Yanis Varoufakis's Blog, page 118
October 10, 2017
Costa Gavras: I will make a film based on Adults in the Room
When the crisis began, the tragedy that the Greek people are still living through, I began to gather material and information in an attempt to make sense of the reasons and the people – published, filmic and oral. However, what I was missing were the goings on behind the closed doors, where the representatives of the European Union and the Greek people met.
On 16th July 2015, just after his resignation, I sent a text message to Yanis Varoufakis, whom I did not know personally. In that message I wrote: “Reading your interview in the New Statesman, I believe I found what I have been looking for a long time: the subject for a film, a piece of fiction, about a Europe governed by a group of cynical people disconnected from human, political and cultural concerns – obsessed with numbers and them alone.”
Soon, the arrangements were made and Michele, my wife, and I visited Yanis and Danae in Greece a few weeks later. Meanwhile I read two of his books, The Global Minotaur (London: Zed Books, 2011,2015) and the manuscript of a book he was completing at that time entitled And The Weak Suffer What They Must? (London: The Bodley Head, 2016). I was impressed by the quality and originality of their content, as well as the prose.
When we met we had long conversations, in the context of which he let me know that he was about to begin writing his own account of his tenure as Greece’s finance minister, a tale of being an outsider in politics, of the negotiations in the Eurogroup – that illegitimate but ultra powerful EU body. I asked to read the manuscript. He agreed and began sending it to me chapter by chapter, as the book was being written.
Immediately I was convinced by the text’s seriousness and the accuracy of the description of the behaviour of each of the tragedy’s protagonists. Reading it saddened me, and I found myself often angered, indeed enraged, by the violence and the indifference of Eurogroup members, especially the German side, to the drama and unsustainable situation in which the people of Greece lived, and live.
I decided to make a film out of this tragedy. Yanis Varoufakis gave me the rights to his book and absolute freedom to adapt it.
Costa Gavras
Monday 9th October 2017
October 9, 2017
Μήνυμα Κώστα Γαβρά για το βιβλίο Adults in the Room (Ανίκητοι Ηττημένοι)
Φίλες και φίλοι,
Όταν ξεκίνησε η κρίση, η τραγωδία που βιώνει ο λαός της Ελλάδας, σε μια προσπάθεια να κατανοήσω τους λόγους και τους ανθρώπους άρχισα να συλλέγω λογιών-λογιών πληροφορίες και υλικό – γραπτό, κινηματογραφικό και προφορικό. Όμως μου διέφευγαν τα γεγονότα κεκλεισμένων των θυρών μεταξύ των αντιπροσώπων της Ένωσης και των αντιπροσώπων του ελληνικού λαού.
Στις 16 Ιουλίου, λίγο μετά την παραίτησή του, έστειλα γραπτό μήνυμα στον Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη, τον οποίο δεν γνώριζα. Σε αυτό έγραφα: «Διαβάζοντάς την συνέντευξή σας στο New Statesman νομίζω ότι βρήκα εκείνο που έψαχνα για πολύ καιρό: το θέμα μιας ταινίας, ενός έργου, που αφορά μιαν Ευρώπη κυβερνώμενη από ομάδα κυνικών ανθρώπων αποκομμένων από ανθρώπινες, πολιτικές και πολιτιστικές αγωνίες, με εμμονές για συγκεκριμένα μόνο νούμερα.»
Κάπως έτσι κανονίσαμε με την Μισέλ, την σύζυγό μου, να βρεθούμε με τον Γιάνη και την Δανάη στην Ελλάδα μερικές βδομάδες μετά. Στο μεταξύ διάβασα τα βιβλία του, Παγκόσμιος Μινώταυρος και Η Αρπαγή της Ευρώπης. Εντυπωσιάστηκα από την ποιότητα και την πρωτοτυπία του περιεχομένου τους, καθώς και από την γραφή.
Όταν συναντηθήκαμε, είχαμε μακρές συζητήσεις και μου είπε ότι έγραφε βιβλίο για τις εμπειρίες του από την περίοδο που διατέλεσε υπουργός οικονομικών, ως ένας outsider της πολιτικής, για τις διαπραγματεύσεις στο Eurogroup – το μη νομιμοποιημένο αλλά πανίσχυρο όργανο της Ευρωπαϊκής Ένωσης. Του ζήτησα να διαβάσω το χειρόγραφο. Δέχθηκε και μου το έστελνε κεφάλαιο-κεφάλαιο, καθώς το έγραφε.
Αμέσως πείστηκα για την σοβαρότητα του κειμένου του και για την ακρίβεια της περιγραφής των συμπεριφορών κάθ’ ενός από τους πρωταγωνιστές της τραγωδίας. Λυπόμουν και συχνά θύμωνα, εξοργιζόμουν με την βία και την αδιαφορία των μελών του Eurogroup, ιδίως της γερμανικής πλευράς απέναντι στο δράμα και στην μη βιώσιμη κατάσταση στην οποία ο λαός της Ελλάδας αναγκαζόταν να ζει.
Αποφάσισα να γυρίσω ταινία για αυτή την τραγωδία. Ο Γιάνης Βαρουφάκης μου έδωσε τα δικαιώματα του βιβλίου και την απόλυτη ελευθερία προσαρμογής του.
Κώστας Γαβράς
Δευτέρα 9 Οκτωβρίου 2017
DiEM25’s tour of Italy forges alliances & a plan for 2019
Last week, DiEM25’s Yanis Varoufakis and Lorenzo Marsili toured Italy, meeting activists, movements, municipal coalitions and political figures across the Eurozone’s third largest economy to put forward our proposals for tackling Europe’s common problems, and to introduce our ongoing debate on DiEM25’s role in the 2019 European elections.
Over five days our team visited six cities, speaking at seven events to over 5,000 people. We were humbled by the extraordinary turnout and the widespread interest in our ideas and proposals!
Here’s what happened:
The first stop was Milan on September 27 at the Fondazione Feltrinelli. Titled “There is (no) alternative?: Progressive proposals for Europe”, the event was sold out to the point where the organisers had to set up a second room for it!
Speakers included Milan’s former mayor Giuliano Pisapia and Tonia Mastrobuoni, Berlin correspondent from the paper La Repubblica. The main topic: the need for a large transnational party in Europe, gathering all progressive movements to offer a real alternative to the Establishment and nationalist parties.
Video diary #1 : https://diem25.org/our-italy-tour-kicks-off/ …
Next up, Yanis and Lorenzo visited Turin, at the ‘Festival Proxima del 99%’. Over 600 people attended to hear Yanis and Lorenzo, alongside speakers like Italian trade union leader Maurizio Landini and Nicola Fratoianni, discuss what’s going wrong with left wing politics in Italy, the sinking numbers in electoral turnout and political participation, and how today’s national-level problems can only be resolved if we take into account the transnational dimension.
The Festival Internazionale at Ferrara provided the venue for the next tour stop. Speaking to a packed theatre of over 1,000 (mostly young) people – many of whom had been queuing around the block (pictured) – Yanis and Lorenzo outlined the core problems of the EU/Eurozone, and the Establishment’s fake narrative of a ‘North/South divide’ which treats these regions as different worlds with different issues. They also took questions from the audience.
Next came the “Movements and Cities of Europe”, an open assembly in Bologna with the municipal movement Coalizione Civica. Yanis’ speech, calling for a ‘political awakening’, closed the event, and it was very well received by the 500-strong audience.
The fifth stop was Naples, where our team joined the first national assembly of DiEM25 in Italy to solidify the activist base there. The event was organised by DiEM25’s local group in the city, DSC Naples 1.
Our team then made a second stop in Naples to speak alongside its mayor, Luigi de Magistris, about the DiEM25’s concept of “rebel cities” – a network of progressive municipalities like Barcelona, Zagreb, Warsaw and Naples itself. Together with Luigi de Magistris and several movements from the city, Yanis and Lorenzo debated how an innovative transnational campaign for the 2019 European elections could look.
The final stop was Palermo on October 1, at an event organised by DiEM25’s local group DSC Palermo2. Titled “Palermo Europe: the future goes from the Mediterranean”, Yanis, Lorenzo and a host of other speakers including Palermo’s mayor discussed how Palermo and the region represented a new model for the welcoming and integration of migrants and refugees, a foundational claim for DiEM25.
The tour also marked the launch of a new initiative “Radio DiEM25 Italia”, with ongoing live videos from our members, DSCs, partners and movements across the country. (Check it out at on the page of DiEM25 Italia.)
The tour might have ended, but the journey has just begun. Stay tuned for future tours and help us spread the word: The time to build a new Europe is now!
Do you want to be informed of DiEM25’s actions? Sign up here.
October 7, 2017
Why Europe Needs a New Deal, Not Breakup – op-ed in The Nation, with James K. Galbraith
The American New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt’s first two terms combined the goals of financial stabilization, reconstruction, conservation, and employment—jobs for the jobless; public works; power systems and new industries, especially in the South; soil conservation and reforestation to battle the Dust Bowl; and a potent mix of regulations and insurance to assert public power over high finance.
Europe today needs all of these. Its overgrown banks, haunted by the specter of insolvency, are pushing households into foreclosures and evictions across the continent, and at an accelerating scale in the most depressed countries. States are bankrupt and will only become more so as the European Central Bank begins to tighten under pressure from German savers crushed by negative interest rates. Like America 80 years ago, Europe has a vast periphery. In its South, there is a semi-permanent Great Depression, whereas in the East there is great need for new and renewed industries, transport networks, housing, and social investments. Above all, Europeans need jobs.
Unlike the United States in the 1930s, Europe is also facing the menace of disintegration, as the absence of a democratic federal system has spawned a crisis of legitimacy. Paralysis in the face of deindustrialization and chronic unemployment is breeding a toxic politics throughout Europe, with a postmodern form of fascism threatening some countries and a sense of hopelessness elsewhere. Europe has not yet suffered ecological calamities comparable to those in the past few weeks in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico; but they are coming, in the form of droughts, rising sea levels, and (most immediately) unstoppable waves of refugees from conflict and climate change in the Middle East and Africa.
The Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 (DiEM25) has therefore proposed a European New Deal (END), inspired by FDR but designed for European conditions. Chief among these is the sad fact that the European Union is a weak and limited thing—a confederacy, more or less. The crisis has made it virtually impossible even to discuss the creation of a US-style federation in Europe, with full powers to budget and mobilize for the emergencies at hand. European polities are so alienated by the authoritarian incompetence of the current leadership—exemplified by the crushing of the Greek government in 2015 and the heavy-handed approach of the European Commission to Brexit—that an increase in central powers (“more Europe,” as they say) would almost certainly meet heavy resistance. So it is necessary to work within existing charters and treaties to bring about stabilization by means of a European New Deal before hope is restored and the creation of new, democratic, federal, pan-European institutions—even a proper European Constitution—can be discussed sensibly and with cool heads.
To this END, we have proposed the following programs for all European countries, independent of whether they are in the European Union or the eurozone:
• A green transition, led by a new agency whose aim is to provide a continent-wide infrastructure focusing on the green Energy Union and the technological sovereignty that Europe desperately needs.
• Economic and social stabilization, principally through a jobs-guarantee program to offer employment to all Europeans seeking work in their home countries. The jobs should pay a decent moderate wage keyed to national conditions, ending the involuntary migration flows within Europe that have been the cause of much discontent, and tied to a food-and-energy-stamps program and to social housing.
• A universal dividend that would allow European citizens to share in the returns of capital and automation, democratizing the economic sphere and preventing the next crisis of low aggregate demand due to the worker- displacement effect of artificial intelligence.
Specifically for the eurozone, we propose a series of therapeutic policy interventions whose great advantage is that they need no European Union treaty changes, but can be implemented under a broad interpretation of existing rules:
• A step-by-step banking union that (a) emulates the creation, by the Roosevelt administration, of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; and (b) restructures all of Europe’s problem banks, placing them under effective social control.
• A program by which the European Central Bank mediates between states and money markets to reduce their total debt burden, but without money-printing or making Germany pay for, or guarantee, the public debt of deficit countries.
• A Chapter 11–like public-debt restructuring facility for unpayable legacy debts (e.g., Greece’s).
How are these programs to be funded in the absence of a federal treasury or a central bank with a suitable remit?
The Green Transition Works Authority will be funded by a combination of (a) the European Investment Bank, which has the capacity to issue the necessary bonds, while the European Central Bank can stand by in the secondary markets ready to purchase the EIB’s bonds, bolster their value, and reduce the interest payments; and (b) a continent-wide carbon tax.
Any retreat to the nation-state will only benefit the xenophobic forces of the ugly right.
For economic and social stabilization, we propose the creation of a European Equity Depository, into which the following income streams will flow: profits from the financial assets purchased by Europe’s central banks (in the context of their monetary operations); other central-bank profits; and a pan-European inheritance tax.
Finally, a percentage of shares from every corporate initial public offering and capital increase should be socialized and transferred to the European Equity Depository. The accumulating dividends, plus levies on the derived distribution of intellectual-property rights and on common-knowledge monopolies, will then fund a universal basic dividend.
Then there is the euro. The currency shared by 19 of the EU’s member states cannot be preserved in its current form, resembling as it does the gold-exchange standard, whose 1929 collapse led to the Great Depression. The euro has political and symbolic importance, both for its champions and its foes, but monetary systems are tools, not ends in themselves. So the euro must either adapt or cease to exist.
The reality is that Europe created a common currency with an inflexible central bank and no federal state; that arrangement has ended in a predictable debt deflation. As a result, already the European monetary system is falling apart. There are countries (Denmark and Britain) that will never join the euro. There are others (Sweden, Poland, and Hungary among them) that are supposed to join in the future but apparently have no intention of doing so. And then there are Cyprus and Greece, which under capital controls have a de facto dual—currency system, since a euro in a Cypriot or Greek bank cannot be exchanged freely for a euro in paper or in another country’s banks. Lastly, some countries in the eurozone would be better off outside, including rich countries like Finland.
Given these realities, the vision of a comprehensive continental currency is not going to be realized. The European establishment must accept that false hope is bad strategy. Work should begin now on a new round of monetary reforms for Europe, giving the indebted countries of the region degrees of freedom without which the grapes of wrath will continue to “grow heavy for the vintage.”
To this effect, DiEM25’s European New Deal is proposing a moderate, technically simple reform: the creation of a public digital-payments platform in every eurozone country. Using the existing digital platform of their nation’s tax office, taxpayers would be given the opportunity to purchase digital tax credits, which they could use to pay one another or to extinguish future taxes at a substantial discount. These credits would be denominated in euros but transferable only between taxpayers of a single country, and would thus be impervious to sharp capital flight. Meanwhile, governments would be able to create a limited number of these “fiscal euros,” to be given to citizens in need or for the funding of public projects.
Fiscal euros would allow stressed governments to stimulate demand, lessen the tax burden, and, ultimately, reduce the crushing power of the European Central Bank. In the long term, these public digital-payment platforms can form a managed system of country-specific euros that work like an International Clearing Union, a modernized version of John Maynard Keynes’s 1944 vision of what the Bretton Woods system should have been like—but, tragically, was not.
DIEM25’s European New Deal provides, we believe, the best chance for holding the European Union together. But should it be held together? Many progressive voices in Europe (and beyond) have been calling for the disbandment of the EU, due to its irredeemably neoliberal architecture, and a return to the nation-state as the realm in which democratic politics can be rebuilt before a new internationalism can spring up again, this time on solid foundations. They point, in much the same way as Burkean Brexiteers did, to the absence of a European demos on which a pan-European democracy can rely.
DiEM25 begs to differ. Societies in Europe are facing four major socioeconomic challenges with the hallmarks of climate change. Just as global warming can never be addressed at the national level, even though local and national action is imperative, the same applies to the crises of (a) public debt, (b) banking, (c) exceptionally low investment (relative to savings), and (d) rising poverty. These will either be dealt with effectively at a European level or not at all, thus ensuring that any retreat to the nation-state will only benefit the xenophobic, militantly parochial forces of the ugly right.
Beyond the practical need for a pan-European approach, DiEM25 embarks from something the left used to understand well: When Marx and Engels adopted their slogan “proletarians of the world unite,” they were not rejecting the importance of national culture or of the nation-state. Instead, they were rejecting the idea of a “national interest” and the view that struggles must prioritize the realm of the nation-state. The notion that we must return to a one-nation/one-parliament/one-demos frame of mind would puzzle the left’s 19th-century pioneers, as it would puzzle progressives of the early and mid-20th century, who dreamed of, and struggled for, a transnational republic from the Atlantic to as far east as possible.
We need a pan-European network of rebel cities, rebel prefectures, and rebel governments.
The left, lest we forget, traditionally opposed the bourgeois belief in a one-to-one relationship between a nation and a sovereign parliament. We counterargued that identity is something we create through political struggle: class struggle, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle to smash gender and sexual stereotypes, and emancipation from empire, racism, xenophobia, and the practices of mass surveillance.
In today’s Europe, this spirit is not well served by calling for the split of the EU into neatly delineated national realms. DiEM25’s alternative approach is to issue a call to arms to all Europeans to join in what we term “constructive disobedience.” First, we offer a well-thought-out policy agenda for every nook and cranny of Europe, to be implemented at a pan-European level; then, when the establishment predictably turns it down, we embark on massive disobedience, including governmental disobedience (which is what one of us practiced when representing Greece in the Eurogroup in 2015).
In this sense, DiEM25’s European New Deal is the constructive part, which should inspire Europeans regarding what can draw us together into a single, transnational progressive agenda, so that we can organize the disobedience necessary at the local, national, and pan-European level. This is the way forward for progressives seeking practical solutions to problems that wreck the lives of the many across our continent.
DiEM25, therefore, by calling for a pan-European campaign of disobedience with the transnational elites in order to create the European demos that will bring about Europe’s democracy, is in tune with the left’s traditional approach. In this Gramscian spirit, DiEM25 insists that our European rebellion should happen everywhere, in towns, regions, nation-state capitals, and in Brussels, without prioritizing any level over any other. The European New Deal, therefore, is a practical policy agenda for bringing together a pan-European network of rebel cities, rebel prefectures, and rebel governments into a progressive movement that becomes hegemonic in Italy, in Greece, in England—indeed, anywhere in Europe.
Of course, one may cheekily ask: “Why stop at the European level? As internationalists, why don’t you campaign for worldwide democracy—for an International New Deal?” Our answer is that we are doing precisely that (see the July 6 New York Times op-ed by Yanis Varoufakis, “A New Deal for the 21st Century”). Ideally, DiEM25 should link up with a Democracy in the Americas movement, which Bernie Sanders’s “political revolution” could spark, as long as it extends beyond the US-Mexican border to include Latin America. And then onward to the Democracy in the Middle East, Democracy in Asia, and Democracy in Africa movements. But given that history has, for better or worse, delivered an internally borderless European Union, with common policies on the environment and a variety of other realms, progressives must defend our really existing absence of borders, the existing EU commons of climate-change policy, even the Erasmus exchange program that gives young Europeans the opportunity to mingle in a borderless educational system. Turning against these splendid artifacts of an otherwise regressive EU is not consistent with what the left ought to be about.
So, yes, the European Union should and must be saved, and here are just a few of the reasons why:
• Europe has political and social standards for democracy and human rights, as well as for health and safety and the environment, that will not be respected if the continent splits back into national fiefs. In this respect, the cases of Poland and Hungary are already disturbing enough.
• Integrated production networks are efficient, and part of the warp and woof of modern economic life. Disrupting them is extremely costly, as the experiences of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia showed.
• After a breakup, the smaller countries of Europe will be just as vulnerable to speculative movements of their currencies, the caprices of international investors, and the vagaries of their local oligarchies as they were before the European project got under way.
• Population movements cannot be stopped, and they would become even more toxic politically if new barriers and electrified fences were built. The evidence for this is clear in Britain in the wake of the Brexit vote, and in Austria, Hungary, and elsewhere.
In the long run, Europe needs a democratic governing structure, a proper budget, and the consolidation of many functions now maintained at the national level, with savings in some areas (the military), more uniform and effective protection of the weaker European citizens, greater effective sovereignty at the state and municipal level, and—last but not least—a common approach to the postcapitalist forms of production and distribution made inescapable by new technologies and the energy and environmental crisis.
But this will be possible only after European peoples come to appreciate the continent as a constructive force in their lives—as a visible, palpable, useful presence. And that cannot happen until the structure and ideologies of European economic management have been changed, until there is a full escape from the dysfunctional molds in which those ideas were initially framed.
Is this politically difficult? You bet! But Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn have shown that clear, sensible ideas—brave enough to challenge the entire existing system, but not unprecedented or utopian—can persuade large numbers of people. Europeans are ready for this. They know that Europe is in danger because it is undemocratic and, consequently, misanthropic when faced with crisis.
Europe now needs an antidote to Euro-TINA: the toxic doctrine that “there is no alternative” within the European Union—except, perhaps, disintegration. That is what the Democracy in Europe Movement, DiEM25, and its European New Deal are about. And this is why we are determined to take our agenda to ballot boxes all over Europe by 2019.
Yanis Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.
James K. Galbraith is the author, most recently, of Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (Yale University Press, 2016). He teaches at The University of Texas at Austin and is an adviser to the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025.
For The Nation site, were this article was originally published, click here.
October 6, 2017
Spain’s Crisis is Europe’s Opportunity – Project Syndicate op-ed, 6 OCT 2017
ATHENS – To revive the ailing European project, the ugly conflict between Catalonia’s regional government and the Spanish state may be just what the doctor ordered. A constitutional crisis in a major European Union member state creates a golden opportunity to reconfigure the democratic governance of regional, national, and European institutions, thereby delivering a defensible, and thus sustainable, EU.
For the rest of the article click here
October 5, 2017
October 4, 2017
ΑΝΙΚΗΤΟΙ ΗΤΤΗΜΕΝΟΙ, Δευτέρα 9 Οκτωβρίου, 7μμ – βιβλιοπαρουσίαση στην Τεχνόπολη (Γκάζι) με τους: Νάντια Βαλαβάνη, Βασίλη Βασιλικό & Νίκο Θεοχαράκη
Η ελληνική έκδοση του βιβλίου του Γιάνη Βαρουφάκη για την Ελληνική Άνοιξη 2015, που έγινε best seller στην Βρετανία υπό τον τίτλο ADULTS IN THE ROOM, παρουσιάζεται την Δευτέρα 9/10 στις 7μμ στην Τεχνόπολη Δήμου Αθηναίων (Αεροφυλάκιο 1 – Αμφιθέατρο) υπό τον τίτλο ΑΝΙΚΗΤΟΙ ΗΤΤΗΜΕΝΟΙ: Για μια ελληνική άνοιξη μετά από ατελειώτους μνημονιακούς χειμώνες.
Το βιβλίο παρουσιάζουν οι: Νάντια Βαλαβάνη, Βασίλης Βασιλικός και Νίκος Θεοχαράκης. Συντονίζει ο Κωνσταντίνος Πούλης (ThePressProject). Κείμενα θα διαβάσει η Μαρία Καρακίτσου
September 29, 2017
Article on DiEM25 in the Boston Globe – by Thanassis Cambanis, 29th September 2017
WHEN THE PUBLIC is disillusioned with an entire political culture, it’s not a problem that technocrats alone can fix. But an unlikely band of Greek reformers may have an answer for an unsettled Europe — and the entire Western world.
Over the last seven decades, Western Europe, with support from the United States, built a liberal order around lofty goals — peace; stable, elected governments; open economies; and shared solutions to regional and global needs. Today, though, Europe’s institutions inspire as much frustration as admiration, with many questioning the entire conceit of a united continent. In the European Union today, citizens heap disdain on the experts in Brussels who have produced reams of regulations on everything from mine safety to banking hours to what kind of labels cheesemakers can use. The sense of malaise ballooned after the 2008 financial crisis exposed the cracks in the union’s foundation, and still more after a wave of new migrants arrived from the south and east beginning in 2015.
While the Brexit vote and the emergence of Donald Trump have prompted some in Europe to rally to the EU’s defense, a homegrown extreme right has gained influence by opposing immigrants and the European Union alike.
Over the years, Europe’s solution to many woes has been to elevate technocrats to ever-greater positions of power, enabling them to go around populist politicians. Yet according to a newly energized wave of reformers, Europe’s penchant for experts has been its undoing, breeding a culture of contempt for democracy.
“We have a Europe that has lost its democracy and legitimacy and soul,” said Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece and founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, which is trying to invent a new kind of transnational politics that will revive Europe. “We want a European democratic union. Otherwise everything we care about will go to the dogs.”
His movement has attracted 100,000 members and is promoting what it calls a “European New Deal,” modeled after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
The activists in Varoufakis’s movement, also known as Diem 25, argue that if Europe is to survive and thrive, it needs to preserve its social-welfare values but also its capitalist dynamism. Their version of the New Deal would stop austerity policies, beef up anti-poverty programs, and invest in jobs for the unemployed.
Yet Varoufakis’s movement also thinks Europe needs an injection of American-style participatory democracy. Brussels operates by bureaucratic consensus. Diem 25 favors a pan-European government vested with more tangible, but also politically accountable, power.
Supporters of Diem 25 see their struggle as part and parcel of a global response to a crisis of inequality and illiberalism that connects them with Bernie Sanders in the United States and the Podemos party in Spain, and with more hardline constituencies like the Occupy movement and anarchist movements.
Varoufakis and his supporters aren’t revolutionaries. They want to channel a neglected group: the fed-up, left-behind 99-percenters who are angry at bankers, fat cats, and Davos grandees — but who also prefer to fix the system rather than blow it up. The Diem 25 movement wants to harness the energy and tactics of the radical left — but in service of a reform agenda that seeks to repair capitalism rather than replace it.
ALREADY, DIEM 25’S rhetoric is reflected in mainstream policy — in the grudging support for EU reform from German Chancellor Angela Merkel and in a more rousing call for reform this past week from France’s young new president, Emmanuel Macron. “The Europe we know is too weak, too slow, too inefficient, but only Europe gives us the capacity to act on the world stage in the face of the big, contemporary challenges,” Macron said in a speech that endorsed many of the Varoufakis bloc’s proposals
It’s striking that the vanguard of European reform has its roots in the tribulations of Greece. One of the EU’s smallest and weakest members, Greece knows how the union operates at its best and at its worst. Europe integrated Greece in 1981 to rekindle democracy there after a disastrous military dictatorship that fell in 1974. The ancient birthplace of democracy embodied the EU’s role of spreading not only wealth but freedom.
But when the financial crisis hit in 2008, it was every nation for itself. Rich countries in the euro zone, like Germany, had very different needs than poorer peers like Portugal, Spain, and Greece. A cabal of mostly unelected finance officials from rich Europe orchestrated a bailout for poor Europe, imposing draconian austerity and triggering a human calamity. Greece suffered the most, but other poor European countries also languished in depression. Meanwhile, immigrants flooded into a fractured Europe unable to coordinate its immigration policy or control its borders. Eventually a deal was reached that amounted to Europe paying Turkey to bottle up refugees there.
In tatters was any pretense of democratic international consensus. Extremist right-wing groups surged in popularity, while legacy national political parties and the bureaucrats in Brussels seemed out of ideas and popular appeal.
But just in the last year, a surprisingly vital third-way reform effort has surged. Varoufakis, an iconoclastic Greek economist, embodies this new fusion of radical and center. The 56-year-old career academic grew up as a self-identified radical and leftist. As a teenager he sided with socialists against the remnants of Greece’s right-wing junta. In the 1980s, he joined workers on the picket lines in England protesting against Margaret Thatcher’s austerity. By the 2000s, however, Varoufakis had adopted a strikingly centrist ideology.
Even before the 2008 financial crisis, he had begun writing extensively about the problems of runaway finance capital and of central banks more powerful than elected politicians. Yes, communism had failed spectacularly, as the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 made clear. But triumphalist capitalism suffered its own catastrophe in 2008, Varoufakis believes, opening the path for a renewed social democracy and a heavily regulated version of capitalism.
Fresh off the publication of two books about the perils of global finance and his vision for a policy that preserved capitalism but shattered the hegemony of the elitist 1 percent, Varoufakis found himself suddenly swept from academia into politics in January 2015.
Greece’s new socialist party, Syriza, won power after the country’s established parties all imploded, and drafted Varoufakis to join the government and run its do-or-die negotiations with the euro zone in 2015. For six months, Varoufakis confronted the most powerful finance ministers and central bankers in the world, and made his case to everyone who would listen. Austerity punishes the poor for the incompetence of financial elites, Varoufakis proclaimed.
Europe’s bankers crushed Greece’s attempt to rebel against austerity. Varoufakis left government perversely energized by his failure. He published a tell-all about the secret negotiations to bring Greece to its knees called “Adults in the Room,” with zingers from conversations he had secretly taped on his phone during meetings he’d had with masters of the global finance universe.
The 500-page memoir about the inner workings of currency union and bailouts made an unlikely best-seller. But like Thomas Piketty’s plodding volume “Capital,” it struck a chord with its explanations of the roots of inequality, and alienation — and with its concrete suggestions to improve matters with a hefty dose of electoral democracy and redistribution of wealth and power.
THE DEMOCRACY in Europe Movement 2025 launched in February 2016, with chapters all across the EU. Its acronym is meant to evoke “carpe diem,” the Latin exhortation to seize the day. The year 2025 is the group’s deadline to bring about a new European constitution.
Whenever possible, the movement’s organizers want to persuade existing political parties to adopt the Diem 25 platform, like Poland’s Razem and Denmark’s The Alternative. But Diem 25 will also run for office at the European level; it already is planning a campaign for the 2019 European parliamentary elections.
The New Deal adopted by Diem 25 aims to revive and democratize Europe’s utopian ideals first through quick fixes that don’t require complex international treaties. These include investment in jobs for the unemployed, economic coordination with countries outside the euro zone, and a new digital payments system.
The next steps proposed by Diem 25 are more ambitious. A tax on finance would fund a European budget. The European Commission, which wields enormous executive power, would become directly elected. And the European Parliament, which today lacks even the power to initiate legislation, would become a real legislative body. Existing political parties and new movements like Diem 25 would have to organize and form alliances across national boundaries, creating European-wide electoral politics to complement political life at the national level.
Under current conditions, few European voters would agree to surrender an iota of sovereignty to Brussels; the track record of the technocrats is too tainted. That’s why the first step is to stabilize Europe and deliver big economic improvements using existing institutions and power. Once that happens, Europe can convene a constitutional assembly to draft a new charter for the continent.
In today’s West, Varoufakis said, “authoritarianism and incompetence feed off each other.” With existing approaches discredited, he believes Europeans will be receptive to a federal, democratic blueprint to fix the continent — but it only can work if it wins legitimacy at the ballot box.
“We leftists and liberals whose illusions were incinerated — can get together to stop creeping neo-fascism,” Varoufakis said. “Even though we are radicals, we don’t want to see a disintegration of the EU because of all the great things it has brought — peace being the greatest of them.”
Although anti-Americanism has long been in vogue for much of the European left, there is a strong American flavor to the whole European project. Varoufakis unapologetically praises and borrows from what he thinks is most valuable in the American democratic tradition. It was American pressure, vision, defense, and money that created modern Europe in the first place.
THERE ARE countless hurdles to a reform agenda for Europe. Since the 1950s, efforts to democratize decision-making, or implement real shared sovereignty across national borders, have foundered because member governments, and sometimes their citizens, are loath to shift power to international bodies.
“This idea of the disconnect between elites and the population is widespread,” said Susi Dennison, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations who studies efforts to reform the EU.
Some proposals have gained mainstream momentum, she said, including the plan to create some new European parliament seats that are elected by continent-wide votes, and to make the European Commission and presidency more directly tied to elections.
But nationalist sentiment remains strong, as does resistance to the fundamental idea of the EU, she said. As Brexit showed, not that many voters care about the idea that the EU is an effective insurance policy against continental war — even if it’s true. Over time, Dennison said, she fears that even well-meaning reform efforts will appear to the public as nothing more than added layers of bureaucracy, and the European project will lose what little value it retains in the eyes of the public.
“I don’t think it will collapse tomorrow, but there’s a very real risk,” she said.
The slow-boil crises of the last decade have altered the landscape throughout the United States and Europe, with anti-immigrant right-wing groups an established part of the political power structure. For the latter half of the 20th century, Western electorates might have come to see war as a risk only for faraway, far less fortunate countries. But the tensions that have erupted since 2008 serve as a reminder that the West’s democratic peace isn’t a given. It arose from the aftershocks of apocalyptic world war, and took sustained effort to build. Without strong public commitment, it could crumble.
Thanassis Cambanis, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is the author of “Once Upon a Revolution: An Egyptian Story.” He is an Ideas columnist and blogs at thanassiscambanis.com.
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