The Post-colonial Bind of Greece
This chapter deals with the post-colonial nature of the Greek’s financial and political crisis of 2015. The decade-long financial crisis snowballed into a debt and currency crisis marking European politics and economy of last few years. The chapter shows
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The Post-colonial Bind of Greece
Abstract This chapter deals with the post-colonial nature of the Greek’s financial and political crisis of 2015. The decade-long financial crisis snowballed into a debt and currency crisis marking European politics and economy of last few years. The chapter shows how the Greek, and in a sense, the European scenario is typical across much of the world, and how Europe’s periphery is now playing out a script of debt, bondage, and neoliberal reforms, already performed many times in the post-colony. In this context, it discusses certain aspects of politics in the time of a crisis, which too resemble post-colonial experiences, including experiences of populism. Yet what is significant, the chapter argues, is that the Greek leaders remained oblivious of the post-colonial destiny of the Greek nation. Even European Left politics was imprisoned in the politics of the welfare state of the post Second World era that fed into a European economic project and failed to recognise the emerging post-colonial realities made global by neoliberalism.
Keywords Debt crisis Euro zone Neoliberal Troika IMF Populism Post-colonial bind European central bank Varoufakis stability pact Monetarism Greek referendum
Syriza European
A Post-colonial Debt Crisis To term a country in Europe as a post-colony will be considered an insult. Colonialism and post-colonial destiny is for others—countries, nations, and peoples outside the Euro-North Atlantic world that includes few honorary members such as Japan and Australia. Europe has given birth to democracy and is naturally democratic. And if there are periods of authoritarianism, do not forget that democracy returns and returns inevitably, in much like the double movement of Polanyi (1957).1 According to this double movement, history evolves in cycles—periodic disembedding movements, when the market because of its speculative and 1
On the reflection of Polanyi’s thesis in the current impasse, see Konngs (2015); see also, Patomaki (2014).
© Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 R. Samaddar, A Post-Colonial Enquiry into Europe’s Debt and Migration Crisis DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-2212-8_1
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1 The Post-colonial Bind of Greece
individualising logic is estranged from its social and political foundations, followed by re-embedding movements, when society reorganises and brings the market back under the considerations of public good. Thus, the argument of the natural inclination of Europe for democracy views a financial crisis as a powerful reminder of the inability of markets to self-regulate and accordingly takes such a crisis as a turning point, when again through the effort of the society the market will be brought back under social control. Some have argued taking a somewhat different line that “democratic global Keynesianism would enable processes of decommodification and new syntheses concerning the market/social nexus” (Patomaki 2014: 746). Most of the anti-austerity social movements in Europe practising new democratic metho
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