"Sleepwalker of austerity" Article ofAlexis Tsipras in Le Monde

Published on Friday, 17 January 2014 13:46

Sleepwalker of austerity

The threats to have Greece expelled from the Eurozone which were made by Ms Merkel and her allies if in 2012 SYRIZA was to come to power still reverberate in our ears.

Was it a false alarm, in the end, or just a nice bluff?

I am not sure which of the two to choose. At any rate, the fact that one of the basic conclusions from the book that your esteemed newspaper has revealed the Chancellor of Germany is reading currently – Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers – is that the habitual use of threats of extreme choices as an instrument in politics implies the risk of those same threats functioning as a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Therefore, an accidental event somewhere in the southern periphery of Europe, or the obsession with erroneous blackmails, may result in dramatic and unanticipated developments in the entire continent.

In any case, one of the most obvious conclusions from Ms Merkel's statements at the European Council session of December 19, 2013, that your newspaper also revealed, is that the Eurozone remains too significant for it to be allowed to dissolve. And that all the links in its chain are equally important to its viability. If one, even the weakest of all, were to break, the Eurozone of today ceases to exist.

Indirectly, if perfectly clearly, with that statement of hers, Ms Merkel confirmed all the salient observations made by the European Left from the beginning of the crisis. She even gave an explanation about the great stress which both she and Mr Sarkozy demonstrated in Cannes at the prospect of having a referendum conducted in Greece. She singlehandedly cancelled the notorious Grexit, thereby exposing in the eyes of the people of Greece as politically selfish and unreliable those few and isolated doomsayers of the euro. In addition, she left exposed an array of consecutive Greek governments : from the one led by Mr George Papandreou to the one today led by Mr Antonis Samaras, which instead of vigorously negotiating in favor of Greece, became actually, and continue to be today, subservient to her commands.

Because, to the extent that the common currency remains non-negotiable, the economic policies of the monetary union countries themselves then become negotiable. All the more so since neither the austerity, nor the Memoranda, are presupposed by the European Treaties for entry and participation in the Eurozone. Instead, they are simply the result of an unfavorable balance of political power in Europe. This balance was formed by the compliance demonstrated on the part of social-democracy to the neo-liberal consent after the mid-90s. It is an orientation which proves today to be a political dead-end, in addition to being the result of the appearance of precarious and rather inadequate governments in the south of the Eurozone.

There is a book which I would recommend to Ms Merkel to read after the The Sleepwalkers, especially now, following her skiing accident, she will necessarily have more time.. It is the classic text, AMonetaryHistory of the United States 1867-1960, by Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz. She might then be able to grasp that she exceeds in monetary obsession even the intellectual father of monetarism. And that by imposing even today her ideological preconceptions on the simply nominal Central European Bank, she is entrapping the Eurozone as a whole, on the one hand, around a delicate point of balance with a zero or very low and certainly a jobless economic growth ; while on the other hand, she is entrapping the southern periphery inside the very risky for everybody – and especially for her own country – deterioration of the crisis, meaning the downward spiral between recession and a weak, superficial growth.

There may be a surprise in it for Ms Merkel in the realization that Friedman and Schwartz put the blame for the intensification of The Great Depression of 1929-1933 on the Federal Bank of the U.S. for refusing to act as a lender of last resort in the purchasing of federal bonds.

Still, as the sleepwalker of contemporary Europe, she fails both to see as well as take advantage of the following:

§ the fact that the U.S. government tackles the crisis by exercising an aggressive growth policy instead of a perennial austerity,

§ the proof reached through comparison that the austerity itself is the crisis – not the solution,

§ the undeniable corroboration derived from my own country, Greece, to the effect that the austerity policy has failed, thereby causing simultaneously an unprecedented for a European country at a time of peace humanitarian crisis, one that puts to shame the whole of Europe.

If together with the European Left and other political powers – in the South as well as in the North - if primarily the citizens of Europe, regardless of their country of residence and of their ways of voting, come to realize the political dynamic inside Ms Merkel¨s statement that the Eurozone signifies either everybody or nobody, then the end of austerity is near.

For the lies end here and so do the blackmails. Either we all change direction together towards a holistic re-orientation of the economic and monetary policy in Europe, or we say farewell to the idea of Europe from within the fury and the dust produced by the crumbling down of the common currency.

It is about time that those who sleepwalk will now come out of their slumber, for they are going to realize soon that their dream turned out to be a nightmare