Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe's Deep Establishment

by Yanis Varoufakis

‘There are two kinds of politicians,’ he said: ‘insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price of their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes.’ With that Summers arrived at his question. ‘So, Yanis,’ he said, ‘which of the two are you?’

As Jean-Claude Juncker, then prime minister of Luxembourg and later president of the European Commission, once said, ‘When it becomes serious, you have to lie.’4

Mindful of the dangers of too much credit, their dictum that ‘To every irresponsible borrower there corresponds an irresponsible lender’ led them to the conclusion that bad loans should burden irresponsible lenders, not taxpayers. As for irresponsible borrowers, they should also pay the price of their irresponsibility, mainly through being denied credit until they proved their trustworthiness again.

There is no point in entering a negotiating room if you are not prepared to contemplate walking out,

As I have frequently observed, there is a widespread belief in Europe’s north that the continent is populated by hard-working law-abiding ants on the one hand and lazy tax-avoiding grasshoppers on the other, and that all the ants live in the north while mysteriously the grasshoppers congregate in the south. The reality is much more muddled and sinister. Corruption takes place across borders, in both north and south. It involves multinational corporations whose connections to the deep establishment are not contained by national boundaries either. Part of what prevents us from tackling this mighty network is a refusal on the part of the establishment to acknowledge its true nature.

Along the same side as Schäuble were what I came to see as his cheerleaders: the Finnish, Slovakian, Austrian, Portuguese, Slovenian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Maltese finance ministers.

Avoiding eye contact and in a voice that quavered with dejection, Pierre responded with a phrase that might one day feature on the European Union’s tombstone: ‘Whatever the Eurogroup president says.’

As the Slovak finance minister, Schäuble’s keenest cheerleader in the Eurogroup, put it a few months later, ‘We had to be tough on Greece because of their Greek Spring.’2

‘Freedom has to be superseded by a system of order.’