Jürgen Habermas, the closest equivalent to those Enlightenment thinkers twenty-first-century Europe has to offer, was aghast. Merkel had “carried out an act of punishment” against Greece’s left-wing government, he told the Guardian. “I fear that the German government, including its social democratic faction, have gambled away in one night all the political capital that a better Germany had accumulated in half a century.” Germany had “unashamedly revealed itself as Europe’s chief disciplinarian and for the first time openly made a claim for German hegemony in Europe.”
