The Euro And Austerity As A Powder Keg In Europe

Via Critical Legal Thinking, excerpts from a translated interview with Alexis Tsipras, the leader of Syriza (the Coalition of the Radical Left), Greece’s new second largest political party:

I believe the European model has to be rebuilt from below. We can’t be sat­is­fied with what today is called Europe. The cur­rent crisis is not a European crisis but a global one. Europe today does not have the mech­an­isms to con­front it or con­trol the world­wide fin­an­cial attack against its peoples. Hence why Europe became a con­tin­ent where the attack of the global fin­an­cial sys­tem was fero­cious.

The [euro currency] has become a prison for the peoples of Europe, espe­cially the weak­est eco­nom­ies on the peri­phery going through the crisis. The con­tra­dic­tion is in the base on which the euro was built. The euro is a powder keg that is going to explode if we con­tinue in this dir­ec­tion.

Greece became an ultralib­eral exper­i­ment, a guinea pig. Here the polit­ics of shock were tried out in order to spread them to the rest of Europe. But soci­ety reacts. People no longer have the every­day life they had before and it is those same people who reacted so that things change. Through its mobil­isa­tion soci­ety threatened the elites in our coun­try.

But we have to bear in mind that on the other side the adversar­ies were not only the polit­ical forces, but also a very power­ful global and European fin­an­cial sys­tem that fought us fero­ciously with all their weapons. But if we won the elec­tions Greece might have become the weak link cap­able of break­ing the chain that binds Europe. Per­haps in this way Greece might move from being a guinea pig to being the future baby, the embryo of hope. We have not yet lost that his­toric oppor­tun­ity. The peoples have not spoken their final word.

New demo­cratic insti­tu­tions are also neces­sary. We can­not change clothes and put on the suit worn by the pre­vi­ous powers. That suit does not fit us well. There­fore we have to cre­ate new social and polit­ical insti­tu­tions to raise the forces of the people, which at the moment are mar­gin­al­ized within the sys­tem and have neither par­ti­cip­a­tion nor power.

The Argen­tinian exper­i­ence is very import­ant for draw­ing polit­ical con­clu­sions. I would say that the most import­ant con­clu­sion is rooted in the fact that the polit­ics of neo­lib­er­al­ism is cyn­ical and inhu­mane. It is a dead end. But, on the other hand, Argen­tina showed us the way in which a people can put a stop to this sys­tem and rebuild its bases in order to live bet­ter, to reor­gan­ise the State and soci­ety.

In Europe and in the world social demo­cracy has under­gone an incred­ible muta­tion in recent years. Social demo­cracy oper­ates as a kind of plastic sur­gery with which they want to change some­thing that does not get changed. This casino fin­an­cial cap­it­al­ism can­not change its image how­ever much sur­gery it gets. Social demo­cracy is incap­able of provid­ing solu­tions to the real social prob­lems that peoples con­front. In Greece, the party that rep­res­en­ted social demo­cracy, PASOK, was no dif­fer­ent from the right wing.

My gen­er­a­tion entered polit­ics as a very small force in the uni­ver­sit­ies and col­leges when there was a near com­plete hege­mony of neo­lib­er­al­ism, when there were eco­nomic growth rates that were huge but at the same time abstract and when the examples of the good life were those of super-​​consumerism. Now we are in a dif­fer­ent real­ity. Today, in Greece, half of young people between 24 and 35 have no job. They are con­demning that gen­er­a­tion to live a lot worse than their par­ents, they are con­demning them to live without dreams. What we can give and say to this gen­er­a­tion is that in its con­scious­ness it has to recover hope within struggle.