Greece in Crisis

The Cultural Politics of Austerity

Dimitris Tziovas

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781784538453
• eBook ISBN: 9781786722522
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

Since 2010 Greece has been experiencing the longest period of austerity and economic downturn in its recent history. Economic changes may be happening more rapidly and be more visible than the cultural effects of the crisis which are likely to take longer to become visible, however in recent times, both at home and abroad, the Greek arts scene has been discussed mainly in terms of the crisis. While there is no shortage of accounts of Greece's economic crisis by financial and political analysts, the cultural impact of austerity has yet to be properly addressed. This book analyses hitherto uncharted cultural aspects of the Greek economic crisis by exploring the connections between austerity and culture. Covering literary, artistic and visual representations of the crisis, it includes a range of chapters focusing on different aspects of the cultural politics of austerity such as the uses of history and archaeology, the brain drain and the Greek diaspora, Greek cinema, museums, music festivals, street art and literature as well as manifestations of how the crisis has led Greeks to rethink or question cultural discourses and conceptions of identity.

PART I

CRISIS NARRATIVES AND CULTURAL POLITICS

CHAPTER 1

NARRATIVES OF THE GREEK CRISIS AND THE POLITICS OF THE PAST

Dimitris Tziovas

For the past seven years the European and American media have been inundated with stories about the Greek economic or debt crisis. The word ‘economic’ or ‘debt’ (the choice of word depending on the point of view of the speaker or writer) was soon dropped, and most talked simply about the ‘Greek crisis’, suggesting its wider ramifications and international implications.¹ Western analysts often referred to a ‘Greek tragedy’ and encapsulated the crisis in exaggerated media headlines such as ‘Greek drama is far from over’, ‘Greece pulls back from the brink of euro exit’ or ‘Greece is facing a Herculean task’, while one left-wing commentator described the political situation in Greece as ‘exciting’ compared to the ‘inertia’ of the English and something that offered hope to a Europe facing austerity.² The crisis attracted immense international attention and was played out in the Western media in a range of reports, opinion pieces, images and comments. The media have been instrumental in constructing the narratives of the Greek crisis, and hence this paper places particular emphasis on newspaper articles and other media reports and images.

During the crisis many people's concern has been what will happen in the future and how soon austerity will be over. Opinion polls suggest that Greeks are pessimistic about or even fearful of the future. And that this uncertainty about the future might spawn some sort of national introversion and defensive retrogression or a nostalgic escape to the past. We witness returns to and of the past for different reasons: as an attempt to trace the roots of the crisis or its early signs, as a source of national pride or an opportunity for reflection, contrast or reclamation. Yet the crisis has made many talk about a new ‘narrative’ for Greece, a departure from the failed practices of the past, a kind of national catharsis and replenishment. It has also induced Greek society to rethink its values, to revisit its founding myths and to re-examine its earlier certainties. This involves to some extent a narrativization of the traumas of history, an interrogation of past practices and a critical searching for what went wrong, using the past as a guide. The past is destabilized and at the same time acts as a source of strength. This twofold role of the past is analysed in this chapter by examining case studies from different areas (politics, international relations, history, media, archaeology, literature and performance).

Throughout the crisis there has been an attempt by scholars and the media to answer the question of whether history plays a role in the Greek crisis. Recently Stathis Kalyvas has described the historical trajectory of modern Greece as a succession of seven major boom, bust and bailout cycles and the crisis of 2009 as just the latest of these. He claimed that ambitious Greek projects and subsequent travails had received considerable global attention disproportionate to the size of the country, while outsiders had always stepped in to correct Greek mistakes. Because they always expect help from outside, he suggests, Greeks have been encouraged to take risks rather than investing in sound institutions. In turn, this has probably reinforced the ambitions of various Greek elites and has fed these successive boom-bust-bailout cycles. He concludes by pointing out that ‘the past points to a pattern that allows us to both better understand Greece's present predicament as well as to reach a more informed assessment about its future trajectory’.³ Thus Kalyvas treats the crisis as part of a recurring pattern and the latest episode in a historical cycle. On the other hand, the crisis could also be conceptualized in terms of what Alain Badiou calls an ‘event’, a kind of rupture, which disrupts the current situation and opens up a space to rethink the dominant social order.⁴ Each event sets a new beginning in time, a break in history's continuum or a moment of disengagement from past experiences, which is both traumatic and exhilaratingly transformative for the participants.

In one way or another the crisis leads to a re-envisioning of the past and in turn the past informs the experience of the crisis. The past is invoked, remembered and re-interpreted, stimulating temporal thinking and historicization. People tend to look at present difficulties and potential futures through the prism of the past and try to develop coping strategies. Here the notion of ‘preposterous history’, introduced by Mieke Bal, could be useful to reflect on the dialogics of past and present and the interdependence of ‘before’ and ‘after’ during the Greek crisis.⁵ What came before the crisis and what has come after play off against one another, altering each other so that neither is what it would be without the other. The ‘pre’ and the ‘post’ mark one another and change their corresponding statuses, as ‘history’ fluctuates in the in-between. The re-envisioning of the past entails its reciprocal interaction and hybrid confluence with the present.⁶ Through such dialogue between past and present, Bal argues for a notion of ‘preposterous history’, where events or works that are earlier in time operate as after effects caused by the images of subsequent events or artefacts. For Bal, ‘preposterous history’ brings together the ‘pre’ and the ‘post’ of history in a hybrid recycling that re-visions the past (in her case, the Baroque era).

The crisis not only disturbs temporalities; it makes people think ‘preposterously’.⁷ Condensing multiple moments of the past, the crisis seems to have fractured time and re-enacted repressed memories or narratives of traumatic past events. Like trauma, the crisis involves a kind of double telling, the oscillation ‘between the story of the unbearable nature of an event and the story of the unbearable nature of its survival’.⁸ As a reflective process, trauma links past to present through representations and imagination.⁹ This reliving of the past and the intergenerational transmission of traumatic experiences produces a kind of ‘cultural trauma’ involving the remembrance of the traumatic effect rather than the experience. The crisis has generated a retrospective discourse of cultural trauma, which is a process of reawakening earlier traumatic events ingrained in the collective memory. Past and present also coalesced into a body of knowledge during the dictatorship (1967–1974). Iakovos Kambanellis’ play Tο Mεγάλο Tσίρκο [Our Grand Circus] paralleled aspects of Modern Greek history with the Colonels’ regime and US neocolonialism and alluded to the past suffering of the Greek people at the hands of both foreign and domestic rulers.

Following Michel Serres, Daniel Knight deploys the term ‘cultural proximity’ to define how certain past events resonate with the experiences of the current crisis.¹⁰ He argues that ‘cultural proximity is the ability for the individual or collectivity to recognize, and eventually embody, representations of the past within the context of the present’.¹¹ The crisis acts as a filter, making some past events feel culturally proximate. The embodiment of the past in the present suggests that the experience of the crisis includes multiple past moments and is a ‘polytemporal’ event. This chapter aims to explore how and to what extent the crisis has had an impact on the ways Greeks and others read, revisit or revise the past of the country in the light of the crisis. The different approaches to the role of the past can first be traced in the competing narratives as to the causes of the crisis.

Competing narratives and European visions

The narratives about the Greek crisis parallel the division of the Greek people into supporters and opponents of the bailout agreement. What is interesting is that both narratives have a time dimension in the sense that they see the crisis as a relatively synchronic event or as a culmination of a long process of incompetence and state failure.

The first narrative, which tends to find supporters in the ranks of the left, treats the Greek crisis as part of a wider European one. Back in 2010 Costas Lapavitsas, in trying to answer the question of what caused the crisis, identified as the primary reason ‘the structural bias of the Eurozone stemming from the way the Eurozone has been set up’, with what happened to Greece having ‘nothing to do with state profligacy’.¹² Along the same lines, Yanis Varoufakis argued that ‘there is a European and global crisis, of which Greece is an interesting part’ and contended that the current crisis had nothing whatsoever to do with the malignancy of the country's state and private sectors. This was ‘simply a convenient excuse for European leaders in denial’.¹³ Greek society's ills were legion, he maintained, but ‘do not explain the current free fall’.¹⁴ As he put it, ‘the reason for our insolvency was simple: the Eurozone was incapable of absorbing the shockwaves of the 2008 global earthquake’.¹⁵

According to this narrative Greece is not the only country that has a huge debt; the whole of Europe is heavily in debt, and therefore the only solution is its mutualization. The crisis, in turn, is seen more as a recent phenomenon and a result of the malfunction of the Eurozone and its architecture. Even the term ‘Greek crisis’ that territorializes a global phenomenon is avoided as an appellation.¹⁶ This narrative aspires to remind Europeans that they have ‘become Greeks once again’, not by going back in history in Shelley's sense of succumbing to the charms of classical literature or Churchill's idea of emulating Greek heroism, but by bringing to the fore Europe's denial of its current systemic failures, responsible for the Greek derailment. It is implied here that an orientalist and colonialist perspective is being ushered in, dividing European countries into modern and not-yet-modern countries.

The treatment of the Greek crisis as a symptom of a wider malaise finds supporters among non-Greeks too. Slavoj Žižek, for example, argues that the Greeks ‘are at war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because it is our struggle too’.¹⁷ According to him, Greece has become the main testing ground for a depoliticized technocracy in which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. What is at stake for him is the European legacy – democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity – and he claims that by saving ‘Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself’. Greece may foreshadow the future of Europe, as the latter is following Greece both in its catastrophic downward spiral and in the rise of popular protest.¹⁸ The country is becoming the testing ground for the transition from democracy to ‘demo-crisis’ or post-democracy.

The rival narrative adopts a more historical perspective by suggesting that Greece aspires to the Western lifestyle but still maintains oriental attitudes and institutions.¹⁹ The crisis is seen as an opportunity to make Greece a ‘normal’ country and terminate Greek exceptionalism. In trying to answer the question ‘How did Greece get into this position?’, political scientists point the finger at the ‘nature of the Greek state’, which is ‘on its way to being a failed state’ and ‘barely fit for purpose’.²⁰ It is claimed that the long-standing clientelistic relationship of the state with wider society and the economy is fundamental to the nature of the crisis. This, in turn, leads to the conclusion that the crisis was ‘ultimately invented in Athens’ and that there is a cultural setting that has led to the profligacy of the state.²¹ More recently Edmund Phelps, the 2006 Nobel laureate in economics, has argued that neither austerity nor government cutbacks can be blamed for the economic ills of the country, because they are ‘rooted in the values and beliefs of Greek society’.²²

Continuing in the same vein, P.M. Kitromilides historicizes even further th...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Crisis Narratives and Cultural Politics
• Part II Crisis Brain Drain and Diaspora
• Part III Cultural Economies and Institutions
• Part IV Street Art and Nostalgia
• Part V Literature and the Discourses of Crisis
• Bibliography