, the Greek suitors have feasted and the time for reckoning has come. The return of order have to be thought of with out sentimental attachments or unreasonable calls for, whereas Europe should not be blinded by Greek crafty and abuse. The Greeks should resolve to both be a part of Europe and respect its fiscal guidelines or return to the Drachma as a political forex and unfastened its place on the European desk.
“I detest that man, who hides one factor within the depths of his coronary heart, and speaks forth one other.” – Homer, Iliad IX, 312-13