Mixed Messages and No Progress in Greek Crisis

BRUSSELS - Bewildered Greeks, not to speak of people throughout Europe and the world, could be forgiven for wondering who, if anyone, is in charge.

   In the past few days, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece has blown up negotiations with European creditors on staving off default, then retreated and accepted more or less the same terms, only to have European leaders tell him the offer had expired.

   Greeks are supposed to vote on a referendum this weekend, but no one there or elsewhere seems sure what they will be asked, or what the consequences will be for voting yes or no.

   And European leaders here and in Berlin and Paris have been saying distinct - sometimes directly contradictory - things about whether there is a bailout deal for Greece still on the table, and whether they want Greece to hold its referendum before they can renew discussions about it.

   The ancient Greek term for all this is khaos, and the vast chasm or void of coherent decision making appears to extend well beyond its borders. The crisis appears to simultaneously vindicate critics’ complaints that Greece’s left-wing governing party, Syriza, is flailing about with wild gambits, but also that Europe, led primarily by the German leader Angela Merkel, is obsessed with rules and procedures that have resulted in a long string of emergency meetings but no clear plan for addressing the Greek debt crisis.

   The question of how to save Greece, debated for more than five years, is the European Union’s recurring nightmare, and despite repeated failures to solve the beleaguered nation’s troubles, it has become a seemingly endless exercise in doing the same thing over and over in hope of a different result.

   This has mostly involved holding lots of meetings, usually in Brussels, often running late into the night and nearly always fruitless. Deadlines that seemed immovable have come and gone, a testament to the dogged dedication of European officials but also an emblem of the confusion that has enveloped the whole process of finding a solution.

   On Wednesday, the finance ministers of the 19 countries that use the euro held yet another meeting, this time a teleconference, to discuss what to do. Like a previous teleconference on Tuesday and five emergency face-to-face meetings over the previous two weeks, Wednesday’s discussion yielded no breakthrough.

   Europe’s paralysis, deepened by the ever-shifting, in-your-face tactics of Greece’s left-wing government, has exposed a fundamental dysfunction - or, the designers would say, a deliberate muddle and ingenious safety valve - at the heart of the so-called European project, a push begun in 1957 to bring the states of Europe into “ever closer union.”

   Europe is a union in which most real decision-making power, particularly on matters involving politically delicate things like money and migrants, rests with 28 national governments, each one beholden to its voters and taxpayers. This tension has grown only more acute since the January 1999 launch of the euro, which now binds 19 nations into a single currency zone watched over by the European Central Bank but leaves budget and tax policy in the hands of each country, an arrangement that some economists believe was doomed from the start.

   With power so diffused by design, Germany, as the leading economic power, has often taken charge on critical policy issues. It forged a surprisingly durable European consensus around the need for sanctions against Russia over Ukraine and has pushed, and won solid support, for a tough line against Greece that many experts view as misguided.

   “Germany is essentially the hegemon in Europe, but it does not like being seen as running the show,” said Charles Grant, the director of the Center for European Reform, a research group in London. And, unlike Syriza, it works hard to lobby support from other countries. Greece’s left-wing government, Mr. Grant added, has itself strengthened Germany’s hand in pushing for austerity by “behaving so appallingly” that it alienated countries like France and Italy that were initially more sympathetic to Greek arguments in favor of debt relief and a relaxing of demands for budget cuts.

   “This is the tragedy in all this,” Mr. Grant said. “There was a chance to use Greece’s suffering to get the Germans to understand that their economic weltanschauung or worldview is partially flawed. But Syriza’s behavior has let the Germans off the hook. It rallied other countries around the Germans, because nobody wants to back Syriza.”

With memories of World War II, the glue that initially held the project together, now faded, the union is bound together by fiendishly complicated rules, informal codes of behavior and a passion among its bureaucrats for technical minutiae that baffles ordinary citizens. Syriza, however, has thrown a hand grenade into the whole setup.

   The European Union and Greece, which has been a member since 1981, “are playing two completely different games,” said Francois Lafond, the director of EuropaNova, a research group in Paris. “Syriza is a revolutionary party. It wants to burn down the house of capitalism.”

   Syriza denies this and insists it wants only a fair deal and an end to what it sees as “blackmail.” But it has certainly shown little patience for the bureaucratic procedures that the European Union relies on to meld the often divergent views of its members into solid, though not always comprehensible, decisions.

   It upended months of negotiations with creditors by announcing early Saturday that it would hold a referendum on whether to accept terms put forward for a deal.

   On Wednesday, Mr. Tsipras - who before Greece’s January election decorated his office in Athens with a picture of Che Guevara - threw Brussels into further disarray by sending a last-minute letter that seemed to accept many of the terms he had previously denounced as intolerable and which he has called on Greek voters to reject in the surprise referendum called for Sunday.

   Valdis Dombrovskis, a button-down former Latvian prime minister who is now the vice president of the European Commission responsible for the euro, chided the Greeks for muddling the procedural rules of the game. “Right now, we are in different procedure,” he said, noting that Athens was revising terms for a deal that was no longer on the table after the expiration at midnight on Tuesday of Greece’s former bailout deal.

   “The previous program has expired,” he said. “So now we need to start new negotiations as regards a new program.” And that, he added, depended not on him but on the Eurogroup, a conclave of foreign ministers from the countries that use the euro.

   Germany’s finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, has repeatedly stressed the need to follow the rules to his Greek counterpart, Yanis Varoufakis, who in turn has denounced “German bullying” and the “dead hand of Merkelism.” Asked about the future of the euro during an earlier bout of jitters set off by Greece, Mr. Schäuble said, “We can’t allow that to be ruined by a country that doesn’t follow any rules.”

   But Greece is not alone in trying to bend or break the rules. Germany and France missed what were supposed to be mandatory fiscal targets in 2003, and France continues to fall short. Neither has been punished.

   “There are rules, but some countries are more equal than others,” Mr. Lafond, the Paris researcher, said. “This is obviously unfair. Countries should not be treated differently according to their size.”

   Unlike the United States, however, Europe has no federal authority that can force everyone into line. Brussels, the putative capital of Europe, has three presidents in residence - of the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament - and a fourth, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who does not live here but serves as the president of the Eurogroup.

   After Wednesday’s teleconference, Mr. Dijsselbloem enumerated a line set earlier in the day by Ms. Merkel: There was nothing to talk about until after the referendum. The European Commission, the union’s executive arm, has tried to assert its authority since its new president, Jean-Claude Juncker, took over late last year.

   But it still has limited sway, as was clear last Friday when leaders gutted a commission plan for dealing with a flood of migrants. Instead of mandatory quotas to force all member states to take in asylum-seekers and lift the burden on Greece and Italy, leaders demanded a voluntary system whose workings will be agreed on later “by consensus.”

   Mr. Juncker, speaking here on Monday, said he had welcomed Greece into what he called “the European family” in 1981 because “the land of Plato should not be playing in the second division.” He then denounced Mr. Tsipras and Syriza, saying he felt betrayed and pointing out that negotiations in the European Union are “not a game of liar’s poker.”

Πηγή: nytimes.com