Author Yanis Varoufakis
Critical engagement is
a form of praxis. But there comes a time when, to retain its relevance,
critical thinking must transform itself into direct political action.
As the Eurozone’s
inevitable crisis was addressed by a cynical transfer of banking losses onto
the shoulders of the weakest taxpayers, politicians and commentators who tied
their colors onto the so-called bailouts’ mast demonstrated precisely no
interest in rational debate.
Instead of discussing,
in the European Union’s fora, the nature of our systemic crisis, the
powers-that-be were busy fiscally waterboarding proud nations, letting them
take a few short breaths before submerging them again into the waters of
illiquidity. Thus Europe began to lose its integrity and its soul, turning from
a realm of shared prosperity to an iron cage, a debt prison, a form of
Victorian workhouse.
At the economic front,
this crisis-denial led to contagion in the sovereign bond markets, beginning
with Greece where the combination of savage austerity and huge loans was tried
and tested, before being exported to the rest of the Eurozone. Predictably (as
this blog was illustrating day in day out) the contagion was only made worse,
reaching Italy with extreme prejudice and forcing the ECB to step in in the
summer of 2012 with Mr Draghi’s famous “whatever it takes” moment. Only the
crisis never went away but, rather, it was transferred from the bond markets to
the real economy, yielding vicious deflationary forces that have now rendered
Spain, Italy and France fiscally unsustainable.
At the social front,
crisis-denial and the logic of the bailouts gave rise to a humanitarian crisis
that Europe should be deeply ashamed of. Again predictably, the result was the
fanning of the flames of misanthropy, of racist nationalism, of all those
sinister forces that are demolishing European democracy and replacing it with
self-propagating authoritarianism. The results of the last European Parliament
elections confirmed that sad truth but did nothing to sway the powers-that-be
away from the policies of deconstruction that are behind the emergent bigotry.
Greece is where all
this started. It must be where a reversal of Europe’s fragmentation begins too.
Regular readers of this blog are familiar with my efforts to come up with a
sensible, modest proposal for resolving the euro crisis. Such proposals have no
chance, I have now understood, until and unless they are tabled at the
Eurogroup, in Econfin at the EU summit.
This is the reason
that when Alexis Tsipras honored me with the offer to run for an Athens
parliamentary seat, and with a view to play a role in Greece’s negotiation with
Berlin, Frankfurt and Brussels, I could not but accept.
My greatest fear, now
that I have tossed my hat in the ring, is that I may turn into a politician. As
an antidote to that virus I intend to write my resignation letter and keep it
in my inside pocket, ready to submit it the moment I sense signs of losing the
commitment to speak truth to power.
PS. Readers of this
blog have encountered a number of articles in which I have expressed qualified
confidence in SYRIZA’s capacity to change Europe for the better (click here and
here for examples). It is scary that now I shall have to partake of the effort
to prove that prognosis right.
(Πηγή: yanisvaroufakis.eu)
