The Greek Crisis: A Democratic Deficit

Introduction

The Greek debt currently totals somewhere around 240 billion euros. Throughout what has come to be called the Greek debt crisis, the actions of the European Union has left commentators perplexed and in search of an explanation. The handling of the Greek debt crisis on the critical point of July 6, 2015 revealed nothing less than the failure of the European Union to enact democracy in any meaningful sense. The day after a Greek referendum rejected European Union (EU) bailout conditions, the EU submitted a new, point-by-point set of bailout conditions noted as worse than the conditions previously rejected. This move by the EU is a simple rejection of the voice of the Greek people and their claim to be part of the European demos. But the question remains: how can we conceptualise the failure of the EU to head the call of the Greek people?

For Jürgen Habermas, a preeminent voice in German philosophy, this failure amounts to the failure of the EU to evolve from an currency union to a political union, and thus fundamentally, a failure for the EU to adopt a more democratic process.[1] This fact is averred by commentators as different as Slavoj Žižek and Paul Krugman. For these thinkers the political dimensions of the Greek debt crisis are obvious: they were disregarding democracy. Žižek writes that the claims of ideological indifference by Eurogroup president Dijsselbloem is in fact “ideology at its purest,” while Krugman has called on European leaders to “abandon self-serving myths and stop substituting moralizing for analysis.”[2][3]

Thus, on one hand, there is Habermas lamenting the failure of the EU to become properly political, on the other, Zizek and Krugman arguing the EU is too political, or political in the wrong way. These claims are clearly in conflict, yet it is not the case then we must choose between these views alone. Bringing these two views into juxtaposition allows us to see what is crucially problematic with both positions, and embark upon a critique of the EU that avoids the pitfalls of each approach.

 Not Political Enough: Jürgen Habermas

Habermas has reacted with vitriol to the EU’s handling of the Greek debt crisis, accusing the European Council of being politically bankrupt and Germany of being “Europe’s chief disciplinarian.”[4] Habermas locates some of the problems in the failures of various actors, notably German chancellor Angela Merkel, claiming that: “investor interests were more important for the German chancellor than debt relief to reform the Greek economy”.[5] However, for Habermas the crucial problem is the structure of the EU: “If we don’t want to declare democracy as mere show, this means expanding the currency union to a political union”[6] Here the currency union is how Habermas refers to the EU. For him it is not a fiscal, economic or political union, and most of its failures can be found here.

Habermas’ critique of the handling of the Greek debt crisis rests on views he articulated over a decade ago. 2001 saw the English translation and publication of two articles by Habermas on the EU and politics: ‘Why Europe Needs A Constitution’ and ‘The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy’. The articles were united by the view that “if the democratic process is to secure a basis for legitimacy beyond the nation-state, then neither state structures nor market mechanisms, but popular processes of collective will-formation alone will have to provide.”[7] Habermas’s approach is rooted in a view that the origins of the EU, in the Coal and Steel Community of 1951, and then the formation of the Euratom and the European Economic Community of 1958, have prevented it, so far, from ever properly becoming a political union.[8] Habermas claims Europe needs more than a common currency and some vaguely ‘European’ institutions that enforce a fiscal policy, it needs an expansion of its basis of legitimacy.[9] Thus Habermas wants to see several characteristics of the nation-state translated into a postnational constellation of some kind. He argues, in this vein, that there is a need for a European public sphere and for the creation of shared European values.[10] Essentially, Habermas sees the EU as something that needs an injection of politics; it suffers from a lack of politics. “Power can be democratised,” he writes, “money cannot.” For Habermas, the EU’s political failures will always be tied to its economic origins.[11]This method of analysis attempts to tie the current problems of the EU into a story, a history, about its origins. It allows Habermas to tell a tale of a postnational union struggling to create a ‘postnational constellation’.

In Habermas’ current critiques of the EU’s handling of the Greek Debt crisis, he still fundamentally maintains the position he held in 2001. Recently Habermas called the EU a “flawed construction of a currency union without a political union.”[12] Implicit in this is the claim that the EU has not evolved, or not evolved sufficiently that its origins still determine its actions today. Habermas is hinting that the current problems can be located in the foundations, in the origins and in the blueprint of the EU. His commitment to this position can be clearly seen in his following remark: “It’s worth repeating again and again: The suboptimal conditions under which the European Monetary Union operates today are the result of a design flaw, namely that the political union was never completed.”[13] Habermas sees the EU as struggling to become fully political in the midst of its origins as a currency union. This position poses two questions, however. The first is how Habermas’ claims can hold up against the analysis provided by Žižek and Krugman, grounded on a different foundation. The second is how Habermas can explain the decade and a half gap between his identification of the economic origins of the EU being problematic, and the situation facing the EU and Greece now: has nothing really changed in fourteen years?

Too Political: Slavoj Žižek and Paul Krugman

Habermas aims to locate the problems of the EU in its economic origins and thus resorts to an historical analysis of the EU failed to become political in a meaningful democratic sense. On the other hand, accounts by Žižek and Krugman tend to accuse the EU of being too political. Of course Žižek and Krugman don’t offer a similar analysis.However they both focus in on politics, and both their analyses are ahistorical.

In the case of Krugman, the claim that the EU is acting politically is often made as the flipside to a primary claim that the EU is forgoing economics. Krugman, reflecting on the July 6^th bailout plan noted: “What we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line. This has no bearing on the underlying economics of austerity.”[14] Likewise, in an interview, the former Greek Finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis claimed that in the Eurogroup there was “point blank refusal to engage in economic arguments.”[15] Krugman refers to such acts as moralising, or in braver moments as part of a “utterly irresponsible campaign of financial intimidation.”[16] This intimidation, however, is only financial in so far as it involves money. What is being pointed towards in Krugman’s analysis is that the EU is overly political.[17] This is a highly intuitive claim. Not only is it echoed by other economists (notably Piketty), it seems like there must be a political motivation to the EU’s actions. However Krugman’s analysis is often presented as a question, “So what is happening? Is the goal to break Syriza? Is it to force Greece into a presumably disastrous default, to encourage the others?”[18] The analysis is intuitively appealing, yet it offers little explanation of the EU’s actions, the historical and institutional incentives guiding its motive are given no account. This is the key problem in the political analysis of the Greek debt crisis offered by Krugman.

Žižek’s analysis has similar problems, though his approach is different. Žižek’s focus is on ideology. While this ultimately places Žižek as making a similar kind of claim to Krugman, namely that the EU is too political, the kinds of claim and method of arriving at them differ substantially.

Žižek, on the whole, has a peculiar and precise definition of ideology.[19] However, in his writing on the Greek debt crisis he employs a more Marxian definition of ideology as “they do not know it, but they are doing it.”[20] Thus when Dijsselbloem claims that “If I get into ideological side of things, I won’t achieve anything,” is, to Žižek, an ideological statement.[21] Here Dijsselbloem is doing ideology (so to speak), though he does not know it. Žižek wants to enact his critique of Dijsselbloem as a critique of the EU: “EU treatment of Greece is not technocracy but politics at its purest.”[22] However both these critiques are part of a broad, global move from politics to an ideology of administration as a “passage from politics proper to neutral expert administration characterises our entire political process.”[23] For Žižek this move from politics to neutral administration is itself ideological, since one cannot properly escape ideology.[24] As soon as one ‘unmasks’ ideology, it shifts: “the moment we see it ‘as it really is’, this being dissolves itself into nothingness or, more precisely, it changes into another kind of reality.”[25] This is perhaps best understood in terms of a short analogy: the goal isn’t to declare that emperor has no clothes as such (the great unmasking gesture), rather it is to acknowledge that underneath his clothes, the emperor is in fact naked; behind the claims and actions there is ideology.

This is the ideology focused position of Žižek. Such a view risks erasing the specific institutional history of the EU in the name of broad remarks about ideology. While these comments are useful, Žižek here offers us a way of understanding the crisis only at the broadest possible level. His analysis may offer a way of situating the Greek debt crisis in a global context, but he offers us little (though not nothing) in terms of understanding the Greek debt crisis at the level of the EU’s motivations and institutional restraints. Despite the different approach, Žižek’s account suffers from a similar flaw to that of Krugman’s: it is ahistorical

Towards a Genealogy of the EU

Habermas’ obsession with the origins of the EU places too much emphasis on an historical account, while Žižek and Krugman provide a political or ideological analysis with only an extremely immediate and local context. Habermas’ obsession with origins falls into an essentialist trap of believing that essence of something can be found in its history, an approach to history of which both Nietzsche and Foucault were critical.[26] Hence why Krugman and Žižek’s accounts juxtapose well against Habermas’, Krugman and Žižek capture something important about the EU now, where as Habermas’ commentary captures something important about the EU’s past. The two positions, then, are caught between the past and the present.

If we wish to avoid the ahistorical impotency of Zizek and Krugman and also the essentialist approach of Habermas we can do this only by understanding the multitude of moments, drifting back and forth between progress and regress, that make up the life of the EU. Only then will it be possible to gain an understanding of how and why the EU has failed to create a more democratic approach to intergovernmentality. What is needed is a critical history of the EU. One that recognises that between the origin of something and the now there is a vast and somewhat discontinuous set of moments, a heterogeneous mass of events; something non-essentialist.[27] An approach that brings out the critical nature of the commentary given by Krugman and Žižek, while picking up what is valuable in Habermas’ account. Without this, the analysis will constantly oscillate between two semi-correct poles, forever just out of grasp. It is only with such an understanding that we can do justice to the claims of the Greek people and thus to democracy itself.