Brookings Institution, Washington DC. Wikicommons/Gryffindor. Some rights reserved.The game of Greek chicken is unending. At the Brookings Institution in Washington DC where the world’s finance ministers assembled for the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank this week, Germany’s austere finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble was asked, ‘Is Europe ready to lose Greece?’
‘No,’ he replied in his one-word answer to the questions that came from the floor. Fifteen minutes previously, also in Brookings, Yanis Varoufakis, who likes to portray himself and his country as the victim of hardline German economic philosophy dating from the pre-1914 Austrian school of Ordoliberalismus had spoken with his usual passion about how the previous corruption and clientelism of past Greek politicians had brought down his country.
Both men are trapped in the iron grip of politics, rather than economics. Varoufakis represents Plato’s philosopher-king, the man of ideas who becomes a ruler, catapulted from the backwaters of academic life into being the most famous finance minister the world has seen this century. But Varoufakis is right when he says that he has a mandate. And so does Schäuble. Varoufakis cannot return to Greece and say to voters – ‘You were wrong and previous governments who imposed austerity were right’. Schäuble cannot return to Germany and say to his voters, ‘You are wrong and Germans should agree to wipe off debts and give Greece lots of money to start growing again.’
