The Name of the Game: Shaping Europe Through Self and Other

Abstract

Chapter 3 moves on from the book’s two central characters to the overall game in which their fraught relationship is embedded. How has the Greco-German saga affected the rest of the EU story? More specifically, how have the mutual ascriptions of Greeks and Germans affected their representations of the EU, and how has their perception of the EU game evolved as a result? The chapter discusses, in particular, the narratives of the EU’s promise of prosperity, turned into a threat thereof during the crisis; the ‘re-nationalisation’ of politics in Europe; and the fate of ‘the EU as an agent of progress’.

If Greeks and Germans have been involved in a game of identity cat-and-mouse, redefining themselves by looking at the Other, this story has not unfolded in a vacuum. Although the affair predates the EU and is not reducible to it, the EU created the drama in the first place. Greeks and Germans may have been talking—or shouting as the case may be—at one another, but their evolving relationship also was about redefining the game they were playing together. There is little doubt that the crisis and especially its Greek dimension triggered a moment of soul-searching regarding the normative cornerstones of our European construct. This happened both indirectly and explicitly, by way of the very concrete questions of what was owed to others in the EU context. Where does it leave Europe if its constituent peoples see each other as hearts of steel or lazy swindlers?

In this chapter, we show that the affair led to the challenging of traditional EU narratives about purpose and legitimacy. ¹ We analyse, in turn, how three narratives about the EU fared during the crisis: Is the EU still a promise of prosperity? What about overcoming national divisions? And can we still associate the EU with competent governance?

3.1 A Union of Prosperity?

As with any union, the European Union is predicated on the shared belief that we have more in common than what divides us and that the union will advance our prosperity and material well-being. So what happens to this premise when people start addressing each other as squanderers, misers or blackmailers across borders? Can they still believe that cooperation can lead to a mutually beneficial outcome?

3.1.1 From Promise to Threat

The fortunes of the EU have ebbed and flowed since its creation. But there is little doubt that the Euro crisis truly shattered the myth underpinning European integration, namely that the EU is about promoting prosperity across its member-states. The aspiration behind integration, in the words of the Treaty of Rome’s preamble, was nothing less than ‘the constant improvement of the living and working conditions of their peoples’. To be sure, the credibility of this promise had been dented before, for example with the economic crises of the 1970s, with the resistance to the introduction of economic and monetary union and the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s, or when the constitutional treaty’s ratification failed as many, not least in the French referendum debate in 2005, questioned the EU’s recipes for economic well-being. ² The Euro crisis, however, added new urgency to concerns that the EU, and the common currency, might not only fail to make the Europeans more prosperous, but might actually be turning into a threat to people’s individual and collective wealth. For Der Spiegel for example, the crisis was jeopardising the model of life to which the Europeans had gotten used. ³ The Euro had ‘paradoxically contributed to increasing prosperity’ as well as creating the very conditions for Europe’s ‘decline into poverty or even destruction’. ⁴

The EU has been transformed under our bewildered eyes, from promise of prosperity to threat to prosperity: a leitmotiv across the Greek newspapers, and many of the German articles which we surveyed. “The Greece of the crisis” was descending into a state of national depression as it became apparent that it would take years to overcome the crisis. To this day, the long-awaited turning point towards recovery is still wanting. The habitual headlines of the period continue to set the tone: ‘Rich Getting Richer and Poor getting Poorer in the Greece of the Crisis’ ⁵ ; ‘Do I Stay or Do I Leave the Greece of the Crisis?’ ⁶ ; ‘Suicides Up by 35% in the Greece of the crisis’ ⁷ ; ‘25,000 Children Born to Uninsured Parents Every Year In the Greece of the Crisis’. ⁸

In a nutshell, the crisis had starkly exposed and magnified the asymmetries of power that had been mitigated until then. Not surprisingly given their role as custodians and enforcers of the strict conditionality attached to Greece’s loans, the Commission, the ECB and the IMF as well as German and other EU member-state leaders came to be associated with (a million miles from any promise of prosperity) austerity, recession, social despair, as well as the imposition of a ‘breakdown of post war social acquisitions’ ⁹ —often portrayed as ‘a medicine worse than the illness’ it was meant to cure. ¹⁰ When the negotiations for a possible EU loan with IMF involvement were intensifying in April 2010, Avgi proclaimed that ‘the triple supervision of the country by the IMF, the EU and the ECB’ would mean ‘The End of the Welfare State’, illustrating this menace with the image of a meat grinder attached to a gun. ¹¹

The negative appraisal of the role of the European institutions in perpetuating, or even sparking, the Greek crisis was sometimes followed by the idea that entering the Eurozone had been a mistake in the first place, and that the Eurozone structurally disfavours Greece. ‘The problem’, in the words of Alexis Tsipras , had ‘the name “Eurozone”’. ¹² As the Euro crisis intensified, the argument was increasingly made that the common currency was designed to favour Germany and the rich Northern European member-states at the expense of the Southern periphery including Greece. EMU had deprived its member-states of monetary policy as an instrument for steering unemployment, consumption, growth, liquidity and inflation in exchange for a ‘one-size-fits-all approach’ to a currency area between countries with very diverse needs and interests. The difficulty for Greece and the Southern European countries was that they ‘followed a monetary policy tailored to the needs of another country’—‘euros being printed in Frankfurt rather than Cholargos’. ¹³ In addition, Germany, through Maastricht and EMU, had ‘solidified its supremacy in terms of labour productivity’, while taking away from its weaker partners their ‘traditional weapons’ for promoting competitiveness, namely the issuing and devaluation of the currency. ¹⁴ In that sense, the argument went, any balanced account of the economic costs and benefits of EU membership should consider not only the size of the transfers that Greece received from Germany through the structural funds or the rescue packages, but also the value of Greek net imports from Germany, which ‘in 29 years of coexistence means about 175 billion of Greek money to Germany’. ¹⁵ No matter that these high-end consumer goods were the mark of consumption nirvana for many Greeks.

Economic arguments were often combined with political ones, especially when stressing the way the more powerful countries always won the argument. And the left-wing end of the journalistic spectrum in particular was unsurprisingly fond of class -based political arguments, defining the euro as ‘an instrument through which the pressures of international competition are transferred into the labour market in order to ensure the discipline of the working classes and to consolidate the despotism of capital at the sites of production’. ¹⁶ Euro vs Labour: 1–nil.

The debate raged for a while in Greece as to whether the country would be better off unilaterally defaulting on its debt, leaving the Eurozone, and starting to rebuild its economy free from the Troika’s prescriptions. In spite of the obvious challenges, anything seemed better to those advocating this route than the Sisyphean effort of getting out of an otherwise intractable impasse.

The idea gained much credibility when Nobel Prize-winning economists Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz intervened in the debate on the occasion of the July 2015 referendum about the Troika’s proposed bailout conditions. The two Americans found a ready audience in both Greece and Germany (and elsewhere) and were widely translated, reprinted and quoted in the Greek press—‘Stiglitz: Europe’s attack against democracy’ ¹⁷ and ‘Krugman to the institutions: Be careful, Greece might leave the Euro and succeed!’ According to Stiglitz and Krugman, the European economies had ‘put themselves into an economic straightjacket’ by joining the Eurozone and had given up effective tools of governing their economies. ¹⁸ Stiglitz added that ‘concern for popular legitimacy [was] incompatible with the politics of the Eurozone, which [had never been] a very democratic project’. ¹⁹ They advised the Greeks to reject the austerity required by Greece’s creditors, even if this meant exiting the Eurozone. As Krugman put it, leaving the euro ‘would be hugely disruptive in the short run’, but it would ‘also offer Greece itself a chance for real recovery’, and not least ‘serve as a salutary shock to the complacency of Europe’s elites’. ²⁰ In Stiglitz’s opinion, voting for an acceptance of the creditors’ conditions ‘would mean depression almost without end’, whereas a ‘no’ vote ‘would at least open the possibility that Greece, with its strong democratic tradition, might grasp its destiny in its own hands. Greeks might gain the opportunity to shape a future that, though perhaps not as prosperous as the past, is far more hopeful than the unconscionable torture of the present’. ²¹

In the end, however, it does not seem that the rejection of the bailout conditions by Greek voters (by over 61%) encompassed a concomitant embrace of their alternative scenario. ²² No matter how unhappy Greeks were with the Eurozone game, they wanted to continue carrying Euros in their pockets.

3.1.2 Bottomless Pit

As the travails of the Greco-German affair came to be replicated elsewhere in Southern Europe, the Euro and its crisis came to stand for a threat to prosperity not just in the member-states in budgetary trouble but across the Eurozone. Even the Germans expressed fears of financial and economic crash, chiming with long-standing German discourses that saw monetary stability and fiscal conservatism as keys to prosperity. ²³ The country’s role as the key paymaster of the rescue measures played a central role in our sources, as did fears that the height of German contributions would get out of control and that a ‘chain reaction’ ²⁴ affecting the banking sector and the public purses far beyond Greece might lead to further Eurozone countries needing help, too. Bild’s headline on the May 2010 ‘emergency safety net’, meant to bolster international financial markets and prevent the crisis from damaging the Euro, was emblematic: ‘750 Billion for Bankruptcy -Neighbours: Once Again We are Europe’s Fools!’ ²⁵ In polemicizing that Germany should hold a German referendum on the Euro rescue, the tabloid conducted a poll among its readers that offered two options: ‘YES, keep throwing money at them’ and ‘No, not a cent more for the Bankruptcy Greeks , take the euro away from them’. ²⁶

The theme of any help to Greece falling into a bottomless pit and setting the course for additional instalments further down the line was captured in another Bild headline ‘Quest for New Billions for the Greeks: The Never-ending Story’. ²⁷ It resonated with the wording common in government circles that, in the absence of thorough political and administrative reform, including, for instance, reform of the tax and land registry systems, Greece would never be able to ‘live within her means’ (unless of course, it ‘reduced costs by lowering living standards’). ²⁸ A Spiegel cartoon depicted Merkel with an umbrella in a time series of images with speech or thought bubbles: initially, she remarks that ‘it’s just a tiny collapsible umbrella after all’, and then the umbrella progressively grows to enormous dimensions until, finally both her and her umbrella are carried away by a gust. ²⁹ Commentators doubted whether Greece would ever pay back any loans at all. ³⁰ The general sense was that ‘Everybody wants our money’. ³¹ This slogan appealed to both frustration and pride and was not without populist agitation potential.

The German leadership had to face the widespread reproach of making their country a sucker, by ensuring that ‘we’ll pay whatever happens’. ³² In this context, domestic politicians as well as commentators demanded ways of limiting Germany’s expenditure. They referred in particular to the German limit of liability, which the Federal Constitutional Court had affirmed, and pleaded for entrusting the Bundesbank with the responsibility of controlling this limit. ³³ These two much-trusted Federal institutions were thus to impose German checks on German contributions. This in addition of course to stringent conditionality of any payments was a leitmotiv we have encountered countless times. ³⁴

In addition to the uncertainty regarding quite how much Germany would pay to save the Euro in future, there was also much confusion as to how much it had spent already. This question was brought to a boil at different points in time as events unrolled. Bild kept a lurid, and at times self-contradicting count. ³⁵ It did not help that Merkel and Schäuble were long—and with reason—accused of talking down the costs of the Euro rescue to Germany for reasons of domestic politics, including by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, no less. ³⁶ Der Spiegel referred to Merkel’s ‘policy to expose voters to the truth in homeopathic doses’, and remarked that the Chancellor treated ‘the Germans like children, whose eyes one covers when reality is all too horrifying’. ³⁷ It did not help either that the German leadership did not provide the German public with the other side of the balance sheet, with an evaluation of how much the euro and even its crisis had benefitted the German economy.

Fuelled not least by this lack of clarity, the German coverage conveyed in parts a real fear that disaster would strike—and that Germany would be included, for better or for worse, in the ‘community of (doomsday) fate’, which the EU had morphed into. ³⁸ The popular commentators depicted themselves as Cassandras, heard but not headed, when calling not to help Greece on the grounds that it could not be helped; the financially sounder member-states should save themselves at least, avoiding the scenario described as ‘patient dead and saviour broke’. ³⁹

While the image of emptying national coffers prayed on Germans’ collective imagination, some also felt affected individually in their personal financial well-being. Bild, for example, drew a direct link between the Euro safety net of 750 billion and the fact that German tax cuts were failing to materialise. ⁴⁰ Likewise, a Spiegel cover headline in October 2012 extolled the ‘creeping dispossession’ of the German ‘average citizen’. ⁴¹ As a result of bond purchases and ‘ultra low interest rates’ with which the ECB ‘want[ed] to help the indebted states’, his ‘savings are being devoured by inflation’, and a ‘whole generation’ had to ‘fear for their retirement provision’. ⁴² This discourse was meant to stoke a sense of victimisation with the proverbial German “saver”, a stereotype that carries the double connotation of someone slightly ridiculous and petty minded, but also of admirable self-restraint, virtue and reason. Not only were such savers’ valiant efforts in the process of being undone, they were also in effect bearing the cost of the Euro rescue:

Interest rates are low because the ECB is flooding the Euro area with money to stabilize the system. Whoever saves is currently the idiot, and is being subtly expropriated […]. The taxpayers and the small depositors are thus financing the Euro-rescue—and from this, those who profit above all are the rich people in the crisis countries. ⁴³

3.1.3 United in Fear?

Against the skyrocketing costs of membership, however, stood the even greater risks of non-membership. What would happen if Greece were forced to leave the Euro? In Greece, defenders of Greece’s Eurozone membership argued that in spite of the economic hardship caused by the Euro crisis, a Grexit would simply exacerbate the situation, bringing on an economic catastrophe that would also threaten the country’s social and political stability. A genuine fear of the consequences of a possible Grexit influenced many of those engaged in public dialogue in Greece throughout the Euro crisis and especially before the July 2015 referendum . The Mayor of Athens, during a rally of the ‘Yes’ campaign in the run-up to the referendum , appealed ‘to the people who have become impoverished during these [past few] years: these people must not succumb to the temptation of “nothing”[…]. There is always something worse than a bad situation’. ⁴⁴ The day before the vote, a Professor of European Politics and Economics at the University of Athens, George Pagoulatos, warned in Kathimerini that ‘the day after the “No” the banks won’t open, for days or weeks’. He fleshed out the scenario, typical of this discursive position:

Deposits will be haircut – naturally debts will continue to be valid. Hundreds of thousands of people, households, and businesses will make huge losses. […] The phrase “business in Greece” will for many years evoke anger and derision among the destroyed entrepreneurs and investors. The 1.3 million unemployed who believe they have nothing to lose will be joined by some hundreds of thousands newly unemployed. The creative people who put their trust in this country and tried to start a business will pack their bags and leave. And the problem is not only that we will lose the best and most productive people. It is also that we will remain with the worst ones. […] This is how societies sink in vicious cycles of destruction. ⁴⁵

These fears also resonated in Germany. The vivid trauma of the 2008 financial crisis offered a powerful deterrent used repeatedly in efforts to mobilise support for successive rescue packages. Volker Kauder, chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, for example, canvassed for a new rescue package on the reminder of Lehman Brothers’ downfall and its role in triggering a global economic crisis. ⁴⁶ According to this German establishment discourse, ‘[t]he risk in simply letting Greece dip is enormous, and no one knows exactly what would happen’. ⁴⁷ Again we see the spellbound peering into the abyss. ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet and IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn’ warned that the alternative to the May 2010 rescue plan for Greece was nothing less than a ‘nuclear meltdown’, likewise drawing a parallel with the Lehman collapse. ⁴⁸ More soberly, Die Zeit detailed the ‘unpleasant consequences’ of a Greek exit specifically for Germany: ‘there would be a threat of new turbulences on the financial markets, which would burden the economy. And Germany would face losses of around 80 billion euro, partly because the Greeks could no longer service the credits they already obtained’. ⁴⁹ Bild, too, tried to quantify: ‘How much money is Germany going to lose in case of Greek bankruptcy ? ⁵⁰

Besides such discussions of the repercussions of a Grexit for Germany, the Eurozone and the global economy, the German political and media debate did engage with the consequences of a Greek exit for the Greeks as well. ⁵¹ The Stuttgarter Zeitung elaborated on how a return to the Drachma would imply ‘a mass expropriation of the population’ and quoted the Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras as predicting ‘never-seen poverty and unemployment’ in the case of Grexit. ⁵² This part of the debate once again appealed to sympathy for and solidarity with the suffering of the Greeks.

3.1.4 Cui Bono?

At the same time, it did not go unnoticed in either country that the Euro crisis, and generally the common currency, did promote prosperity —at least in Germany in spite of the plight of the “expropriated saver”. One favourable outcome from a German perspective was that the Germans could borrow money ‘almost for free’—not just individual homeowners or consumers, but also the Bund, whose debts could increase year by year with interest rates still falling. True, this effect arguably amounted to a ‘redistribution’, comparable to a tax, from the many German savers to borrowers. ⁵³ Notwithstanding, as Martin Schulz noted, overall ‘Germany is the country that profits most from the Euro’ and among those in which ‘the population profits most from the EU’. Ironically, however, ‘the impression is being conveyed that it constantly has to pay for the others. […] This is objectively not correct’. ⁵⁴

The benefits of the crisis to the German economy did get widely reported from the very beginning of the crisis. Even Bild featured periodical headlines such as ‘Low Euro Exchange Rate makes it Possible: Bankruptcy Greeks Bring Us Economic Boom’. ⁵⁵ Der Spiegel quoted the head of a technology company who noted that the weak currency and low interest rates bring about ‘the same effect as an economic stimulus package’ (adding that ‘we do need this prosperity, for it is inevitable after all that we are presented with the bill for the euro at the end of the day’). ⁵⁶ Germans, in Der Spiegel’s words, emerged from the crisis as the great winners, with pension funds, insurance companies etc.—as well as banks making direct profits from loans—hardly knowing where to invest all their money. ⁵⁷ As early as 2010, the Stuttgarter stated, Germany had ‘already received more in interest rates for the Greek aid than its financing cost itself’, and this effect would be multiplied in the future so that the ‘current helpers’ would ‘find themselves the winners’. ⁵⁸

To balance such a lopsided diagnosis, and while it would have been inconsiderate to argue that the Greeks were in any way the beneficiaries of the crisis, commentators did remind their readers that Greece’s prosperity had benefited from EU and EMU membership over the years and would continue to do so in future. Those stressing the direct redistributive aspects of the EU construct often pointed to the EU structural funds (known in Greece as the ‘ESPA’ funds). ⁵⁹ During a rally of the Yes campaign at Kallimarmaro stadium on 3 July 2015, diverse stakeholder representatives directly benefiting from the structural funds were given the floor to explain the measures that had been made possible through EU funding. The speakers included schoolteachers, business owners, farmers, organisations for the disabled, representatives of the Roma community and others. On another occasion, a Kathimerini journalist stressed the numerous activities that had become part of daily life in Greece and were inextricably linked with the EU:

How will the networks for the production of ideas, infrastructure, goods, and progress be sustained without the dozens of European financing programmes in all sectors? Without ESPA and OPs and ROPs, without Life, Interreg, Med, Urbact, Progress, without Comenius and Erasmus and Youth in Action, without Leonardo Da Vinci and Build Up Skills, without NER-300, Horizon 2020, etc.? Without restraints in the thoughtless use of funds, the uncontrolled disposal of waste, without the European experience in the protection of cultural heritage and of the landscape? ⁶⁰

Relatedly, others pointed to the economic potential that some of the structural reforms on which the Europeans insisted could unleash in years to come. These reforms, accordingly, would lead to an increase in production and productivity, which were the preconditions for the rise in demand and the redistribution of income ‘that everyone in the Greek political class [was] preaching about’. ⁶¹ In this light, the conditionality game could be seen as some sort of a solution, since after all, ‘it wasn’t the foreigners who imposed the wastefulness, the disorganization and the corruption that sank Greece into debt’. ⁶²

For the optimists then, remaining a member of the Eurozone was about playing the long game, a commitment that would indeed pay off at least in the long run, despite all the costs and conditions that came with it. National interest was still frequently invoked as a reason for remaining committed to European integration, in line with a discursive tradition as old as European integration itself. ⁶³ In Germany, the benefits from the common currency, and even its crisis, were sufficiently apparent for both European unity and any rescue measures to continue to be portrayed as serving Germany’s long-term interests (remember not least the explanation in terms of the tight-fisted Swabian housewife ’s reasoning that it was better to spend a little more than to loose everything one has already invested). In Greece, too, a vocal group of commentators continued to argue against EU detractors that Greece would best recover its economic dynamism as an EU member.

But overall, the European story was being couched as a zero-sum game, where gains for one member-state meant losses for another. The “Pareto efficient” idea that the EU was about a bigger “cake” for everyone, without making anyone else worse off, seemed discredited once and for all by Euro crisis. The early EC discourse that had focused on establishing that there was such a thing as a common European interest, over and above national interests, lost all credibility. ⁶⁴ While this narrative was contested early on and throughout the history of integration, ⁶⁵ the Euro crisis sounded the death knell for the narrative of a European common good furthered by European integration. The divergences between the Eurozone countries made monetary union look like anything but a mutually beneficial enterprise. Rather, the Eurozone emerged as ridden with unresolvable conflicts of interest, tainting in turn the EU as a whole.

3.2 Europe Re-Nationalised?

In addition to prosperity , however, the idea of a European common good furthered by European integration rested centrally on two further legitimating narratives. First, that European integration safeguarded peace in Europe and helped Europeans overcome national divisions. Second, that it offered enlightened social engineering and governance on the basis of expert rationalities and competent policy-making. ⁶⁶ In some member-states, the progress ushered by European integration even became synonymous with modernity. The EU would help overhaul obsolete national practices, structures and institutions through both the obligations which it entailed and the mutual accommodation which it encouraged. Did these promises survive? How could the EU stand for the overcoming of national selfishness through social progress and a better life for all, when thousands were using Nazi imagery to protest against imposed austerity and its implications in the streets of Southern Europe? When there were such hard-wearing discourses about Europe’s decision-making elites at a loss as to what course of action to take in the face of the crisis? We shall now turn to the question of whether the crisis brought about a “renationalisation” of politics in Europe, of which there was much talk in both countries’ press, before moving to the questions of how the crisis affected the portrayal of the EU as a moderniser.

3.2.1 Germanisation, or Nationalisation?

In the early years of integration, references to the European common good had often gone in tandem with calls to leave “national thinking” behind. These ideas had been particularly resonant in Western Germany until the early 1990s, but have continued to represent an important discursive strand in German public discourse since then. ⁶⁷ The project of EU citizenship had been a deliberate attempt at rooting post-national thinking in popular mindsets and mentalities. ⁶⁸ De Gaulle’s counterpoint of a “Europe of the nations” in the 1960s, and significant resistance to the Maastricht and Draft Constitutional Treaties’ ratification in the mid-1990s and mid-2000s had already re-tilted the discursive balance in Europe towards national interests. This discursive counter-movement had now intensified. Indeed, throughout the time period covered by our study, there was much talk of how the Euro crisis was triggering a ‘growing re-nationalisation in Europe’. ⁶⁹

In Greece, this re-nationalisation was mainly understood as the result of the resurgence of other countries’ (and particularly Germany’s) inward-looking or nationalistic reflexes. As we discussed in Chapter 2, the Greek press often fell to the temptation to draw parallels to Germany’s Nazi past, at least implicitly. Germany’s renewed assertiveness was seen by several journalists as having led to the ‘Germanisation of Europe’, as in: ‘the European Union is led to “Germanisation”’ ⁷⁰ ; ‘some don’t believe in a united Europe, but in a German Europe’ ⁷¹ ; ‘German Europe is at a standstill’. ⁷² Even though it had several domestic propagators, the idea of the Germanisation of Europe also gained credibility through its use by non-Greek commentators eagerly translated in the Greek press, such as the sociologist Ulrich Beck ’s assertion in Avgi that his country was becoming introverted, a country that ‘has stopped being the most European of Europeans’, and that is ‘recasting the “German problem” in the European context’. ⁷³ Similarly, a commentator in Kathimerini quoted Oxford’s Timothy Garton Ash, who observed that ‘the policy of the European Union is undergoing fundamental change, with Germany becoming increasingly willing to absolve itself of the shackles of the past and to make its voice heard’. The commentator remarked that ‘from now on, we will live in a more German Europe, with an economic policy that will be determined by the “exports or death” model of ascetic Berlin’. ⁷⁴

For some, the Germanisation of Europe had gone so far that the decision-making process in Brussels now fully reflected the preferences of the German government and, rather than serving the European common good , the European institutions had been reduced to serving the national interest of Germany (or at best also that of her close allies in the Eurogroup, for example Finland and the Netherlands). As a result, ‘Berlin’ and ‘Brussels’ were typically considered together or interchangeably as imperialist agents trying to subjugate Greece, as in the titles ‘the Brussels-Frankfurt axis has become Greece’s economics super-ministry’ ⁷⁵ and ‘Barroso, Rompuy and Schäuble demand submission to the Memorandum’. ⁷⁶ A cartoon published by Kathimerini in 2010 showed Greece’s Finance Minister George Papakonstantinou preparing to meet with the ‘inspectors from the European Union’, taking off his jacket and starting to whip himself as the inspectors come into the room, upon which the latter exclaim, ‘sehr gut!’ ⁷⁷ Nikos Kotzias, at the time Professor of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus and later Foreign Minister of the Syriza-ANEL governments, elaborated on these arguments in his book ‘Greece: Debt Colony—The European Empire And German Primacy’, in which he described the EU as turning into an empire, with Germany as its ‘New Rome’. ⁷⁸

Greece of course may have seen others as harping back to the national interest frame, but most of its commentators almost exclusively focused on the imperative of ‘protecting Greece’ rather than on some European common good to which Greece ought to contribute. Even calls by left-wing newspapers to move towards a ‘Europe of solidarity ’ were seldom accompanied by a vision that went beyond noting the anti-memorandum support by kindred political movements and parties abroad (especially Die Linke ). ⁷⁹ While this introversion could be seen as the result of short-term hardship, the defensive discourse against Europe, which emphasises national resistance against European imperialism, has a long pedigree in Greek national debate. ⁸⁰ Let’s recall for instance how soon after Greece’s accession to the European Economic Community in 1981, the then PASOK leader Andreas Papandreou, who was about to win a landslide victory in the upcoming national elections with 48% of the vote, described the accession treaty as a ‘monument of national subjugation and betrayal of the interests of the people’, through which the right-wing government ‘surrendered Greece in shackles to foreign interests and monopolies’. ⁸¹ While many in Greece had hope that the long-standing self-understanding of Greeks as underdogs in the European arena had been mostly overcome through the co-ownership of EU policies, the Troika’s growing influence over Greek socio-economic policy easily reawakened both the fears and the discourse which stoked them. ⁸²

German commentators also stressed the discursive shift towards national interests, but tended to start at home more than Greece did. The German government was often held responsible for this change of perspective. ‘Merkel’s policy on Europe’, said Ulrich Beck , ‘has isolated Germany, woken the spectre of a German Europe, created massive resistance , and has proven counterproductive’. ⁸³ Re-nationalisation was usually seen as part of a broader phenomenon across Europe at large, not limited to Germany. Were the images of violent Greek protests adorned by Merkel-as-Nazi, seen as the proof that Focus was right to picture the Greeks as uncivilised? Was the EU no longer capable of mitigating the old national divisions as well as German power preponderance? It seemed that the Euro had turned Germany into a hegemon, however reluctant, without giving Germany a purpose in how to use this power against the reigniting of old national cleavages across the EU.

Another important discourse championed by left circles including in particular economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, called for the re-nationalisation of monetary policy and decision-making in European politics. ⁸⁴ This rested on the democratic deficit of the EU, as greatly exacerbated by the crisis. Enormously consequential decisions were being taken by institutions that had to ‘pay no political price’ for them. ⁸⁵ Accordingly, the crisis had only exposed how EMU’s and the EU’s institutional logic inherently favoured economic liberalisation, pushed through by EU institutions and ‘authoritarian liberal strategists such as Wolfgang Schäuble ’, while side lining any opposing forces such as parliaments, trade unions, critical publics or organised civil society. ⁸⁶

3.2.2 Community of Fate and Responsibility

There was, however, a competing storyline. Rather than reviving primordial nationalist instincts, the crisis was actually turning the EU more than ever into a ‘community of fate ’. ⁸⁷ Accordingly, the currency union indissolubly tied the member-states to one another in their destiny, for better or for worse. Only together could the European ‘community of fate ’ overcome a crisis which was after all imported from Wall Street, argued Merkel, ⁸⁸ and in the process turn it into a ‘community of responsibility ’, in which Greece’s ‘enormous efforts face enormous European solidarity ’. This meant not letting Greece ‘bleed to death’ and slip into ‘chaos and violence’—matched, the Chancellor did not fail to remind her audience, by an obligation on the part of Greece to play by the rules of the community, which was also a ‘community of law’. ⁸⁹ In 2017, SPD Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel captured the idea of a community of shared destiny when warning that Europe ‘will not be strengthened by being amputated’, ruling out any prospect of Greece leaving the Eurozone, even temporarily as Schäuble had proposed in 2015. ⁹⁰

References to the inescapable interdependence between Eurozone and even EU members often involved a concept of path dependence, whereby institutions, once in place, became irreversibly entrenched. ‘You can’t unscramble scrambled eggs’, one German economist commented on the unacceptably excessive costs of undoing monetary union. ⁹¹ Tying European nation states into a shared institutional framework that irrevocably intertwined their welfare and disincentivised unilateralism had been one of the key functionalist motivations behind European integration. ⁹² Provided all played by the rules, that is. As one German politician put it: ‘We have built a European house and it was a mistake to accept Greece into it’. But now that the ‘roof structure’ is burning ‘we on the ground floor cannot suddenly say that this is none of our business’. ⁹³ The metaphor of a fire for the Greek debt and the euro crisis was widespread, and the need to extinguish this fire appeared to be a matter of urgency, leaving no time or little room for theoretical debate on the ideal course of action. ⁹⁴

In this context, it was the inescapable interdependence between European countries in the face of global turmoil in general and the financial crisis in particular that justified hanging on together and making the Euro work. Germans after all had been deeply attached to the Deutschmark and their support for the Euro only been out of the absolute necessity resulting from a globalised financial and economic system. Now more than ever, Europeans’ only chance of regaining agency over their fate, and over the Euro crisis, was to work together. In fact, the current situation presented an ‘enormous risk’ of a complete loss of control, that is, a global economic crisis if Europe failed to help Greece to stabilise. ⁹⁵ The German public seemed generally to understand that the Euro and Greek debt crisis had only intensified, and laid bare, how much the European demoi had come to be at each other’s mercy.

If European countries’ interdependence was a salient topic in public discussion in the economically strongest country of the EU, it was even more so in Greece, the country that was gradually and painfully becoming increasingly aware of its own fragility. Many Greeks saw losing the support of Greece’s longest-standing partners and leaving the ‘big hug of Europe’ ⁹⁶ as tantamount to economic and geopolitical folly. ⁹⁷ In April 2015, as it was becoming clear that the negotiations between the newly elected Syriza-ANEL government and Greece’s lenders were reaching a dead end, a cartoonist in Kathimerini uttered a cry of agony over the ‘deepening rift’ between Greece and the EU (see Image 3.1). ⁹⁸

Image 3.1

Kathimerini 26/04/2015 (Dimitris Hantzopoulos): ‘ Tsipras … The port is leaving…’

Crucially, the idea that Greece’s interests were inextricably tied with its continued Eurozone membership was not confined to the 2015 ‘Yes’ campaign. After all, even Syriza members in their majority argued that the Syriza-ANEL government’s negotiations with Greece’s lenders ought not to endanger the country’s position in the Eurozone, since Eurozone membership was a ‘strategic choice’ for the party. ⁹⁹ According to Tsipras , ‘the country’s European course “can be taken for granted”’. ¹⁰⁰ Characteristically, four days before the July 2015 referendum , Avgi claimed in its cover page that ‘Schäuble clarified that Greece won’t leave from the Euro even if No prevails’. ¹⁰¹ Any claims to the contrary were summarily dismissed as ‘scaremongering’, ¹⁰² demonstrating by default how negative the connotations associated with this scenario.

3.2.3 Mortal Europe, More Europe, and a Different Europe

Nevertheless, and much before Brexit, the Greco-German affair did bring to light something that had long been unspeakable and even unthinkable: European integration was no longer irreversible. Talk of Grexit, whether as desirable or anathema, became ubiquitous. We were finally ‘experiencing Europe’s mortality’. ¹⁰³ The prospect was truly disorientating not only for both our protagonists but also for the rest of Europe. Merkel put it most starkly: ‘If the Euro dies, Europe dies’. ¹⁰⁴ But Beck echoed many other commentators in his quip that Europe felt like a ‘marriage that is not yet divorced only because one is afraid of the consequences’. In these kinds of musings, were Greece and Germany stand-ins for all their peers in the European Council? Was the diagnosis about Europe, the odd couple’s writ large, a couple that had become so mutually dependent as to be inseparable whether or not their initial bond was still alive? And was the use of the term ‘Europe’ to refer to the threat of the European Union’s break up a way to evoke fears of an even greater order?

But then again there is nothing like the vivid prospect of mortality to serve as a wake-up call. Talk of Europe’s mortality seemed to reawaken ‘the dream of a new Europe’. ¹⁰⁵ The ‘new’ here most often amounted to calling for “more Europe” as the answer to the EU’s existential crisis—a theme used early on by Wolfgang Schäuble . ¹⁰⁶ But of course what ‘more Europe’ entailed varied. Some voices centred on “political union” or fiscal, budgetary and financial coordination. Der Spiegel among others commended the ‘courageous plan’ of the heads of the European institutions (Barroso, Juncker, Van Rompuy and Draghi) to complete what Merkel had called the ‘dame without abdomen’, i.e. EMU, with political union. The magazine found that ‘everyone agreed that the currency union had to be turned into a political union’—only ‘what this meant concretely was controversial between Berlin and Paris, Helsinki or Rome’. ¹⁰⁷ One widely reported version was the ‘programmatic call upon the social democrats’ by Jürgen Habermas , philosopher Julian Nida-Rümelin, and economist Peter Bofinger. In their opinion, what needed to be done was ‘obvious’ (and of course diametrically opposed to those advocating a re-nationalisation of powers):

Only a clear deepening of integration would enable us to keep a common currency alive without making a never-ending chain of aid measures, which would, in the long run, overstrain the solidarity of the European state peoples on both sides, giver and taker countries. A sovereignty transfer to European institutions is inevitable to this end, in order to effectively enforce fiscal discipline and to guarantee a stable financial system. In addition, the financial, economic, and social policies of the member-states need to be coordinated more strongly with a view to balancing structural imbalances in the common currency area. […] ¹⁰⁸

The ‘institutional safeguarding of a common fiscal, economic, and social policy’ that they called for was a matter of absolute and self-evident necessity, the only viable alternative to a return to national currencies in the whole of the EU which ‘would expose every individual country to the incalculable fluctuations of highly speculative currency markets’. Germany, they concluded, should take a lead in mustering the hitherto lacking political will, and the European Parliament and the European Council should be strengthened as the EU’s democratic institutions so as to legitimate the inevitable redistributive effects.

In contrast, others flatly rejected “more Europe” as unrealistic or even undesirable: ‘Stop dreaming!’ was the headline of a Bild commentary that suggested that the ‘European Union has got to master its crises as it is—in the framework it has’. Any more far reaching efforts at institutional reform, it cautioned, would fail against the resistance of European citizens. One Bild commentator flatly dismissed Habermas’ et al. programmatic call as an example of ‘howling at the moon’. ¹⁰⁹ Unsurprisingly in the light of this divergence of opinions, ‘more Europe’ (or ‘federalism’) has been shown to have been ‘both taboo and pervasive’ in the Chancellor’s speeches around European summits between 2010 and 2013. ¹¹⁰

Others demanded, rather than just “more Europe”, a different kind of Europe, often focusing on an alternative economic approach. Martin Schulz and Ulrich Beck, for example, both argued that the EU ought to provide an ‘alternative to what Angela Merkel contends is without alternative, that is, the austerity policy’ (Schulz). Not only was this necessary, but it would be possible thanks to a Merkel-Hollande alliance (Beck). ¹¹¹ As we discussed under the rubric of ‘revolutionary nostalgia’, some Germans were truly fascinated by Greek resistance to the austerity measures and the possibility it opened up for alternatives to current Eurozone policies and more radically to the global financialised capitalist system in its present form. Pressures to give up on Merkel’s ‘austerity dictate’, not only from Hollande, but also from ECB President Draghi, and the Southern European governments and electorates, were widely reported, and their proposed alternatives explored. ¹¹²

As a result, as with any affair which goes sour, it became harder and harder for other member-states not to take sides, leading to an awareness in both countries that the EU was being split by the ongoing saga, not only materially but also in the public imaginary. The cleavage between rich and poor was not necessarily congruent with the cleavage between creditor and debtor countries, which in turn was not quite the same as countries with their finances in order and those without, a fact which took a long time to percolate in Greek reporting. As a result, there were countries and publics who resented an EU that became a channel for redistributing funds to Greece when they were actually poorer than Greece (eastern Europeans and Baltics states), while there were those who saw the EU forcing redistribution across countries upon them as if they were punished for their success. Either way, ‘redistributive EU’ was coming up against the hard constraint of domestic politics, in an increasingly re-nationalised EU. Post-nationalism and cosmopolitanism à la EU were all well and good, but when it came to budgets, unemployment and similar ‘significant numbers’, one could no longer afford to dream the dream of a Europe united beyond national divisions. At least a neoliberal Europe left redistributive choices up to the markets!

3.2.4 European Domestic Politics

One of the paradoxes of the Greco-German affair is that even while it led to the kind of raw assertion of national interests which the European integration had meant to tame, it also visibly increased the curiosity exhibited by national newspapers about political debates and developments in other European countries.

As early as May 2010, for instance, Greek journalists paid unprecedented attention to the German regional elections of North Rhine-Westphalia, both to understand the ways in which these elections had been influenced by the recently signed first loan package for Greece, and, admittedly more selfishly, because they knew that the electoral results would influence the federal government’s future stance towards Greece. Accordingly ‘Greece, Germany, and the whole of Europe have paid dearly for this pre-election campaign’, as Chancellor Merkel ‘desperately’ resorted to ‘the populism of coffee-shops – “not a cent for the good-for-nothing Greeks”’. ¹¹³ Other articles explained that turning the EU into a transfer union was highly unlikely on the part of German politicians who ‘would not be able to explain to German voters’ why the tax reductions that the Christian Democrats had promised before coming into power were not materialising, ‘while aid is being given to Greece’. ¹¹⁴

Regardless of its tone, Greek reporting was opening the black box of German domestic politics with increasing frequency. As Kathimerini explained, Greeks ‘observe carefully the multitude of foreign publications and statements that concern Greece’, as ‘the fortune of the country is not only on Greek hands, but also on foreign hands’. At the same time, Greek politicians must understand ‘that their behaviour cannot exclusively target the internal audience’. ¹¹⁵ After all, agreements about loans to Greece had to be ratified by other national parliaments, and for this reason, it was important for the Greek governments to know not only their own red lines, but ‘also the red lines of the others’. ¹¹⁶ In short, the public at large was invited to a broader kind of strategic negotiation analysis of the situation than it had ever been used to.

On the German side, Angela Merkel actively promoted the label of ‘European domestic politics ’—using it ‘more and more often’ to refer to ‘an entirely new level of cooperation in Europe’, or for ‘European politics gradually morphing into domestic politics’. In one of the numerous articles expanding on the idea, Zeit presented it as a counterpoise to the much-discussed ‘renationalisation’ of politics in Europe. ¹¹⁷ To be sure, the two sides—re-nationalisation of European politics and the Europeanisation of the domestic—spoke to a common sense that European politics was being re-grounded in national political spheres, both through the channels of electoral democracy or alternatively in the methods and targets of political activism and the like.

This new way of doing politics in Europe was said to manifest itself in various ways. National ministers and heads of government met their EU counterparts more frequently than their fellow national cabinet members; new policy areas were moving ‘centre-stage in Europe that used to be distinctly national domains: pension age, labour law, wage policy, budgetary questions’; and crucially, national elections were now means by which countries were ‘negotiating European issues’, and had immediate implications for the lives of people in other member-states. ¹¹⁸

A distinct quality of European politics as domestic politics was that the people, and the interconnected demoi, had to look for ways to make their voices heard over and above elections . This had become necessary as Merkel, in particular, ‘determines large parts of European policy, but only has to be justify herself to her German voters. The others can only abuse her, not vote her out of office’. ¹¹⁹ As a result, strikes and demonstrations seemed to be the only ways to oppose externally imposed policies in Southern member-states. Some German commentators even raised the possibility of a ‘European civil war’. ¹²⁰

The phrase ‘European domestic politics ’ was also an attempt at putting “politics” and thus contestation back into an EU dominated by a German-designed technocratic logic. If the EU’s supposedly rational decision-making had long been seen as removed from democratic will-formation, it was now de-politicised no more! ¹²¹ To be sure, the opposing reading was powerful, whereby the crisis was turning the EU into an ‘authoritarian, expertocratic Super-Europe’, further away than ever from the politicisation and democratic scrutiny of public policy. ¹²² The EU still lacked a ‘forum for deliberating a European common good disputatiously and with consequences’, bemoaned the Germans, while national forums had yet to learn to articulate their concerns in ways relevant to other Europeans. ¹²³

3.3 Embodiment of Progress, Competent Governance and Modernisation?

At the end of the day, perhaps the greatest selling point for the EU across Europe has traditionally been its promise of progress. In this section, we hone in on three variants of this narrative of progress and ask how they have fared in both countries and beyond. More specifically, we focus on notions of the EU as an agent of competent governance, a source of empowerment against market imperatives, and a harbinger of the modernisation of national institutions.

3.3.1 Saviours Without a Plan

The crisis generated profound challenges to the old conception of the EU as a locus of competent governance by technically skilful and politically astute leaders, who cooperate in European platforms in order to restore a degree of political agency over global markets that would have been impossible at the national level. Indeed, the Eurozone crisis exposed the limits of the competence , commitment and agency of policymakers, experts and politicians alike. While the EU had long laid claim to incorporating Europeans’ chance of regaining political agency over economics and the imperatives of globalisation, the contrary seemed much closer to the truth, a concern much closer to people’s hearts.

Habermas et al.’s assertion that the necessary measures to save the Euro and Europe were self-evident was a recurrent narrative in the German debate and coverage, implying that the failings which had led to the crisis could have been and could still be avoided, if only political leaders were up to it.

If we start at the beginning of this storyline, the German media did not stop at debtor countries, and the blame game we explored extensively in the previous chapter. Wasn’t the EU, too, responsible for letting the problem spill over from such a small country as Greece? ¹²⁴ For many, the root of the problem was inherent in the institutional form of the currency union. References abounded to the significant ‘construction mistakes’ that had ‘to a large extent produced the problems of the Euro’, a currency not backed up by common fiscal and economic policies, or ‘political’ and ‘fiscal union’. ¹²⁵

To some, the flawed structure of the Euro was cause enough for giving up on the project altogether. This formed the argumentative foundation for all types of demands discussed in the previous section: to abandon the common currency entirely, to limit its remit to the member-states who fulfilled the criteria for an optimal currency area, or to simply force the countries in deepest budgetary trouble to exit. For others, however,

if the currency is the problem, then it is also the solution. In that case, it is not national and cultural idiosyncrasies that endanger the currency community, but specific construction mistakes, which can be repaired. In that case, an efficient debt break [Schuldenbremse] would be more important than the federal [or unitary] state [Einheitsstaat]. ¹²⁶

Yet others pointed the finger back home, and more specifically to the German chancellor’s handling of the debt crisis. Much was made of Merkel’s ‘indecision’, from 2010 onwards, with which she ‘led Greece to the abyss’. ¹²⁷ Always with an eye to domestic electoral politics, Merkel and her government were unhelpfully and cynically dragging their feet. ¹²⁸ In this way, they had made the Euro rescue much more expensive than if had they gotten their act together immediately. A ‘quick and courageous relief operation at the start of the banking crisis would have been the lesser evil’, but the chancellor ‘did not even try to explain [this] inland’ because ‘she knows that aid for Greece is unpopular with the Germans’. ¹²⁹

Very similar arguments were made in Greece, with commentators accusing the German and European elites of incompetence, indecision, short-termism, an inability to discern the full implications of their decisions. In short, a lack of vision all around. A journalist in Kathimerini criticised European leaders for ‘sustaining the climate of uncertainty and the attacks of the markets with their critical statements’ and argued that the European leaders ‘resort to a herd behaviour of scolding Greece in order to hide the Eurozone’s inability to act that results from its internal contradictions’ ¹³⁰ ; ‘it is high time for the politicians of both [Greece and Germany] to become serious’, the journalist concluded. ¹³¹ Going a step further, an Avgi title story argued that ‘behind all the mayhem’ of the negotiations between the Greek government and the lenders in the first half of 2015 lay ‘the disagreements among the lenders themselves. The IMF, the Commission, the ECB, and the pawns of Schäuble all had different priorities’. The author further exclaimed, ‘it’s not possible that much-needed reforms are constantly blocked by the petty interests of German pressure groups or by the administrative rigidity of the IMF’, adding sarcastically that among other consequences, these disagreements ‘confuse the domestic pro-Memorandum bloc, which has difficulties understanding the line to take’. ¹³²

While some Greek commentators saw German ulterior interests behind the EU’s apparent inability to come up with a sustainable solution to the crisis, German journalists offered a number of explanations for the German and European politicians’ indecision. As we have seen above, one explanation had to do with the likely electoral costs of a quick and decisive German intervention. But beyond that, experts and politicians were portrayed as simply being at a loss as to what to do, often disagreeing among themselves, and their problem-solving capacity was questioned with unprecedented vehemence. The general feeling was that of an intractable challenge. This was captured, for example, in Der Spiegel’s headline ‘Saviour Without Plan’, ¹³³ or in Die Zeit asking: ‘How can we get out of this? The Germans are grappling over the future of the euro. And no one admits how little they know’. ¹³⁴ In addition, commentators quickly picked up on clashing interests between Germany and its EU partners. Der Spiegel drew an image of ‘All Against One’, of heads of government everywhere pressurising Merkel to ‘save the Euro’, but of the rescue plans being ‘half-baked and risky’. ¹³⁵ It even ran an in-depth article on the implications of the ‘chronic crisis’ on the ‘psyche of the politicians’. ¹³⁶ The crisis had exposed the soul of Europe’s body politics.

In Germany, the phrase ‘muddling through ’ achieved emblematic status, even if it meant all things to all people; in essence, while countries like Greece could be put under ‘programme conditionality’ within the existing treaty framework, there was bound to be a makeshift or ad hoc quality to EU action, forever delaying addressing the root of the problem. ¹³⁷ And while German commentators tended to see their country as the main muddle-through culprit—against the stereotypical self-image of thoroughness—this was also presented as a newly acquired virtue. After all, Germany was given a lead role in this new-found art. Finance minister Schäuble defined muddling through as taking one small step at a time, as opposed to attempting a sweeping blow against the debt crisis, which would be impossible to achieve given diverging member-state preferences and domestic political resistance . Europe, he insisted, had always progressed by the principle of incomplete integration, ‘and takes the next step in the knowledge that we do not yet have the perfect solution’. The great steps towards strong institutional structures for the currency union, which he himself would favour,

…we will not achieve. And hence one has to manage with different instruments, with smaller steps. […] But the main thing is, he says, that the direction is right; “when we cannot accomplish the best solution, we choose the second best”. ¹³⁸

To be sure, Merkel’s own attempts to frame the sluggish crisis intervention as deliberate strategy—on the grounds that a sustainable change in financial misgovernment was the only promising crisis approach—were generally not granted much credibility in spite of her continued personal popularity. ‘A good European is not necessarily he who helps quickly’, she declared as early as March 2010 in the Bundestag. Rather, a good European was he who had his sights on the stability of the Eurozone. ¹³⁹

3.3.2 Markets as the Lords of Politics

With all said and done, many commentators turned to the ultimate culprits: the banking sector and the financial markets. Bild’s narratives involved Merkel and ‘the politicians’ heroically resisting the May 2010 rescue package , but in the end ‘even Angela Merkel laying down arms’. ‘Why?’, it asked, ‘what browbeats them so? [Merkel] knows: politics has been blackmailed by banks and financial markets. Once again’. ¹⁴⁰ Indeed, nearly any government strategy could be defended in view of the alternative, the uncontrollable response to be expected on the part of the financial markets. Former chancellor Helmut Schmidt weighed in, accusing investment banks and rating agencies of having ‘become the lords of world politics’, ¹⁴¹ blamed for ‘lining their pockets’, ¹⁴² in the face of people’s suffering and for actively making things worse, undermining every attempt at alleviating the crisis. ¹⁴³ The financial culprits were ‘pouring oil into the fire’ while ‘we are struggling to extinguish the fires’ (Austrian Chancellor) ¹⁴⁴ or betting on national insolvencies, forcing politicians into a ‘dramatic race against speculators’. ¹⁴⁵ These narratives fully resonated in Greece, with two commentators in Avgi asking rhetorically, with reference to the rating agencies, whether ‘unreliable evaluators should be entitled to evaluate’ the economies of entire countries without following transparent rules or being democratically accountable. ‘This situation cannot continue’, the commentators argued. ‘The smallest and weakest countries and their peoples are the easiest victims and fall prey to [the rating agencies’] actions’. ¹⁴⁶

With the rapidly spreading discourse on “the power of the markets ”, ¹⁴⁷ Greeks and Germans could at least find themselves somewhat on the same side, the common enemies balancing the asymmetry of power between them. So did other cleavages become attenuated between small and large, weak and strong, northern and southern member-states who ultimately, were all subject to the whims of the markets and whose political classes shared in their sense of powerlessness. For Helmut Schmidt and others, this did not have to be the case. A vacuum of statesmanship in the rest of Europe—of the kind needed to create a banking watchdog and effective financial markets—explained ‘why the investment bankers and the rating agencies who are paid by them could turn into the masters of world politics’. ¹⁴⁸ The commentators in Avgi could not have agreed more: rating agencies should be subject to a transparent European regulatory framework, which would be set up and overseen by EU institutions. ¹⁴⁹ Short of that, the ‘absence of a European policy to face the crisis [...] encourages the markets to continue speculating against the diverging national economies of the common currency’, consolidating rather than challenging the dominance of the markets over European affairs. ¹⁵⁰ In other words, many on both sides shared the view that the real power struggle was not Germany vs Greece but states vs markets—and that markets would have been much harsher to Greece than its fellow member-states.

This discourse was part of a much wider critique of capitalism in the context of the global financial crisis which fed in particular the advocacy for a financial transactions tax. Paradoxically perhaps in the age of ‘neoliberal EU’, this chimed with an old discourse supporting the EU’s claim to legitimacy: that European integration helped Europeans to (re)gain political agency over the imperatives of the markets. ¹⁵¹ Interestingly, one German variant of this discourse tended to eschew different economic-ideological approaches altogether, coupling instead demands for alternatives to austerity with the call for ‘more integration’. ¹⁵² The variant calling for a re-nationalisation of monetary policy and more, to be sure, framed integration, quite on the contrary, as in essence ‘constraining the political capacity to act, to the advantage of economic freedom’, ¹⁵³ and the Euro as eliminating an important possibility for intervening politically into the market. ¹⁵⁴

3.3.3 Europe as Moderniser

Nevertheless, many Greek commentators continued to believe in European institutions and their capacity not only to provide a bulwark against global financial markets, but more importantly to also contribute to Greece’s ability to compete internationally on a par with advanced countries. Even in the midst of the devastating crisis, these commentators tenaciously refused to analyse Greece’s EMU membership in simple cost-benefit terms, as being a core member of the European family continued to be inextricably tied with certain ideas of progress in far deeper ways than short- or medium-term economic indicators. For them, a Grexit would not only imply a trade-off between short-term economic dislocation and potential long-term gains, but it would brand Greece as a ‘country that doesn’t have the structures and institutions that befit a Eurozone member’. As Kathimeri put it rather succinctly:

it is one thing to have a high debt and deficit, and a different matter to be treated by your European partners, the markets and the investors like a third-world country, which remains in the Eurozone by mistake. ¹⁵⁵

Such statements may appear hard to understand for a foreign audience, who might regard them as evidence of an obsessive attachment to EU institutions. Nevertheless, these statements become clearer when one considers the extent to which many in Greece still consider EU membership an anchor of political and economic modernity, including a warrant of democratic consolidation. As George Pagoulatos wrote in Kathimerini,

Our history as an independent state was a history of hunger, poverty, wars and civil wars, dictatorships, ethnic divisions, emigration, bankruptcy, crises and uncontrolled inflation. The only interlude of real democracy, a European way of life, and stability during the last four decades is thanks to our attachment to the nucleus of Europe. Without this vital link, we will backslide to the dark corridors of our historical destiny, prey to the dangers and threats of our troubled neighbourhood. ¹⁵⁶

A comment even in Avgi echoed this sentiment, albeit apologetically:

if there are hopes for survival, these are thanks to the post-1974 consolidation of Greek Democracy, with the leading events being our accession initially to the EU and subsequently to EMU (note: I know that I evoke the mockery of those who believe that Greece is an unhappy country, trapped in a European neo-liberalism that doesn’t let it develop the multiple facets of its idiosyncrasy, but I remain incorrigible). ¹⁵⁷

Interestingly, under this narrative, EU and EMU membership are considered as a package. As with the EU in 1983, Greece’s accession to EMU in 2001 was perceived as a signal of further modernisation of the country’s political, economic and social structures. Such modernisation had been a long-standing aim of a small but vocal group of commentators in Greek public debate, whom we refer to here as ‘the modernisers’, and who had long advocated the reform and rationalisation of Greek economic and political institutions along Western European lines. ¹⁵⁸ Only then could Greece bridge the gap between promise and performance, thereby tackling the famous Greek paradox. ¹⁵⁹ This agenda became the mantra of the prime-ministership of PASOK leader Kostas Simitis between 1996 and 2004, thus occupying a position of rhetorical dominance for the first time in post-1974 Greece through its association with the electoral winners’ mandate. Since accession to EMU was one of the central prongs of Simitis’ policy programme, reversing would be tantamount to questioning the aims of the modernisation programme as a whole. In the words of Simitis,

When I became Prime Minister, I had a specific strategic plan […] [I wanted Greece] to follow a direction of inclusion among the developed countries and especially the EU with continuity and consistency. […] The central aim of the national strategy had to be EMU accession. I believed that our simple participation in the EU would not ensure all the benefits that we could reap from our accession. […] The effort to upgrade the country would fail if we hid behind defensive conceptions of protectionism or isolationism. ¹⁶⁰

Of course, the narrative of modernisation , and with it one of the most potent rationales for Greece’s continued membership in the Eurozone, did suffer a serious blow during the crisis, which appeared to dramatically reverse the kind of progress Simitis had in mind when applying for Eurozone membership—i.e. ‘stabilisation, growth, and social justice; nominal convergence, real convergence, and social convergence’. ¹⁶¹ Far from paving the way towards more mature democratic institutions and an environment allowing sustainable growth, ‘healthy surpluses’ and ‘the extension of social policies for cohesion and solidarity ’, ¹⁶² European norms now appeared as inhumane, autarchic, embodying cutthroat liberalism and a lack of solidarity . In Avgi’s judgment, ‘the growth model of the last 15 years has really gone bankrupt’ ¹⁶³ ; ‘we have understood it: modernisation is here, united and strong, and it is modernising us more and more. […] The tsars of the economy of the “Troikan” miracle, who were taken out of the drawers of the modernising wing of PASOK, brought us where we are’. ¹⁶⁴

In spite of all that, a sizeable minority of commentators remained convinced that Europe could still bring Greece a much-needed impulse for modernisation . Indeed, reminiscent of Rosa Luxembourg’s revolutionary defeatism, ‘Armageddon might be a solution’ ¹⁶⁵ as the conditions attached to the Greek rescue packages could advance much-needed structural reforms in a way that had proved impossible during times of growth, when successive reform attempts stumbled on the arrayed forces of special interests, clientelism and corruption . In the words of Kathimerini’s editor:

Is supervision really such a bad thing? Let’s remember how many things happened in Greece during the time before the Olympic Games. Let’s count how many public works finished in record time, in full contrast with the decade of the 1980s, which didn’t leave behind a single big public works project. […] If we go back to that time, we will discover that the whole country, the whole state was under direct and asphyxiating supervision. […] This is basically why we succeeded, and it is almost certain that if they had left us alone, without any control since the day we undertook the Olympics, we wouldn’t have been ready even in 2014. […] Now we are at an exceptionally difficult moment, and supervision can only be good for us. […] If this damned supervision compels us to create efficient institutions for combatting tax evasion , to open the closed professions, to be able to implement an investment in a few months rather than a few years, this will only be good.’ ¹⁶⁶

For the Greek modernisers, the measures foreseen by the successive memoranda ought to be assessed precisely against the yardstick of how effectively they advanced structural reforms such as combatting tax evasion , making the welfare system fairer, making it easier to do business in Greece, and the likes. Indeed, the modernisers invested a lot of political capital in the success of the Troika-induced change, thus defined. This narrative resonated forcefully in the German press and in German diplomatic circles—where it combined with the concurrent lamentation that the Greeks effectively lacked the will to brave the painful costs of reform. ¹⁶⁷

Of course, the danger of an externally imposed modernisation programme was that if it didn’t command sufficient ownership in Greece, its logic could suffer major backlash, and society could come to ‘repudiate anything related to the Memorandum’. ¹⁶⁸ For pro-reform commentators, the second hope provided by the crisis was therefore that the prospect of Armageddon might lead people to realise that reform was necessary, thus creating a permissive space for reform.

A policy area that illustrates well this possibility is pension reform, which had come to symbolise the limits of Simitis’ premiership. Indeed, the large-scale attempted reform of the pension system in 2001 by Tasos Gannitsis, who was then Minister of Labour and Social Security, was not only vehemently resisted, but had also led to the outright demonization of its architects, who were portrayed as ‘dangerous extremists trying to terrorise the people to make them abandon social security’. ¹⁶⁹ It is still rare today to hear voices recognising that these architects had been right to warn that the pension system was not viable. Avgi for instance reported approvingly that ‘government sources and leading Syriza members’ launched a ‘harsh attack’ against Simitis, saying that ‘there is a difference between Simitis’ efforts and ours’, since ‘the then Prime Minister wanted to deconstruct social security at a time of growth, whereas today’s [Syriza-ANEL] government is supporting the pension system during a time of recession’. ¹⁷⁰ The irony of praising the timing of a reform when it hurts more might have been lost here. Nevertheless, both Avgi and Prime Minister Tsipras have stated explicitly that ‘the issues related to pension reform are issues that we would have to tackle regardless of the Troika’, ¹⁷¹ since without any change, ‘in four or five years there will simply be no pension system’. ¹⁷²

The competing discourses about Europe and progress surveyed in this chapter continue to be evoked as the Greco-German affair unfolds. Some will eventually emerge strengthened, others weakened. What is clear however is that for most people in Greece and Germany, the EU, even at times of crisis, is not a simple cold calculus of short-term costs and potential long-term benefits, but is intertwined with diverse deep-rooted understandings about their countries’ institutions, political systems, international standing and ultimately, their national identity.

Notes

• 1. See Sternberg, C. S. (2013). The Struggle for EU Legitimacy: Public Contestation, 1950–2005. Basingstoke, Palgrave; Lacroix, J. and K. Nicolaïdis, K. (eds.) (2010), European Stories: Intellectual Debates on Europe in National Contexts, Oxford. Oxford University Press; della Sala, V. (2010a). ‘Special Issue: Political Myth, Mythology and the European Union’. Journal of Common Market Studies 48(1): 1–190; Sternberg, C. (2016a). Culture and the EU’s Struggle for Legitimacy. Re: Thinking Europe, Thoughts on Europe: Past, Present and Future. Matthieu Segers and Y. Albrecht. Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press: 155–167.

• 2. See Sternberg 2013; and 2015 ‘What were the French telling us by voting down the ‘EU constitution’? A case for interpretive research on referendum debates’. Comparative European Politics: 1–26.

• 3. Spiegel 26/2012.

• 4. Spiegel 48/2012.

• 5. Avgi online 10/12/13.

• 6. Kathimerini online 08/07/11.

• 7. Proto Thema online 30/3/15.

• 8. Proto Thema online 07/01/13.

• 9. Avgi 18/04/10, cover page.

• 10. Avgi 14/02/10, cover page.

• 11. Avgi 18/04/10, cover page.

• 12. Avgi 20/06/15, cover page.

• 13. Avgi 17/01/10, p. 2.

• 14. Kathimerini 21/02/10, p. 18, ‘The German problem’.

• 15. Kathimerini 28/02/10, p. 20, ‘Germans and Greeks’ (Nikos Konstantaras).

• 16. Avgi 09/05/10, p. 29, ‘Euro, the vulnerable currency’ (Ilias Ioakeimoglou).

• 17. Avgi online 01/07/15.

• 18. The New York Times online 03/07/15, ‘Europe’s Many Economic Disasters’.

• 19. Guardian online 29/06/15, ‘Joseph Stiglitz: how I would vote in the Greek referendum ’.

• 20. The New York Times online 03/07/15.

• 21. Guardian online 29/06/15.

• 22. Avgi online 26/05/15.

• 23. Bulmer, S. (2014). ‘Germany and the Eurozone Crisis: Between Hegemony and Domestic Politics’. West European Politics 37(6): 1244–1263, p. 1246.

• 24. E.g. Stuttgarter Zeitung 16/06/2012.

• 25. Bild 10/05/2010.

• 26. Bild 21/08/2014, ‘Take the Euro Away from the Greeks: Mrs Merkel, we, too, want a referendum !’

• 27. Bild 28/11/2012.

• 28. Informal conversation with a German diplomat in June 2017.

• 29. Spiegel 23/2012.

• 30. See e.g. Bild 02/06/2010.

• 31. Spiegel 38/2012 ‘Everybody wants our money’ (Bavarian minister of finance Markus Söder, CSU).

• 32. Bild 02/05/2010 to Merkel.

• 33. Ibid.

• 34. E.g. Bild 02/05/2010 to Merkel, or 19/03/2015, ‘Merkel Wants to End Argument with Tsipras ’.

• 35. E.g. Bild 24/07/2012, 10/03/2012, or Spiegel 37/2012.

• 36. See e.g. Spiegel 48/2012, ‘Euro: Denial of Reality’.

• 37. Spiegel 50/2012, ‘No Wonder’.

• 38. Focus February 2010, see also reference to Europe being on the brink of catastrophe, e.g. in Zeit 21/02/2014.

• 39. Bild 2012/11/28.

• 40. Bild 10/05/2010, ‘750 Billion for Bankruptcy Neighbours—Once Again We’re Europe’s Fools’.

• 41. Spiegel 41/2012 (08/10/2012), see e.g. EP President Martin Schulz in Faz.net 24/05/2013, or Spiegel online 27/07/2012, ‘Low Interest Rates: ECB policy hits German savers hard’.

• 42. Spiegel online 27/07/2012.

• 43. Spiegel 15/04/13, pp. 65–66.

• 44. Ta Nea online 30/06/2015, ‘Big gathering of “We Stay in Europe” under rain at Syntagma’.

• 45. Kathimerini online 04/07/2015, ‘The day after “No”’ (George Pagoulatos).

• 46. Bild 22/06/2011, see further e.g. Stuttgarter Zeitung 15/06/2011.

• 47. Focus 06/06/2011, see further e.g. Stuttgarter Zeitung 16/06/2011.

• 48. Bild 10/05/2010, ‘Again We’re Europe’s Fools’.

• 49. Zeit 16/02/2012, ‘Was that it now?’

• 50. Bild 24/07/2012.

• 51. See e.g. Stuttgarter Zeitung 25/09/2011 on even Schäuble acknowledging the ‘considerable consequences’ of an exit ‘for Greece, but also far beyond it’.

• 52. Stuttgarter Zeitung 16/06/2012, see further Zeit 06/06/2012 and 29/09/2010 ‘Seven Questions on Greece’.

• 53. Spiegel online 27/07/2012.

• 54. Faz.net 24/05/2013.

• 55. Bild 03/07/2011, see also e.g. 02/05/2010, 18/05/2010, 02/06/2010, and Spiegel 42/2012 ‘Europe Benefits Us’ for a detailed analysis of the benefits of integration and the crisis to Germany.

• 56. Spiegel 03/2012.

• 57. Spiegel 23/2013.

• 58. Stuttgarter Zeitung 15/06/2011, see also 12/02/2010.

• 59. ESPA is the Greek acronym for the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF), which outlines how the EU structural and cohesion funds will be used in a particular member-state.

• 60. Kathimerini online 03/07/2015, ‘Our European…routine’ (Tassoula Karaiskaki).

• 61. Kathimerini 6/1/15, cover page, ‘Statements of foreigners and reality’ (Aggelos Stagos).

• 62. Kathimerini 21/2/10, cover page, ‘Main article: Perhaps a solution’.

• 63. Sternberg 2013.

• 64. Sternberg 2013: 22–30.

• 65. See also Sternberg 2015.

• 66. Sternberg 2013: 14–43.

• 67. Sternberg 2013: 23–26, 108.

• 68. Sternberg 2013: 79, 95–100.

• 69. Here Zeit 27/12/2012; for a study of the resilience of constructions of European identities, see Galpin, C., Ed. (2017). The Euro Crisis and European Identities: Political and Media Discourse in Germany, Ireland and Poland. London, Palgrave Macmillan.

• 70. Avgi 21/02/10, cover page.

• 71. Avgi 26/06/15, main article, ‘We are not playing and we are not intimidated’.

• 72. Kathimerini 18/04/10, p. 19.

• 73. Avgi 02/05/10, ‘“Angela Bush”, Germany and Europe’ (Ulrich Beck ).

• 74. Kathimerini 28/03/10, p. 21, ‘Towards a more German Europe’ (Paul Taylor, Reuters).

• 75. Avgi 08/01/10, p. 3.

• 76. Avgi 10/05/12, cover page.

• 77. ‘Sehr gut’ means ‘very good’. Avgi 24/02/10, p. 15.

• 78. Kotzias, N. (2013). Greece: Debt Colony: The European Empire and German Primacy. Athens: Patakis.

• 79. See the declaration of support by Die Linke members of parliament and MEPs to Greek strikers, republished in Avgi ‘Our Germans show solidarity towards Greek workers’ 28/02/10, p. 11.

• 80. Lacroix/ Nicolaïdis 2010.

• 81. Eleftherotipia 28/09/1981, p. 15.

• 82. On the ‘culture of the underdog ’, see Diamandouros, N. (1993). Politics and Culture in Greece, 1974–1991: An Interpretation. In R. Clogg (ed.) Greece, 1981–1989: the Populist Decade. New York, N.Y., St. Martin’s Press: 1–23.

• 83. Faz.net 24/05/2013.

• 84. Streeck, W. Gekaufte Zeit: die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus. Berlin, Suhrkamp [Streeck, W. (2017); see e.g. review in Faz.net 23/09/2013, ‘Euro crisis: Why didn’t the horses drink? Is there an alternative for Germany from a leftist perspective?’

• 85. Here social scientist Fritz Scharpf as cited in Faz.net 29/11/2011, ‘You can’t unscramble scrambled eggs’.

• 86. See the discussions of Streeck’s arguments in Zeit 11/06/2015, ‘Struck dead by the Euro’ or 07/03/2013, ‘Crisis? Reschedule!’.

• 87. See e.g. Zeit 12/05/2011, ‘How Can we Get Out of This?’ or 21/02/2014; Focus 22/02/2010, ‘2000 Years of Decline’.

• 88. See e.g. Focus 19/05/2010.

• 89. Merkel, speech to Bundestag, 17/06/2015, https://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Rede/2015/07/2015-07-20-merkel-bt-griechenland.html [accessed 13/07/2017]; for a vision of EU foreign policy structured around responsibility , see Mayer, H. (2008). ‘The Long Legacy of Dorian Gray: Why the European Union Needs to Redefine its Role in Global Affairs’. Journal of European Integration 30(1): 7–25.

• 90. Spiegel online 23/03/2017, ‘Gabriel Meets Tsipras : The Nice German in Athens’.

• 91. Henrik Enderlein as reported in FAZ 29/11/2011, ‘You Can’t Unscramble Scrambled Eggs’.

• 92. See Mitrany, D. (1943). A Working Peace System. London, Institute of International Affairs.

• 93. Wolfgang Kubicki, leader of the FDP in Schleswig-Holstein’s Land parliament, Stuttgarter Zeitung 04/09/2012.

• 94. Spiegel 36/2016 on EP President Martin Schulz.

• 95. E.g. Volker Kauder, leader of the CDU/CSU Bundestag group, in Focus 06/06/2011.

• 96. Kathimerini 04/02/2015, ‘The big hug of Europe’ (Alexis Papahelas).

• 97. Kathimerini 08/02/15, cover page, main article.

• 98. Kathimerini online 26/04/2015 (George Pagoulatos and sketch by Dimitris Ηantzopoulos).

• 99. Avgi online 21/01/2015, ‘Euclid Tsakalotos: The Euro is a strategic choice for Syriza’.

• 100. Kathimerini 23/01/2015, cover page, ‘The foreigners and our elections ’ (Nikos Konstantaras).

• 101. Avgi 01/07/15, cover page, ‘NO will be a catalyst for a better agreement’.

• 102. Avgi online 30/06/15, ‘Syriza: Terrorism by Samaras to obscure the true meaning of the referendum ’.

• 103. Faz.net 24/05/2013, see further e.g. Zeit 2012/51.

• 104. Spiegel 25/2013, see similarly Focus 19/05/2010.

• 105. Faz.net 24/05/2013 (Ulrich Beck ), see also e.g. Zeit 23/07/2016 ‘A Break’.

• 106. Spiegel 26/2012.

• 107. Spiegel 24/2012.

• 108. FAZ 03/08/2012.

• 109. Bild 22/07/2011.

• 110. Borriello, A. and A. Crespy (2015). ‘How to not speak the “F-word”: Federalism between mirage and imperative in the euro crisis’. European Journal of Political Research 54(3): 502–524.

• 111. Faz.net 24/05/2013.

• 112. E.g. Bild 22/07/2011; faz.net 24/05/2013.

• 113. Avgi 09/05/2010, p. 41, ‘The German ballot box and the Greek panic’ (Kaki Balli).

• 114. Kathimerini 02/05/2010, p. 9, ‘Merkel, Westerwelle, Greece, and the elections ’ (Tassos Telloglou).

• 115. Kathimerini 03/01/2015, cover page, main article, ‘A wish and a hope’.

• 116. Kathimerini 18/02/2015, cover page, comment, ‘The vindication and the fiacso’ (Alexis Papahelas).

• 117. Zeit 27/12/2012, ‘Be embraced!’ (Matthias Krupa).

• 118. Zeit 27/12/2012; see e.g. faz.net 24/05/2013.

• 119. Zeit 27/12/2012.

• 120. Fritz Scharpf, as reported in FAZ 29/11/2011; Zeit 27/12/2012.

• 121. See Thomas Risse ed: European Public Spheres: Politics is Back, Cambridge University Press 2014; Sternberg 2013: 121–122, 210–222; 2015; or 2016b. ‘Public opinion in the EU institutions’ discourses on EU legitimacy from the beginnings of integration to today’. Politique européenne 54: 24–56.

• 122. Fritz Scharpf, as reported in FAZ 29/11/2011, ‘You Can’t Unscramble Scrambled Eggs’. For discussions of how crisis management has affected the EU’s democratic legitimacy, see Bellamy/Weale 2015; Joerges, C. (2015). The Legitimacy Problématique of Economic Governance in the EU. Governance Report 2015. M. Dawson, H. Enderlein and C. Joerges. Oxford, Oxford University Press; Glencross, A. (2014). ‘The Eurozone Crisis as a Challenge to Democracy and Integration in Europe’. Orbis 58(1): 55–68; or Schmidt, V. A. (2015). The Forgotten Problem of Democratic Legitimacy: ‘Governing by the Rules’ and ‘Ruling by the Numbers’. The Future of the Euro. M. Matthijs and M. Blyth. Oxford, Oxford University Press; against Schmidt’s critique of the ‘excessively intergovernmental processes of Eurozone crisis governance’, see Dehousse, R. (2016). ‘Why has EU macroeconomic governance become more supranational?’ Journal of European Integration 38(5): 617–631.

• 123. Here Zeit 23/07/2015, ‘A Break’ (Claus Offe); see Follesdal, A. (2014). Democracy, Identity, and European Public Spheres. European Public Spheres: Politics is Back. T. Risse. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press: 247–262.

• 124. See e.g. Bild 22/07/2011, ‘Greek Apologizes for Swastika Attack’.

• 125. Zeit online 23/08/2012; see e.g. Spiegel 27/2012, ‘There is a Way Out’ [of fiscal pact], Zeit 27/10/2011, ‘All Power to the Germans?’, Spiegel 18/2012 ‘Currencies: Engine Without Train’, Zeit 13/12/2012, ‘Europe: In the Shadow of the Fathers?’, Zeit 23/08/2012, ‘Euro Crisis: Either—Or?’, Zeit 09/08/2012, ‘“The Main Purpose of Europe is Power”’.

• 126. Zeit online 23/08/2012, ‘Euro Crisis: Either Or?’

• 127. Spiegel 50/2012, ‘No Wonder’, see also Zeit 16/05/2012, or Stuttgarter Zeitung 17/07/2012, ‘The Indecision Chancellor’.

• 128. See e.g. Tagesspiegel 23/04/2010, ‘Angela Merkel : The Gambler’; Spiegel 47/2012; see Jacoby, W. (2015). Europe’s New German Problem: The Timing of Politics and the Politics of Timing. The Future of the Euro. M. Matthijs and M. Blyth. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

• 129. Tagesspiegel 23/04/2010.

• 130. Kathimerini 19/02/10, cover page, comment, ‘The tug-of-war of catastrophe’ (Stavros Lygeros).

• 131. Kathimerini 28/02/10, p. 20, ‘Germans and Greeks’ (Nikos Konstantaras).

• 132. Avgi 06/05/15, cover page, main article, ‘Polysemy and the component groups of the lenders’.

• 133. Spiegel 15/2010.

• 134. Headline Zeit 12/05/2011.

• 135. Spiegel 25/2012.

• 136. Spiegel 23/2012.

• 137. References to “muddling through” appeared from the onset of the crisis in 2009 and 2010, and continue to do so. A Google search on 29/07/2016 on ‘durchwurschteln Griechenland Krise’ [muddling through Greece crisis] yielded 15,300 hits, spread fairly evenly across moments of newsworthiness throughout this period. For critiques of this style of governance, see e.g. Zeit 14/04/2015, ‘Muddling Through Doesn’t Work in Long Run’ or the Academic Discussion in Dawson, M., et al., Eds. (2015). Governance Report 2015. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

• 138. Focus 16/11/2012. See also e.g. Zeit 29/12/2011; Spiegel 47/2012, 03/2012, ‘Euro Rescue’ or 36/2012 on Martin Schulz; Faz.net 23/01/2011, ‘Greece-Scenario 1: Muddling Through ’, and Handelsblatt 06/09/2011 ‘Greece-Options’.

• 139. Zeit 10/11/2011, ‘Merkel’s will be done’.

• 140. Bild 10/05/2010.

• 141. Zeit 2013/01.

• 142. Bild 02/06/2010, ‘Who is Lining their Pockets in the Crisis?’

• 143. See e.g. Zeit 29/09/2010, ‘Will the banks again get away scot-free—after making a mint on Greece?’

• 144. Stuttgarter Zeitung 08/05/2012.

• 145. Bild 02/06/2010.

• 146. Avgi 16/12/09, p. 30 (N. Georgakis and G. Koutsoukos).

• 147. See Sternberg 2013: 171–173 on the history of this discourse in Germany.

• 148. Zeit 2013/01, ‘Euro Crisis: The Obligation to Solidarity ’.

• 149. Avgi 16/12/09, p. 30 (N. Georgakis and G. Koutsoukos).

• 150. Avgi 28/03/10, cover page, ‘The Brussels agreement as an ambiguous declaration’ (George Stathakis).

• 151. Sternberg 2015b.

• 152. E.g. Zeit 2011/06/23, ‘In Europe’s crisis, politics has to reclaim the helm instead of ever only reacting. An open letter against ever new austerity packages and for more integration’.

• 153. FAZ 29/11/2011, ‘You can’t unscramble scrambled eggs’ (Fritz Scharpf).

• 154. Die Wochenzeitung 4/2013, ‘The Euro as a Frivolous Experiment’ (Wolfgang Streeck), https://wolfgangstreeck.com/2013/01/24/der-euro-als-frivoles-experiment/ [accessed 13/07/17].

• 155. Kathimerini 15/11/09, cover page, main article, ‘At nadir point’.

• 156. Kathimerini online 04/07/2015, ‘The day after “No”’ (George Pagoulatos).

• 157. Avgi 18/04/10, ‘Post-1974 distortions’ (George Bramos).

• 158. See Diamandouros 1993.

• 159. See various contributions in Alison, Graham and Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Promise vs Performance, 1996, MIT Press.

• 160. Simitis, Costas. ‘Our National Strategy’. From the book Policy for a Creative Greece (Polis 2005, in Greek), http://www.costassimitis.gr/2016/05/27/shedio/ [accessed 28/06/17].

• 161. Simitis, Costas. ‘Speech in the ceremony for Greece’s application for accession in the Eurozone’ (03/03/2000), quoted at http://www.costassimitis.gr/2000/03/03/zappeio_eu/ [accessed 28/06/17].

• 162. Ibid.

• 163. Avgi 06/01/10, p. 2, ‘Tight corset’.

• 164. Avgi online 06/08/14, ‘Some get beaten up and others eat lobster pasta ’ (Kavvadias Stasinos).

• 165. Kathimerini 13/12/09, cover page, ‘Experiments in the midst of the crisis’.

• 166. Kathimerini 17/1/10, ‘Myths of Supervision’ (Alexis Papahelas).

• 167. Conversation with senior German diplomat, June 2017.

• 168. Kathimerini 07/05/12, cover page, comment, ‘Who can convince the people?’ (Alexis Papahelas).

• 169. Palaiologos, Y. (2014). The 13th Labour of Hercules: Inside the Greek Crisis. Athens, Estia, p. 106 (quote translated from the Greek version of the book by the authors).

• 170. Avgi online 12/01/2016, ‘We won’t apologise’.

• 171. Interview of Alexis Tsipras to ERT (14/07/2015), minute 9.10, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSD_QQoFgSc (last visited 18/12/2016).

• 172. Avgi online 15/02/2016, ‘Let’s say the truth’ (Vassilis Paikos).