Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World

by Suzy Hansen

“So the Americans unpegged the dollar from gold,” Varoufakis continued. “Then Volcker comes in in the late 1970s, and pushes interest rates up. Suddenly, there is a complete reversal of the old plan. Before the 1970s, you had America being the surplus country: exporting products to Europe and Japan, importing a surplus of capital, and then taking this money and loaning it back to them. When these surpluses ended, they engineered something else. American consumers were now buying products from Europe and Japan and later China. What was financing America’s deficits? German and Chinese profits. They were flying into Wall Street.” And then the whole thing collapsed. Varoufakis was speaking from an economic or scientific point of view, but all I could think of was an ordinary Greek’s emotional or psychological reaction to this history, the sense of helplessness when the European Union suggested that raising taxes or cutting pensions would somehow assuage a crisis sixty years old. The Greeks, like many other peoples around the world, had once been victims of a military coup, and thus would not necessarily assume such calamities could be entirely their own responsibility. * * * ON THE DAY of the Greek junta, the writer Neni Panourgia was a child. She remembers walking outside and seeing only military trucks instead of cars. Military music played on the radio, but the world otherwise felt hushed. In