Few would question that the European Union almost drowned in a tsunami of crisis since the initial wave of global financial mayhem in 2008. Many would argue that the so-called Euro crisis ceased to be an existential threat in 2012. Others say that the EU has been mortally wounded and is heading towards disintegration, a free fall from one crisis to the next, with Brexit only a symptom of this ominous state of things. Has the EU turned a corner or is it still heading for the abyss? As we finish writing this book, one thing is certain. The crisis has redrawn the boundaries of gain and pain in Europe, and changed the nature of EU politics in the process. Publics are angry, frustrated and emollient. No wonder that in such an atmosphere old relationships we took for granted are put into question, old wounds fester back to the surface, and people take refuge under their national umbrellas.
1.1 The Foundation of European Demoicracy
We believe, however, that all is not lost. That the people living through these times of trouble did not start from scratch. They have a history together, the kind of baggage that makes relationships flare up, intensify and reset. We decided to write this book through our intercultural lenses to better understand what pulls us apart and what brings us together.
In doing so, we use the prism of mutual recognition , a multifaceted social and philosophical concept that in our view best speaks to what has been lost in Europe and what we hope can be recovered. Recognition implies knowledge of each other, imbued with respect, acceptance of our difference, and a desire to engage with these differences for the sake of some amorphous ambition that we call togetherness. To speak with RicĆur, recognition involves both identifying someone as themselves and not someone else in an epistemic sense, and acknowledging them in their identities and values. Mutual recognition , which conditions and is conditioned by self-recognition, implies the reciprocal acknowledgement of two parties as well as the granting of respect and human dignityâand this is how it can transform an unequal relationship. 1
If we did not fear sounding too grand, we would argue that a crisis of the body politic is also a crisis of the soul. If the European project was supposed to be anchored in the mutual recognition of European peoples, recognition of their respective concerns, needs and suffering, it is safe to say that such recognition has always been partial and timid at best. 2 With the crisis though, we have witnessed a reversal, a return to old demons and denials of recognition between the same peoples who had been supposed to engage in togetherness in the previous decades. In the process, we have reshuffled our understandings of who we are, and who our European Others are, of what we need, want and deserve as the peoples constituting the Union. The crisis has shaken up our understandings of what kind of a Union we share and why. It has forced us to renegotiate the rules of our living together, the acceptable balance between interference in each otherâs affairs and deference to each otherâs waysâbrief, the rules of recognition in Europe. One can think of this process as the deeper sociocultural foundation of managing the political economy of monetary union. 3 As yet, we are far from achieving an even preliminarily sustainable equilibrium in this renegotiation.
Why is this so hard? In part because the Euro crisis has brought to light a fundamental tension built into the very nature of the European project. On the one hand, the project was built around the aspiration to bring into being an entirely new kind of political animal. One way to characterise this entity is as a â demoicracy â where the European demoi (in the plural) and citizens rule together but not as one. 4 In this sense, the EU is a third way which tries to provide an alternative to the equation between demos and polity that we find in both a federal state and in an association of states. The aspiration towards the kind of mutual recognition that can support such deep cooperation among demoi is at the heart of such a construct, as both a legal norm of cooperation and as a broader state of mind meant to imbue the body politics of the countries involved.
On the other hand, this demoicratic ambition has increasingly clashed against its nemesis, that is the propensity shared across Europe to deny others such recognition, a propensity that seems imprinted into Europeansâ DNA and is going back to our long history of wars and pogroms, culminating in World War II and its aftermath, when neighbours continued to slaughter neighbours and entire communities took revenge on other communities long after peace was proclaimed by governments. 5 This is why, what the Europeans have achieved in building their Union around the aspiration of mutual recognition, even if often imperfectly and with much trial and error, is no small miracle. Beyond its standing as a form of governance, norm, and as a legal principle, the hope was that it was also becoming an increasingly shared ethos for majorities among the peoples of Europe. 6
And this is where the effects of the so-called Euro crisis on the fragile progress towards mutual recognition between the peoples of Europe are particularly devastating. Any apparent progress towards mutual recognition that we had witnessed in the last decades suddenly seemed to move into reverse gear. In the midst of difficult choices with enormous redistributive consequences, long-standing but dormant conflicts of identities have festered back to the surface, reviving old tropes of prejudice and othering and touching on some raw collective nerves. In these ways, the crisis has undermined the EUâs raison dâĂȘtre and its key legitimating narrative of peace through mutual engagement across Europe and beyond. 7
1.2 The Greco-German Affair and the Battlefield of Stories
The scars are nowhere more visible than in what we refer to in these pages as the Greco-German affair, which unfolded with much public drama and private angst in the shadow of the Greek sovereign debt crisis. Many watched in dismay as the Greeks and Germansâor their yellow press and, perhaps (but not always) less explicitly, their democratic representativesâflouted each other as power-grubbing Nazis and as lazy crooks, to mention but the tip of the iceberg. Yet, the patterns we observe between Greece and Germany are also at work elsewhere, so that this special relationship provides a kind of âothering benchmarkâ for the various divides that have emerged North vs South, East vs West, rich vs poor, disciplinarians vs disciplined, paymasters vs spendthrifts etc. Who can doubt that the British vote to leave the EU in June 2016 was also about a sense of being dismissed and bypassed by large sways of the British publicâBrexit, too, can be read in the shadow of mutual recognition . 8
European struggles over demands and denials of recognition have occurred not least on the battlefield of the images and stories that have come to populate our screens and our newspaper pages. Although we draw on relevant sources up to the date of publication, we concentrate on those found in the two countriesâ print media between 2010 and 2015, from caricatures of Angela Merkel or Wolfgang SchĂ€uble in Nazi uniforms to the infamous Focus magazine cover featuring the ancient statue of the Venus of Milo raising her middle finger. 9 Such images and the stories around them, we believe, hold a key to understanding how a crisis that started with gross over-indebtedness of public and private actors in Europe seeped into the depth of our collective continental psychology. For this reason, we approach the sociopolitical theatre of this Greco-German affair from the perspective of key or recurring storylines, narratives and visuals in its newspaper coverage.
Our method is simple and intuitive. We sought to interpret what we see as discourses bound up with the construction of Selves, Others and Europe, and their underlying recognition dynamics, in a constant back and forth between the Greek and German material.
We gathered material as widely and systematically as we could from a mix of print publications and their online outlets covering the political spectrum. We compiled our German corpus from yellow press dailies (mainly Bild), serious regional dailies (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, SĂŒddeutsche Zeitung and Stuttgarter Zeitung), and weeklies providing investigative journalism (Spiegel and Focus) or intellectual analysis (Zeit), running word searches (âGriechenlandâ and âEuroâ) in their own online archives and on Lexis Nexis, and reviewing cover pages for the days and weeks around the key events specified below. We collected our Greek sources by reading all cover-page articles that referred to Germany or the German leadership during the weeks before and after the key events listed below in the centrist newspaper Kathimerini and the left-wing newspaper Avgi, 10 and by doing word searches i...
