Greece after the Olympics

[Fiona]

Comedy, which is the drama of happy endings, alternated in ancient festivals with tragedy. The Greeks of old knew that success and good fortune always had a price.
Last year’s happy ending was the staging of the Olympic games in Athens, an event whose bill--all $16 billion of it--has literally come due. Greece understandably basked in its two weeks of fame, for the modern Olympics are equivalent in complexity of maneuver and capital investment to a medium-sized war. Athletes win their medals, but the host country, especially if it is less than a G8 superpower, has to win its spurs. Greece was the smallest country ever to put the games on, and there was trepidation up to the last about its ability to bring them off successfully. Pride mixed with relief when the result exceeded all expectations.
The bigger the party, of course, the bigger the hangover. The $11 billion estimated price tag for the Olympics was soon upgraded to $13.6 billion, and, recently, another $2.4 billion was added, without breakdown or explanation. When one considers that the population of Greece is less than one twenty-fifth that of the United States, the per capita burden on the average Greek citizen was equivalent to $400 billion in debt to an American one--roughly twice the notional cost of the Iraq war. To this must be added the lost revenues from tourism, which declined sharply in the run-up to the Olympics.
To be sure, the games left improvements, particularly in the transportation infrastructure around Athens. But the Olympic village and the athletic venues themselves are now a collective ghost town, and the ‘greening’ of the city promised by the games has failed to materialize. This is not surprising. No serious planning for future use of the Olympic site was done, and trees and parks are anathema to the real estate boom that has consumed Athens and other Greek cities for years. In retrospect, the economic results of the 2004 Olympics resemble a Third World loan from the IMF: a scheme to enrich the elites who benefitted from lucrative contracts and cost overruns, and a mountain of public debt to be paid by everyone else.
There are subtler costs as well. The Olympics were an enormous security challenge, partly met by converting much of Athens into a veritable war zone patrolled by armed troops, and partly by the installation of thousands of security cameras all over the city. These latter were billed as temporary, but the Karamanlis government has now decided to maintain them. In the wake of the London bombings, few would dispute this as a matter of prudence. Nonetheless, it is a sobering thought that the surveillance society has come to the cradle of democracy, and it is limited consolation that a new anarchist group has devoted itself to smashing the cameras.
This year is also likely to be remembered for an almost uninterrupted succession of scandals, clerical and lay. It began last summer with the revelation that the Simitis government had falsifed Greece’s annual deficit to gain membership in the European currency union. Next came revelations that members of the Orthodox priesthood had engaged in a wide variety of criminal activities, including embezzlement, drug trafficking, and trial-fixing. While the church was attempting to cope with this “religious tsunami,” as one senior cleric called it, an Athens daily carried the alleged photograph of a nonagenarian bishop nude in bed with a young woman. Swift on the heels of this came news of the politically charged sale of two Palestinian-run hotels to Jewish investors by the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, whose leader, Irenaios, resisted international calls for his removal from office. Finally, the hierarchy was embarrassed by the leak of an internal memo that denounced PASOK’s leaders as unpatriotic. To cap the run of headlines, the Bishop of Thessaloniki denounced homosexuals for “warp[ing] human nature with unspeakable, unnatural acts.”
The secular arm was not to be outdone, however. Revelations of a second trial-fixing ring followed hard on the indictments of the first, suggesting pervasive corruption in the judiciary. Passenger cars bought on the cheap by the Hellenic Railway Organization were found to be contaminated with asbestos. A blistering report portrayed a hospital system in crisis, with overcrowding and understaffing, dismal hygienic conditions, chronic waste, and general administrative chaos. The President of the Bank of Greece underscored the critical problem of social insurance, with a fifth of the population (and a third of those aged 65 or over) living in poverty.
The consuming issue of the past summer, however, was the attempt of the government to introduce new work rules and to consolidate pension funds. The work rules, authorized but not implemented by the preceding Simitis government, would enable employers to require longer and more “flexible” hours from Greek workers, whose average workweek, at 44.1 hours, is already the highest in the European Union. Flex time, as it is popularly called, has already imposed disruptive patterns of labor on workforces across Europe and the United States, and is widely perceived by unions as a device to increase the workload (at decreased overtime compensation rates), and to weaken worker solidarity and union strength. Banking and transportation employees staged rolling work stoppages in protest throughout July, and late in the month a one-day general strike was called. After gauging the strength of the opposition, however (whose only political support came from small left-wing parties), the Karamanlis government proceeded to impose the new rules.
In many respects, the problems of Greece spotlighted by these various events and embarrassments mirror those of contemporary Western societies in general: persistent unemployment and poverty; failing health and pension systems; a crisis of pastoral care; a general disillusionment with both private and public authority. They are the common dilemmas of what I call horizonless democracies: societies with the formal apparatus of democracy (separated powers, guaranteed rights, regular elections, nominally competitive political parties), which nonetheless appear unable to deal with major social problems or to achieve a shared prosperity, let alone to advance long-term goals of justice and equity. In such societies, the political process services elites and little else, widening inequality, impoverishing the public sphere, and delegitimizing public institutions. This results not in the cronyism and corruption of older clientage systems on which political parties were traditionally based, but in a climate of anomie compounded of frustration, resentment, cynicism, and opportunism. In such a climate, the state appears as simultaneously weaker and more intrusive, and becomes itself a prey to outside forces (as for example in the influence of fundamentalism in the United States, and the increasingly emboldened intervention of clerical regimes in Greece and elsewhere). In part as a cause and in part as a consequence of this, the political parties converge toward a shallow consensus (invariably on terms dictated by the Right), in which debate is narrowed and voters find themselves without substantive policy alternatives. This has been the fate of the Democratic Party in the United States, the Labour Party in Britain, the Social Democrats in Germany, and PASOK in Greece.
The wider crisis of the European Union in the past year epitomizes this situation. The rejection of the EU constitution by electorates in France and the Netherlands and the general disillusionment with financial and political rationalization that it reflects represents both a demand for more effective national government and for protection against the effects of economic integration: cheap labor and the concommitant erosion of workplace standards and conditions; open borders and declining security; an increasingly homogenized culture and the felt loss of both public and personal autonomy. It is unlikely that European federalism will be reversed, but if the present ‘pause’gives the continent a chance to rethink the kind of society it wants rather than the one it has been programmed for, it will be all to the good.
Greece has its own part to play in this debate. It is not only the birthplace of democracy and the home of its most famous symbol, but the only nation to have defeated fascism twice. The bankruptcy of its present politics is no measure of the capacity of its people, or the heritage they bear. The renewal and broadening of that heritage is the task of Europe at the present moment. In it, the voice of Greece should be second to none.

Robert Zaller is Professor of History at Drexel University.

The Hellenic News of America