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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Necessity of Greece’s Separation

The Greeks have even more cause to throw off German shackles than the Americans did the British in 1776.
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When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The causes, in this case, are fairly clear. The metropole (Brussels/Berlin) demands terms for renegotiation of Greece’s debt that leave Greece politically and economically utterly subservient to said metropole. The Greeks demand more favorable terms that allow their economy to grow again and have some measure of independence.

The Greeks have suffered far more from austerity than the American colonists did under British taxation. And the British metropole had at least as much reason to accuse us of ingratitude: its taxes were imposed to pay for a war waged on the colonists’ behalf, and the British were rather as disinclined as the German bankers are to have the relationship with the crown treated by the colonists as a blank check.

And, as with the American colonies, the remedy is either independence or genuine representation at the metropole. Either the EU needs to remedy its democratic deficit, creating political organs as powerful and responsive to the people as the ECB is to the imperatives of finance, or it needs to shrink from an empire to a club of like-minded states with already synchronized economies.

The difference is that Germany does not want to be an empire. It is more than happy to see Greece go if it will mean the end of their formal obligations and the ability to return to the normal arms-length relations of business (which include dealing with defaults, bankruptcies, etc.—creditors don’t make all the rules in international finance either, just most of them).

The necessity of separation, therefore, should be all the clearer.

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