Losing Greece: its meaning for Europe, past and future.

Overheard in a train station at the height of the Greek financial crisis, between two men of business. One, in middle age, is wearing a light-grey suit. The other, somewhat younger, is dressed in a blue coat and red bow-tie. They speak in German over their coffee.

Mark: We have lost Greece.

Karl: You should be glad to be rid of it.

Mark: I feel the loss.

Karl: You should be lightened by it. No longer will we be carrying their burden. That burden is in the past; we must look toward the future. There is little in Greece that speaks to the twenty-first century.

Mark: How can you say that?

Karl: Listen to me. The Greeks are constantly in debt and want more money. Their politics are corrupt; their socialism is outdated. They have no discipline, no transparency in their governmental affairs.

Mark: But is this all we know of Greece? To what degree is Greece more than a gathering of taxpayers and tax recipients? More than members of a financial exchange?

Karl: You’re starting to sound somewhat romantic. They owe everyone a lot of money, want more, and you speak of vague notions.

Mark: I simply ask about other senses of cost and loss, outside the economic ledger.

Karl: You mean security and immigration? Certainly the Greeks might dream of an Eastern alliance with Russia, based on their shared Orthodoxy. And Europe needs its borders secure. But these fears do not rule out the repayment of debts. It is not a sound strategy or negotiation to renege on promises by threatening more trouble, while at the same time demanding more money!

Mark: I am not thinking along these lines, as sound as they may be from a certain point of view.

Karl: What then? You’re not making sense.

Mark: I am asking more basically: can there be a Europe without Greece?

Karl: Of course! You seem to speak about history and the ties we fondly imagine to tie us to the past. What matters is the future, and that we much know from what is important to us now, in the present. Greece’s future lies in its economic progress. It must address its financial problems.

Mark: It sounds as if you want Greece to be like your Europe, rather than speaking to my question: does Europe have a meaning without Greece? And both places, Europe and Greece, have a past, and therefore a destiny, beyond the balance sheet.

Karl: Now you’re talking again in riddles, or in those vague, romantic terms. We were discussing its financial plight.

Mark: Is the loss of Greece an economic issue?

Karl: Yes – that is what the voters care about. They cannot live off the past or have destiny put bread on the table.

Mark: Is that how the West Germans felt before 1989, or even aftewards? That what happened in Leipzig or Dresden was not their concern, that the East should take care of itself?

Karl: That is a bad analogy. Families were split, especially after 1961, and there were ties of language and shared history.

Mark: But why stop there? Why was there a larger European union, why one currency, if not on the basis of shared history, and sense of belonging? When discussing the place of classical philosophy in Christianity, Tertullian asked, what has Athens to do with Jerusalem? Who asked twenty years ago what Athens had to do with Bonn or Paris? Obviously the financial union was grounded on a a shared history. Why doesn’t this history sustain the union now?

Karl: This sense of history was, as I said, a romantic fantasy, or a political calculation, or an economic strategy. For a shared currency lowered the costs of exports, and it gained traction through inclusiveness. But now we see it as a mistake.

Mark: So there is no Europe anymore? Europe is a term of economic convenience, or a concept that can even include Turkish soccer teams. But it has no deeper meaning. Who remembers the verses of Hölderlin?

Blessed Greece! The dwelling of every deity,
So it is true what we once heard in our youth?
Where, where do the sayings shine, those of the far cast?
Delphi slumbers and where sounds the great destiny?

Karl: You care about things that are useless. Things will sort themselves out. The rest is poetry.