Greek democracy is in peril and much of the fault lies with the EU's hard stance
When those madcap Scandinavian satirists awarded the
Nobel peace prize to the European Union,
they let everyone in on the joke by praising its commitment to
"reconciliation, democracy and human rights". If the committee's 2012
citation were anything other than a spoof, you would have read
denunciations of the rise of oppressive state power and neo-Nazism in
Greece from concerned Euro commissioners long before now.
The EU denounces threats to freedom of speech in
Viktor Orbán's
Hungary with vigour. European politicians worry with good reason about
the fate of independent institutions that stand in the way of the
rabble-rousing regime. They notice the fascistic element in the new
Hungarian right's flirtations with antisemitic and anti-Roma hatreds and
its willingness to indulge the revanchist fantasy that Hungary can
regain the lands it lost after the First World War.
On the fate of Greek
democracy there is silence, however, although there is much that
Europe's leaders might talk about.
You spot the pressure points of
a failing state by looking at what it censors. In the case of Greece,
the authorities' prosecution last week of
Kostas Vaxevanis
showed that he had hit a pressure point with the accuracy of a doctor
sticking a needle into a nerve. While Greeks live with austerity without
end, while Greek GDP has shrunk by 4.5% in 2010 and 6.9% in 2011, and
will shrink by a predicted 6.5% this year and 4.5% in 2013, the list of
the names of 2,000 Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland Vaxevanis
published, suggested that the well-connected were escaping the burdens
that fall on the masses.
"Instead of arresting the tax evaders and
the ministers who had the list in their hands," thundered Vaxevanis in a
call to arms that stirred the blood, "they're trying to arrest the
truth and freedom of the press."
His acquittal on privacy law
charges, though welcome, was less important than it appeared. It did not
mean that freedom of the press was secure in Greece. Even in good
times, independent journalism has rarely been a force in the land. Most
Greek TV stations and newspapers are owned by either the state or
plutocratic corporations, neither of which likes seeing corruption
exposed. The leftwing daily,
Eleftherotypia, which for all its faults and flirtations with terrorism at least challenged the oligarchs, filed for bankruptcy last year.
Few
of the employees of the remaining Greek news organisations reject the
notion that they should keep quiet in the interests of holding on to
their pay cheques. The state is hounding too many of those who do. "We
still have freedom of expression recognised by the law at a theoretical
level," said Asteris Masouras, one of the free speech monitors at
Global Voices.
"On a practical level, well..." And he proceeded to give me a list of
instances of menacing forces intimidating reporters that would go on
into the New Review section if I ran it in full.
Where to begin?
How about the self-defeating austerity policies the troika of the
European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary
Fund have forced on Greece? The authorities used an old warrant to
arrest
Spiros Karatzaferis,
after the journalist threatened to reveal confidential emails, that
might have explained how the troika's alleged "rescue package" had
pushed the country into depression.
Police brutality is another
pressure point, undoubtedly. The Greek left makes persistent allegations
of collaboration between the supposed forces of law and order and the
thugs in the neo-Nazi
Golden Dawn movement. The
Guardian
ran reports that the police had beaten up anti-fascist demonstrators
after they had confronted Golden Dawn. Yes, I know leftists call
everyone "fascists" from headteachers to their mums and dads, but as
Golden Dawn is building a mass movement while marching under a swastika,
the term is correct on this occasion. The following day, Greek state TV
replaced
Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, the presenters of its morning news show, after they told managers they planned to follow up the
Guardian's
claims. Another state TV reporter, Christos Dantis, has joined the
ranks of the vanishing journalists. His editors assigned him to cover
the celebrations of the centenary of the liberation of Thessaloniki from
Ottoman rule. He was about to report on popular protests against the
presence of the Greek prime minister and president in Greece's second
city when his masters turned off the camera and cut to a more amenable
hack.
All the Greek journalists I spoke to, emphasised that Athens
was not Beijing or Tehran, but they described how the liberal
certainties they once held now appeared flimsy. Helena Smith, our superb
Athens correspondent, says that she feels as if she is standing on
shifting sands. If the centrist coalition fails, and the troika's
punitive demands have condemned it to failure, then the left opposition
in Syrzia will probably take over. After that, Golden Dawn, maybe? No
one knows. Nothing is unthinkable in a climate of fear and hopelessness.
One
can say with certainty that old alliances between extreme political and
extreme religious movements are reviving. Hence, last month Christian
fanatics and neo-Nazis (and the difference between the two is fine)
protested against a "blasphemous" play with a homosexual theme in
Athens. The theatre's management duly pulled it. Greek television cut a
scene from
Downton Abbey that featured a gay kiss. No one can explain why but a country that censors
Downton Abbey on any grounds other than literary taste is in grave trouble.
British
Eurosceptics do not understand that the European Union once offered an
escape to a liberal future for the peoples of Europe. When I visited
Athens in the early 1980s, the old could remember fighting the Nazi
occupation and the young had grown up in and on occasion fought the
military dictatorship the colonels imposed. Joining the European Union
meant saying goodbye to all of that. Now poverty, fear, suppression and
state intimidation are back.
You can blame the corruption Greek
society tolerated.
You can blame the bankers for the crash. But you must
also apportion blame to Europe's politicians and bureaucrats who
accepted Greece (and the rest of southern Europe) into a single currency
area that has put them at a permanent competitive disadvantage and
refused to write off debts Greece can never repay.
No wonder they
stay silent about the abuse of the human rights the Nobel prize
committee insisted European integration guaranteed. Greece is the
Eurocrats' very own Weimar on the Aegean. They helped build it.
