Yanis Varoufakis at a meeting with Wolfgang Schäuble, February, 2015.Wikicommons/Jörg Rüger.All rights reserved. Yanis Varoufakis is the architect of the current negotiating strategy of Greece. As he usually says when he tries to explain things: “It is very simple”. Greece’s negotiating strategy is based on the dogma that when push comes to shove, the other side will retreat. Why? Because the other side, meaning Europe, has a lot to lose. His estimate is around 1 trillion euros.
During the past five months, Varoufakis did not seem to adhere to popular win-win prescriptions of negotiation theory that call for mutual accommodation of interests. Although Greece’s and Europe’s interests are almost completely aligned, he always disagreed with the ways in which European partners suggested that Greece could escape the difficult economic debt crisis it found itself in, in early 2010. Instead of austerity measures that were imposed, he always favored a more “European” solution that required central management of EU debt and EU investment funds.
Europe was not, and still is not, ready for the level of consolidation that the Greek Finance Minister suggested. On the other hand, Varoufakis was not ready to compromise his ideas either. He insisted on lecturing other EU member state Finance Ministers that the vision of a unified Europe could only be accomplished though his ideas. This tactic was all the more paradoxical, if you take into account that back home, in Greece, the divisive rhetoric of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was focused on national resistance against Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble. The ugliest moments of this rhetoric were the many insinuations about Germany’s Nazi past, which have only fueled the division between Greece and Germany.
