When he realized that I had several, he gestured for me to join him in an area with a few chairs between the stream of shoppers passing through the square and the protestors' makeshift camp. The man - I'll call him George here, because that was his name (and because it hardly blows his cover in Athens) - was middle-aged and filthy, with awful teeth. He spoke English well, which was a relief (my modern Greek is not up to political disputation). He offered me a biscuit, which I accepted, and a cigarette, which I declined.
George wanted to get one thing clear: the Greeks don't owe anybody anything. He seemed to have three main ways of getting back to this conclusion, and made use of them as soon as the conversation looked like it might go anywhere else. First, the Greeks don't owe the Germans anything because the Germans violated the country during World War II and never paid reparations. Second, the Greeks don't owe anybody anything because the terms of the loans they took out were unfair. Third, the Greek people don't owe anybody anything because the loans were made by politicians, not by the people themselves.
Greece's deputy PM Theodoros Pangalos accused Germany last year of failing to pay Greece back for gold looted during the war. The German foreign ministry quickly issued a rebuttal, pointing out that Germany had paid around 115 million DM to Greece in formal war reparations in 1960, and estimated that over 30 billion DM had flowed from Berlin to Athens in EU transfers since then. In any case, even if Greece did not owe Germany any money for whatever reason, it would still owe plenty of money to other creditors at the national and sub-national levels in France, the UK and the US.
George made his second point with a particular vivid analogy. 'Say you have a wife and two kids', he said, 'and I lend you money. Would you not try to stop me if several years later, when you couldn't pay up, I came to your house, killed your kids and fucked your wife?' Like many of the analogies bandied about by the opponents of the austerity measures, this struck me as somewhat over the top: nobody, as far as we know, has at this point been directly raped or murdered by employees of the foreign banks holding Greek debt.
Even if we change the terms of the example, though, it doesn't follow from my making a bad deal that I should be released entirely from fulfilling the terms of the deal, unless I've been forced to accept the deal under threat of violence, or if the terms are so egregiously disadvantageous that I would never have chosen them had I been in my right mind. But neither case seems to apply to Greece, which took out its loans entirely willingly after entry into the Eurozone at very good rates of interest compared to those that are common in international money-markets nowadays.
I had more sympathy with George's third complaint: that the Greek people were being made to suffer the consequences of decisions they had little to do with themselves, while the politicians who made them were shielded from the fallout. I could have pointed out that the Greek people also profited, for a time, from the loans their government obtained for them; but I preferred to seize the opportunity to agree with George, adding that if he had grown up in his city in classical times he would have been able to discuss and vote on his city's policies directly, one at a time, without having to cede control of the state for four or five years to a set of politicians.
This led to the question I really wanted to ask: given that the system we have now is defective, what were he and his co-indignants planning on putting in its place? 'The system of Pericles' he said (by which I took him to be referring to the classical Athenian system as a whole, and not to be excluding innovations, like pay for attending the assembly, that were introduced after the famous statesman's death in 429 BC). I told him I thought that was a wonderful idea, provided women were enfranchised and there were no slaves.
But I also pushed him on what exactly a revived Athenian system would look like nowadays, when nations are so much larger and technological complexity has increased so much. On this subject he had little to say, but said that he and his comrades would get to that; the first step was to combat the present system. This worried me: as another Greek put it a long time ago, links in a chain of thought that come later temporally may yet be prior analytically; or as my American flatmate expressed it this afternoon, destroying a regime without having a good idea of what to put in its place is pretty damn stupid. In fact, he implied that it reminded him of Donald Rumsfeld before the most recent war in Iraq, a comparison that the protestors would probably not be too happy about.
I'm not saying that the dream of reviving genuine popular participation, inspired by models from ancient Greece and elsewhere, is dead; only that it would require the most meticulous institutional design to be sustainable, and that arriving at it might be less painful working with our current quasi-democratic state-forms rather than against them. Meanwhile, the protestors I met will be preparing to confront the rows of police again tomorrow and the day after, as their rulers vote on another package of austerity measures designed to reassure those foreign banks. I will be monotonously brushing layers of dirt off stones, pieces of a bigger picture that might tell us how the ancients did something we now can't.
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