When my short essay on Greece after the referendum “The Courage of Hopelessness” was republished by In These Times, its title was changed into “How Alexis Tsipras and Syriza Outmaneuvered Angela Merkel and the Eurocrats”. Although I effectively think that accepting the EU terms was not a simple defeat, I am far from such an optimist view. The reversal of the NO of referendum to the YES to Brussels was a genuine devastating shock, a shattering painful catastrophe. More precisely, it was an apocalypse in both senses of the term, the usual one (catastrophe) and the original literal one (disclosure, revelation): the basic antagonism, deadlock, of the situation was clearly disclosed.
Many Leftist commentators (Habermas included) got it wrong when they read the conflict between the EU and Greece as the conflict between technocracy and politics: the EU treatment of Greece is not technocracy but politics at its purest, a politics which even runs against economic interests (as it was clearly stated by IMF, a true representative of cold economic rationality, which declared the bailout plan unworkable). If anything, it was Greece which stood for economic rationality and EU which stood for politico-ideological passion. After the Greek banks and stock exchange reopened, there was a tremendous flight of capital and fall of stocks which were not primarily a sign of the distrust of the Syriza government but of the distrust of the imposed EU measures – a clear brutal message that (as we are used to put it in today’s animistic terms) capital itself does not believe in the EU bailout plan. (And, incidentally, most of the money given to Greece goes to the Western private banks, which means that Germany and other EU superpowers are spending taxpayers’ money to save their own banks which made the mistake of giving bad loans. Not to mention the fact that Germany profited tremendously from the escape of the Greek capital from Greece to Germany.)
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