The Grand Old Duke of Athens

Alex Tsipras has caved in to the demands of Eurozone creditors. He rightly claims that he has no mandate to leave the Eurozone. However he also has no mandate to accept the creditors’ demands. In the referendum that he called, Tsipras convinced the Greek people to vote decisively against accepting an austerity package very similar to the one he is now recommending. The Greek parliament’s approval of the package last night is an empty formality that does nothing to conceal the final surrender of Greece’s sovereignty and with it any remaining pretence of self-government. The parliamentary majority that Tsispras commanded was made up of the utterly compromised Syriza and the opposition parties whose arguments the Greek people decisively rejected in the referendum campaign less than a week before.

The contradiction in Syriza’s strategy and its mandate has been fully exposed. From its election as a government to the referendum, Syriza convinced the Greek people to vote for something that was not possible: staying in the Euro without the austerity that was the condition of staying in the Euro. This strategy has now come unstuck, as it was bound to. Faced with a stark choice of leading their country out of the Eurozone or giving it up to the control of Eurozone leaders, Syriza has opted for the latter. At the time of writing, it is still possible that the Eurozone will decide to kick Greece out, notwithstanding Syriza’s capitulation. But whatever the outcome, democrats need urgently to assimilate the lesson of this political debacle.

Tsipras and Varoufakis claimed that they could use the Greek people’s support in elections and the referendum to increase their bargaining power in an intergovernmental forum. They discovered that there was no truth in this claim. They fatally misunderstood the nature of the Eurozone and the EU. These are not institutions in which different sovereign nations reach a compromise on their interests, as they erroneously believed going into the negotiations. They are institutions in which national governments agree to subordinate their national will and interest to a set of technical rules dictated by market imperatives. As Syriza discovered, this institutionalized self-limitation of national sovereignty by European governmental elites is implacably hostile to the idea that policy should be accountable to electoral majorities. The essence of the Eurozone and the EU is anti-democratic.

Instead of being straight about this with his supporters, Tsipras, like the Duke of York in the English nursery rhyme, marched the Greek people up to the top of the hill only to march them back down again. This futile manoeuvre failed to cover up his retreat, and it is likely to have a profoundly subversive effect on democratic politics in Greece and beyond. After months of populism Syriza have flipped and now do the work of the technocrats. Voters have been forcefully reminded that neither their votes nor their views count for much in contemporary Europe. Many will react to Syriza’s capitulation with resigned acquiescence, while others will simply turn away from representative politics in disgust. The worst of it is that many people, and not only in Greece, will take away the lesson that democratic political action is impotent in the face of market power.

To have any chance of reversing the effects of this disaster, democrats need to be realistic about the anti-democratic nature of European integration and recapture the idea of popular sovereignty from the populist right.

Peter Ramsay