The
unflinching support for the EU and its institutions is not about
preventing European countries from becoming “Afghanistan.” Not
about preventing collapse. Not about the inconvenience of long lines
at passport control. It is about promoting an ideology, a specific
worldview, a vision for the way the world should work.
by
Michael Nevradakis
Part
3 - “There is no alternative”
Just as with
opposition to international “free” trade and the policies of
institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank, there was a time
where the left and progressive forces were opposed to the politics of
TINA—“there is no alternative,” exemplified by the original
iron lady, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Today
though, we are told by a wide range of voices, including purported
leftists such as Varoufakis, that for countries such as Greece there
is no alternative to EU and Eurozone membership, categorically ruling
out any thoughts of departure.
But Greece
lied by presenting false economic data to enter the Eurozone, did it
not? And therefore it must accept “bitter medicine,” should it
not? That’s what many “well-meaning” leftists and progressives
retort when the topic of the EU and IMF’s cruelty towards Greece is
brought up. But this also exposes what could, depending on one’s
perspective, be described as either the EU’s incompetence or its
insidious nature. If Greece lied and the EU did not perform due
diligence and was fooled, then it is incompetent. If it knew what was
going on and went along, then it is complicit in what has followed.
Furthermore,
Greece wasn’t alone in its “creative accounting:” countries
like Italy and Spain also brokered deals with the likes of Goldman
Sachs and J.P. Morgan to massage the numbers in order to meet the
Maastricht criteria to qualify for Eurozone membership. Even
Varoufakis, in a 2012 Dialogos Radio interview, has suggested that
many other Eurozone members fudged the numbers.
Membership
in the EU and the Eurozone provided an ephemeral economic boom and a
period of false prosperity for Greece. The negative impacts, however,
are more long-lasting, if indeed not permanent, in nature.
Privatizations, which began in earnest in the early 1990s and did
nothing to prevent the crisis, resulted in the wholesale sell-off of
strategic state assets, resources, and public utilities that were
often profitable. Introduction of a “hard” currency, overvalued
for the Greek economy, made Greek exports and tourism uncompetitive
compared to lower-priced alternatives in the region. Greece’s
previously modest industrial base was decimated while agricultural
production has dropped sharply since 1981, the year Greece joined the
EU, due in large part to the EU’s common agricultural policy.
Greece, as
did several other countries, may have presented questionable data in
order to enter the Eurozone. In yet another biting irony though,
similarly “fudged” numbers may have been presented, very much on
purpose, in order to drag Greece into the IMF-EU austerity mechanism.
Whistleblowers such as Zoe Georganta have made allegations and
presented evidence indicating that Greece’s debt and deficit
figures were purposely worsened in order to drag Greece under the
austerity mechanism.
Fueling
these allegations is the revelation that former IMF chief Dominique
Strauss-Kahn had met with then-opposition leader George Papandreou in
April 2009, months before Papandreou was elected as Greece’s prime
minister. The allegedly augmented deficit and debt figures were
revealed soon after Papandreou’s election, signifying the start of
the economic crisis.
We might
ask, why sabotage a national economy? The corrected question, though,
should be, why not? The austerity regime enabled the EU and
successive subservient regimes in Greece to impose unpopular and
socially harmful measures that would never have had a chance of being
enacted under ordinary conditions — including harsh cuts to social
services, wages, and pensions, plus fast-tracking the privatization
of key national assets.
Notably, the
Greek economy was subject to EU audits and oversight during the
2004-2007 time period. For some unexplained reason, this oversight
did nothing to prevent the crisis that followed. And while the
international press has habitually focused on Greece’s falsifying
of its economic data to join the Eurozone (without focusing on other
countries which also engaged in this practice), any discussion of the
allegations made by whistleblowers about the alleged augmentation of
Greece’s deficit and debt figures is denounced as conspiracy
theory. Indeed, the chief statistician who oversaw this possible
falsification of the data is lauded in the press.
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