Imagine
a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near
future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on
the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are
brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in
today's Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the
Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement - which won 7 per
cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support,
it's said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police - have been patrolling
the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans,
Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring
of 2012.
The
trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant
threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to
'civilisation' than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like
this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton
articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves:
'Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity
end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the
Church ... The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the
secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to
them.'
Many
liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism
that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may
fight terror. If the 'terrorists' are ready to wreck this world for love
of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy
out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so
much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It's an
inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start
out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing
their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the
aspects of secularism they hate.
But
Greece's anti-immigrant defenders aren't the principal danger: they are
just a by-product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that
have caused Greece's predicament. The next round of Greek elections will
be held on 17 June. The European establishment warns us that these
elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but maybe the fate
of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome - the right one,
they argue - would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery
through austerity to continue. The alternative - if the 'extreme
leftist' Syriza party wins - would be a vote for chaos, the end of the
(European) world as we know it.
The
prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of
our current democratic arrangements complain that elections don't offer a
true choice: what we get instead is the choice between a centre-right
and a centre-left party whose programmes are almost indistinguishable.
On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment (New
Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is
usually the case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in
a panic: chaos, poverty and violence will follow, they say, if the
wrong choice is made.
The
mere possibility of a Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of
fear through global markets. Ideological prosopopoeia has its day:
markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their 'worry' at what
will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate
to persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural
reform. The citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these
prospects: they have enough to worry about in their everyday lives,
which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades.
Such
predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about
the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European
establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an
attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity
between Brussels's technocracy and anti-immigrant populism. This is why
Alexis Tsipras, Syriza's leader, made clear in a recent interview that
his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic:
'People will conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be
blackmailed.'
Syriza
have an almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left
'madness', but of reason speaking out against the madness of market
ideology. In their readiness to take over, they have banished the left's
fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the mess
created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination
of principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to
act quickly and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a
minimal chance of success, they will need an all-European display of
solidarity: not only decent treatment on the part of every other
European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion of
solidarity tourism this summer.
In
his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that
there are moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief -
i.e., when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a
sectarian split. This is the position in Europe today. Only a new
'heresy' - represented at this moment by Syriza - can save what is worth
saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian
solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is
outmanoeuvred is a 'Europe with Asian values' - which, of course, has
nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of
contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.
Here
is the paradox that sustains the 'free vote' in democratic societies:
one is free to choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This
is why, when the wrong choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected
the EU constitution), the choice is treated as a mistake, and the
establishment immediately demands that the 'democratic' process be
repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George
Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the
eurozone bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was
rejected as a false choice.
There
are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the
German-European story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy,
free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to be brought under control and
taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our national
sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by
Brussels).
When
it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third
story emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in
need of help, as if a war or natural catastrophe had hit the country.
While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most
disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at war with the
European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in
their struggle, because it is our struggle too.
