Three months and 70 years ago, the
future balance of power in Europe was decided by then soon-to-be
winners of WWII. In the Livadia* Palace, near Yalta in Crimea, the
leaders of the outgoing British empire, the upcoming empire of the
USA as well as the totalitarian “Soviet Socialist” successor to
the Russian empire, finalized their plan to end nazi Germany's
aggression -aimed at establishing its Third Reich- and negotiated
their spheres of domination.
Britain's Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the USA, and USSR
Premier Joseph Stalin, decided that Germany was to be dismembered,
demilitarized, denazified and rehabilitated “so as to never again
pose a threat to peace in Europe”, divided between the four
occupying forces (defeated and afterwards liberated France was to be
given a mandate, comprised by US and British concessions).
With a dividing line established in
the middle of occupied Germany, all countries in the west and south
would be “guided” by the allies, while those neighboring
north-east to the USSR in “reasonable” distance would be
handed-over to Moscow's rule. With the exception of Greece, which for
geo-politico-strategic reasons, although situated in the extremity of
the Balkan peninsula (conceded to Soviet influence) was to be the
west's enclave in the region.
The political essence of that agreement
between the contingent allies was to define the future of the “modern
world” of that time. On one side would be the free-market
capitalist proponents of the industrial western world and on the
other side the self-proclaimed communists who advocated an
egalitarian society via an inefficient centrally planed economy, in
transition from the absolutist regimes of czarist Russia and the
remnants of the Austro-Hungarian empire in the center-eastern part of
Europe.
The “sphere of interest” division
was transformed -through the iron curtain- into a nearly total
separation between the two models, lasting decades until the fall of
the Berlin Wall, in 1989. But separation was not total, in the sense
that both regimes tried to emulate selected elements of one-another.
The so-called Soviet block had unsuccessfully tried to create it's
own type of “people's capitalism”, but only achieved in giving a
bad name to anything Socialist and the mere idea of social justice.
On the other hand, the Western world had successfully created it's
own, so far unprecedented, social security system, which ensured that
capitalism would enjoy decades of relative peace between the haves
and have-nots.
At the time of its collapse, 45 years
after the Yalta “Argonaut Conference”, the undemocratic
totalitarian Soviet block was unveiled as what it was: A system with
basic political goods -as education and health care- offered to all
citizens, bar the dissidents, but with very little in terms of
justice, infrastructure, organized markets or civic administration
able to compete with the other half of Europe.
Meanwhile, West Germany protected and
supported by the USA, had once more emerged as a major player in the
global economy. It was only natural that the Federal Republic would
absorb the former People's Republic and -after a relatively short
period of integration- would seek to utilize its capacity in full.
Aspiring to dominate on its neighbors, this time not through war, but
via its economic might, it played a major role in the transition of
former Soviet satellites towards the “new world order” of
deregulated global markets for goods, services and financial
products. That's where the euro comes into play.
The common European currency was
initially devised to be only one of the cornerstone elements towards
a hybrid-federal union of states. Separated from the broad strategy,
the euro only fueled the inherent imbalances between the various sets
of countries. The current account deficit states, not any more
controlling a national currency that would smooth out problems
through devaluation, entered a vicious circle of internal inflation
and external debt. The monetary union -in a sense- degenerated into a
rogue transfer union, where the eternal weaklings of Europe
transferred their competitiveness to the strongest states, in return
for cheap funds, directed mostly not in capital formation but in
consumption. That Greece was the first country to collapse in this
system, is due to a combination of many mistakes, inefficiencies and
breaches of rules, both on the national and the European level.
At this point, Germany had achieved the
status of first among unequal partners, able to dictate its
political/economic dogma as the only way forward for Europe. Based on
the current economic situation and its own interests, Berlin
advocates a new redistribution of spheres of interest in Europe,
mostly under its own direction. In this new balance of power, Germany
is now seen to methodically promote a three tier segregation of
European states, in a revision of the Yalta Conference compromise,
decided in her absence, 70 years ago.
In the first tier would be the
core-members of the EU, the strongest states of central Europe (let's
for argument's sake call them the “3.000 euro per month
citizen-states”) like Germany and France, which would be the ones
to determine (regardless of their citizens' choices) the policies and
means available to the other two: The “1.000 euro per month”
states of the “immediate outer circle”, comprised by the
relatively advanced countries of the former Western World, such as
Italy, Spain, Finland, etc. and the “500 euro per month” outer
periphery of former eastern block countries (e.g. the Baltic states,
Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria etc.), with the addition of some
“usual rogues”, such as Greece or even Portugal.
This is -in my view- the true issue at
stake in the current conflict between Greece and the Quintet
(formerly known as the Institutions and previously as the Troica).
And the outcome of this conflict is certainly not something regarding
only the Greeks.
At this point Athens is offered the
choice between either slow death in the hands of it's
"partner/creditors" or quick death down the Grexit cliff.
Is there a third way out or is chancellor Merkel to confirm Otto von
Bismarck's observation that “it was always a failing of the Germans
to want to attain all or nothing and, in their headstrong way, to
rely on one particular course” in the pursue of their ambitions?
____________________________
*Palace in the Livadiya estate, granted
by Empress Catherine II of Russia to Lambros Katsonis (1752–1804), a Greek
revolutionary and Imperial Russian Army officer, and named thus after
Livadeia, Greece, the town he was born in, then part of the Ottoman
Empire. It is now a suburb 3 kms west of Yalta.
