Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece

T. Pappas

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137410573
• eBook ISBN: 9781137410580
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Exploring the negative effects of populism, this study presents an original explanation of Greece's current political and economic failures. It argues that the sovereign debt crisis only exacerbated the malfunctioning of a democracy long ago contaminated by populist politics while also offering a more general insight into the impact of populism

1

Introduction

Abstract: Contemporary Greece has caught the world’s attention for both the sheer size of its economic crisis and the complexity of its political troubles, including the recent rise of radical and extremist parties. Populism, too, has been a fascinating, let alone puzzling, phenomenon, currently on the rise in many parts of Europe and beyond. Post-authoritarian Greece presents arguably the most compelling, almost ideal-typical, case worldwide for the empirical study of the emergence, development, and outcomes of populism within a liberal democratic context.

Pappas, Takis S. Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137410580.0005.

Yesterday, the whole world was watching Greece as its Parliament voted to pass a divisive package of austerity measures that could have critical ramifications for the global financial system. It may come as a surprise that this tiny tip of the Balkan Peninsula could command such attention. We usually think of Greece as the home of Plato and Pericles, its real importance lying deep in antiquity. But this is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.

Mark Mazower, The New York Times, 29 June 2011

While writing this book I fancied it as a little stone trying to hit two birds. The first bird is a country, contemporary Greece, which in recent years has often commanded the world’s attention. After the fall of military dictatorship back in the mid-1970s, Greece became a true harbinger of the global democratization wave that, in subsequent decades, spread throughout Europe and beyond. When the Great Recession arrived in Europe in the late 2000s, Greece was again on the front line, both as the gravest casualty of the crisis and as a major hazard to the stability and future of the European integration process. This country has for a long time attracted the world’s worried interest and the recent rise of political extremism ensures that this attention will increase rather than abate. Although it is still early to know what will happen at the end of the ongoing crisis, this book was written while its author regarded as true Mazower’s belief that, in a very real sense, Greece holds the key to what lies ahead for Europe and the future of liberal democracy.

The book covers the thirty-eight-year period that the Greeks refer to as metapolitefsi (roughly translated as regime change, but also as post-authoritarianism), which began with impressive successes and culminated in utter failure. It commenced on 23 July 1974, when the dictatorship crumpled to be swiftly substituted by political pluralism, and effectively ended with the elections of 17 June 2012 and the collapse of the country’s party system amid economic crisis and social unrest. During that period, Greece underwent three metamorphoses: one, from a – albeit frail – liberal democracy to a polity swarming with populism and political extremism; two, from relative riches to actual rags; and three, from equal partner within the EU to international outcast.

Between annus mirabilis 1974 and annus horribilis 2012, Greece had had the time to live through remarkable national exploits. Only a few years after having made an exemplary transition to democracy, and having established liberal political institutions, Greece was embraced in 1981 as the tenth member of the – then – European Economic Community (EEC) since, to many philhellene leaders at the time, Europe’s unification could not be possible without the country that gave the continent its name. While trying to steer to the common European norm, however, Greece also embarked in 1981 upon its very idiosyncratic experiment with socialism, as promised and promoted by the party founder and leader Andreas Papandreou, a leather-jacketed rabble-rouser. Socialist rule in the 1980s brought the masses decisively, even demandingly, into politics; undermined the fledgling liberal institutions; and generated intense polarization in society. Meanwhile, the collapse of Communism in 1989 had caused an influx of immigrants into Greece, which thus turned from an historical exporter of human capital into a net importer and, consequently, from an ethnically uniform to an increasingly multiethnic and multicultural society. The abundance of low-cost labor, in combination with cheap loans from abroad, further transformed the country from a nation of producers to one of consumers. And entry into the Eurozone in 2001 helped elevate Greece into the top ranks of the world’s richest nations. In the 2000s, the country was living its own dream. In 2004, it even hosted a successful Olympiad and saw its national soccer team win the European Championship. By that decade’s end, however, as Greek governments found it increasingly difficult to meet their payments on the country’s external and domestic obligations, the dream was over.

Not quite out of the blue, in early 2010 Greece came to the brink of default. As Greek euro bonds began plunging in financial markets, the country was forced to request international bailout emergency financial aid, which was granted in May 2010. In exchange, Greece undertook the task of a very large fiscal adjustment and the restructuring of its entire state system. From then on, everything moved bewilderingly fast, catching both Greeks and the rest of the world by surprise. There were more bailouts negotiated between the country and its foreign creditors, almost constant – and often violent – social unrest on Greek streets, the rapid succession in office of three prime ministers, and the agony of the old political class now faced with an entirely unfamiliar state of affairs. In the two general elections of May and June 2012, the political system all but imploded. The traditional government parties were just about able to form a rickety coalition; an alliance of leftist groups under the leadership of a firebrand young leader became a major opposition party; and a neo-Nazi organization with a criminal record entered the country’s public life and, alarmingly, Parliament. By then, with Europe’s highest unemployment rate and an increasing number of families facing extreme hardship, Greece became the epicenter of the worst crisis in capitalism and liberal democracy since the interwar years, with a questionable future.

What went wrong in Greece, when so much seemed to be going right at first? Lacking a unified and concise theory about the specific Greek case, one must begin with the existing general theories about what makes some states fail and others succeed. These theories, broadly speaking, stress either the role of culture or of institutions.

Cultural theories, first, relate the fate of states to culture, and more specifically to its geographical and historical determinants. Greece, in particular, has been portrayed as a country in which exist two powerful cultural undercurrents that, ever since the creation of the Greek state in the early nineteenth century, are in eternal conflict (Diamandouros 1994). The first, originating from Western European liberalism, represents the forces of pluralism, open market, and secularism; the second undercurrent, originating from Greece’s Ottoman past and the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church, represents nationalism, reliance on the state, xenophobia, and suspicion of the market mechanism. In this view, the development of contemporary Greek politics is seen as the perpetual conflict between tradition and modernity and its current failure as a result of the country’s incomplete modernization (Triandafyllidou, Gropas and Kouki 2013). Pushed to their extreme, cultural interpretations of Greece’s past or present maladies often lead to unfounded, if not altogether preposterous, claims about, for instance, the acceptance of geography as ‘fate’ (Kaplan 2010), a presumed cultural proclivity for bankruptcy (Oborne 2011), or commonly mistaken perceptions of Greeks as lazy or prone to resistance because, as another journalist during the recent crisis rather naively put it, ‘when you’ve been lorded over by the Ottomans, you don’t want to be lorded over by central bankers’ (Cohen 2011).

Institutional theories, by contrast, hold that nations stand or fall by their institutions. Strong and resilient institutions mean that major political and economic crises can be withstood, while weak institutions crumple and fold under history’s harsh test. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson (2012), for instance, have recently advanced a comprehensive institutional theory of ‘why nations fail’ that attributes this to a lack of political pluralism and, therefore, of inclusive economic institutions. ‘Rich nations are rich’, these authors argue, ‘because they managed to create inclusive institutions.’ In contrast, the most common reason for the failure of nations today is the presence of extractive institutions, as these not only ‘keep poor countries poor and prevent them from embarking on a path to economic growth’ but also create the conditions for ‘the killing fields’ of corruption. For, as has been convincingly established, there is a direct causal link in every society between the quality of institutions that exercise political power and the well-being of its population (Diamond 2007, Rothstein 2011). This view resonates across a large body of accumulated scholarship in Greece that has focused on state largesse vis-à-vis a supposedly weak society, the pronounced role of patronage politics, the conspicuous lack of trust, and widespread corruption, all of which are serious impediments to reformism (Kalyvas, Pagoulatos and Tsoukas 2012, Mitsopoulos and Pelagidis 2011).

The Greek case, however, puts both conventional theories to a stern test. Cultural theories fall short of explaining how post-1974 Greece succeeded in building a pluralist political regime despite its ostensibly adverse geographical, historical, and cultural conditioning. While institutional theories are at pains to account for Greece’s recent failure, which was not caused by a lack of inclusive political and economic institutions but rather happened in spite of them. Greece, especially when compared to other similarly debt-ridden European countries such as Spain, Italy, Portugal, or Ireland, is uniquely puzzling in at least two ways. It is both the only country in Europe that saw its state fail in key areas during the recent economic crisis, and the European country that has proven most resistant to reforms. To be credible, therefore, any explanation of the Greek puzzle must account for both the causes that led to state failure and the reasons for the exceptionally strong resistance to reforms aimed at restoring a sustainable state and the ability to compete in global markets.

To this end, I will attempt to go beyond simple cultural or institutional theories in order to propose a unified explanation based on the extraordinary development of populism in Greece – to the point of becoming predominant, thereby contaminating the entire political system. The Greek crisis, therefore, was not the result of adverse historical conditioning or the outcome of narrow, predatory elites that organize societies for their own interest at the expense of the people’s various interests. There was logic in crisis. Focusing in particular on social agency and the role played by political mechanisms, my claim will be that, during the metapolitefsi, Greece’s clamorous and increasingly atomized society, brought to, and kept in, power a political class that promised to attend to its particular interests against existing liberal institutions and at the expense of the public good. This created short-term benefits for both the politically established class and the majority of the people in society while a large-scale crisis was unmistakably brewing in the background.

Populism then, is the second bird aimed at by this stone-book. It is a fleet-footed and stealthy one so that, to hit it, requires clear vision and a suitable standpoint. The concept of populism is, alas, writes Margaret Canovan, ‘exceptionally vague and refers to a bewildering variety of phenomena’ (1981: 3), which makes the term ‘notoriously hard to pin down’ (1984: 313). ‘Populism is a concept both elusive and recurrent’ is how Laclau opens the first of two books on populism, to continue gloomily: ‘Few terms in contemporary political analysis ... have been defined with less precision’ (Laclau 1977: 143; also Laclau 2007). Over time, populism has acquired a great number of defining attributes, or properties, which have given rise to a very broad range of meanings.

As a result, despite the increasingly robust scholarly treatment it has received in recent years, populism still stands as a rather ‘omnibus concept’ (Di Tella 1965: 47), that is, a polyseme lacking precise meaning and, for this reason, hard to apply in real-world cases. When it is not for stretching the concept of populism so as to include more and more cases, it is simply for the substandard quality of the cases chosen that, whether for their lack of electoral significance, time durability, or general political importance, often lead to misleading generalizations. In contrast, contemporary Greece supplies us exactly with what Harry Eckstein (1975: 118) understands as a ‘crucial case’, that is, one providing the most distinctive type of empirical evidence for inductive theory building. Even more, this case offers near laboratory conditions for studying all possible facets and successive phases of populist development, including initial emergence, subsequent development, ascent to power, and polity contamination. Even more importantly, perhaps, as post-authoritarian Greece has been the battlefield where liberalism and populism clashed most violently, with populism being the ultimate winner, this study provides clear insights into populism’s fateful consequences. All in all, then, this book aspires to offer a full empirical account of the populist phenomenon in the country where it has arguably presented in its most paradigmatic, near ideal-typical form.

So, what is populism?¹ Under this innocuous formulation, breaking with the current conceptual jumble, I herein understand and define populism simply as democratic illiberalism (also see Pappas 2014: 2–5). This conceptualization has important ontological and methodological advantages: it provides us with a truly minimal definition for identifying our object;² it clearly points to the exact opposite of populism; and it proposes a hierarchical (per genus et differentiam) mode of empirical inquiry in which populism is seen as a species belonging to the broader genus ‘representative democracy’. This way, we are in perfect position to answer, not only ‘What is populism’, but also ‘What it is not’ and ‘Populist in relation to what and, moreover, to what degree.’

First, being minimal, our definition includes the core properties of the referents of the concept while excluding the variable ones (Sartori 1984: 79). The core properties, namely, democratic credo and illiberal practice, are furthermore both adequate and parsimonious. They are adequate because, taken together, they alone can bound the concept extensionally within contemporary democracy; and they are parsimonious because no accompanying property (such as, the social bases of populist parties or the characteristics of their leaderships) is necessary to make our definition valid. The relation of the latter properties to the core concept should therefore be ‘more productively treated as the focus of empirical investigation rather than as a matter of definition’ (Collier and Gerring 2009: 5).

Second, by pointing to its ‘negative pole’ (Goertz 2006: 30–5), that is, political liberalism, the foregoing definition not only establishes what populism is, but also what it is not, thus effectively delimiting the concept’s boundaries while at the same time providing us with a clear dichotomous view of our object. populism, in short, may be democratic, but it is never liberal. Of course, to say what populism is, and what it is not, is hardly enough if we do not also stipulate specific empirical indicators marking the continuum between populism and its antithesis, political liberalism. This way, our concept will always be determinate (and possessing high discriminatory power) provided, of course, that we can agree on some relatively undisputed cutoff points along the liberalism-populism continuum.

Third, our conceptualization helps situate populism, and its study, firmly within modern democratic politics. Populism, thus, is seen as one of representative democracy’s two faces, the other being political liberalism. Echoing Robert Dahl (1956), social choice theorist William Riker has pointed to a clear categorical distinction between two views of democracy: one that he calls liberal, or Madisonian; and the other that he terms populist, or Rousseauistic. Liberalism and populism, he further explains, ‘exhaust all the possibilities for democratic theory’ (Riker 1982). There is more to it. Since both faces are on display in any democracy, populism can, in fact, be measured (more-or-less populism) in relation to its opposite liberalism; as with a seesaw, the strength of populism is then reversely related to liberalism’s strength.

Finally, based on our definition, populism is not only distinguished from political liberalism, but it is also clearly set apart both from populist occurrences in nondemocratic settings (as, for instance, authoritarian populism in, say, Perón’s Argentina) and from anti-democratic episodes occurring in pluralist settings, which often, but quite inappropriately, are lumped as populist (as are, for instance, various communist or explicitly fascist parties of the kind that currently flourish in Greece). I will return to this point in the last chapter of the book.

Before that however, I will show how, after having reached power in 1981, populism permeated Greek politics and produced what I call a ‘populist democracy’. This in turn required two mechanisms: a state bent on handing out political rents to practically every member of the society; and a party system built to ensure the distribution of these rents in an orderly and democratic way – that is, by turns rather than in one go. Taken together, these two mechanisms led to a fine coordination of aims between the political class and the vast majority of Greeks, enabling both sides to exploit the state and its resources in a seemingly nonzero-sum fashion. When coming to understand those two mechanisms, we will be able to make sense of what made Greece’s populist democracy tick for su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction
• Part I  Populist Democracy
• Part II  Cogs and Wheels
• Part III  Legitimation Crisis
• Part IV  Party System Change
• Part V  Lessons from Greece
• Appendix
• References
• Index