Two fatalities — one Greek the other Bosnian — connect my family to this past week’s news. Exactly a year ago our family visited Srebrenica to pay our respects to the victims of genocide and their families. Shortly thereafter, we left on a road trip to Greece, where we vacationed on the Greek island of Skiathos. The vacation was much welcomed. And, yet, cracks were already beginning to appear in the Greek facade. But the relationship between Greece and Srebrenica clearly goes beyond my family’s travel plans. Talk to anyone from the former Yugoslavia. They will tell you. After two decades of borrowed time, time (and money) for Yugoslavia began to run out in the 1980s — and not just for Yugoslavia, but for the entire globe. The strikes and layoffs of the 1980s, whose hardships were felt in the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan, and Western Europe, brought war and genocide to the Balkans. The 1990s visited horrific misery on the former Yugoslavia and genocide on the refuges gathered for United Nations protection in Srebrenica-Potocari.
Which is why it is with no small amount of horror that I have followed the debates over Greek debt in the European Parliament and among the European Union’s finance ministers. “We will certainly not be able to rely on promises,” said Mr Schäuble. “In recent months, during the last few hours, the trust has been destroyed in incomprehensible ways. We are determined to not make calculations that everyone knows can’t be trusted. We will have exceptionally difficult negotiations. I don’t think we will reach an easy decision.” Perhaps the German Finance Minister was recalling Germany’s destruction of trust during the last century. Would he have advised the United States to withhold aid to post-war Germany, squeeze its institutions, strangle its growth potential? The aid then extended to Germany makes debt relief for the Greeks appear minuscule by comparison.
There are few alive today who recall the still widespread popularity of fascism in defeated Germany. And so few also recall how terribly important it was to make sure that Germany enjoyed strong centralized institutions of law and a social system that left no one behind. An unemployed family with sufficient education, healthcare, security, and a pension is called “grateful.” An unemployed family without hope, by contrast, is called a “recruit to fascism.”
Perhaps if Greece were an isolated case on an otherwise swelling sea of prosperity, there would be no cause for alarm. But besides Greece, there is Croatia, Estonia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Portugal, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, all of which have suffered greatly since the Great Recession and in all of which neo-fascism presents a growing threat. Desperate people do desperate things. Holding a gun to Greece’s head does not make Greek citizens feel more secure, more healthy, more competent. It makes them feel more desperate.
Mr Schäuble and his cronies make it sound as though German institutions were entirely faultless in the spending and “investment” spree that captivated he and his fellow investors from the mid-1990s to 2006. During those ten years German investors could not find a bad investment anywhere. It was all good. And, much as the United States and Great Britain a decade earlier, German neoliberals were all agog with deregulation and tax-cut fever. What could go wrong. You can’t blame them for forgetting 1973, when US President Nixon took the Dollar off the Gold Standard and let its value float — downwards of course — releasing a flood of cheap dollars onto world markets.
But ask any former Yugoslavian. They will tell you. Among those who snapped up those cheap dollars was Jozip Broz Tito, partisan hero and president of the fiercely independent and crassly market socialist Yugoslavia. What could go wrong? What went wrong was stagflation. What went wrong was neoliberal economic policy. What went wrong was Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. When Paul Volker tightened the screws in 1979, he not only nailed a death notice to the chest of Yugoslavia. He may as well have erected the internment camps, dug the trenches, and unloaded the rounds into the bodies of unarmed Bosnian men and boys. For, nothing is more certain but that it was the inconceivable debt that Volker prompted and the austerity measures imposed upon the former Yugoslavia by neoliberal American and European negotiators that generated a decade of genocidal war in the Balkans.
Did Germany and the EU play any role in Greek debt. You betcha. But — and you can count on this — without serious debt relief, not simply for Greece, but for the entire seam running from the Baltics down through the Balkans and eastward to Turkey, the EU and US are sowing seeds that will fly up in their face and cost them Trillions more than the pittance now being requested. Just ask anyone from the former Yugoslavia. Or, for that matter, ask any Germans who remember the costs Europe paid for imposing unbearable reparations on an already defeated Germany. Its called the Holocaust.