I first visited Greece 50 years ago, hitchhiking with a school
friend from England, in search of the glorious world of Homer,
Plato, and Thucydides. Of course, we didn’t find that world. But we
found something almost as remarkable, which was a place where the
church and the priesthood dominated rural life, where villages were
self-contained communities, where local saints enjoyed their
festivals and where the old dances were still danced in the village
squares, men in groups, and women in groups, dressed in the
costumes that survived from Ottoman days, and rehearsing the old
drama of the sexes with marriage as its eternal dénouement. It was
a country that had yet to enter the modern world. Its rhythms were
those of the village, where debts and duties were local, and where
sun, sleep, and surrender managed the day. It was inconceivable to
a young Anglo-Saxon visitor that such a country could be judged in
the same terms as Germany or France, or that it could play a
comparable role in an economy that included all three countries as
equal partners.
At one point, running out of money, I joined the queue at a
hospital in Athens, where you could give blood and be paid in
drachmas. The presiding doctor leaped up to welcome the tall
red-haired youth, and turned away the two small men who preceded
me, judging their blood to be useless. The names of my unsuccessful
rivals were Heracles and Dionysus. It was the only sign offered to
me during that first visit that these people were descended from
the Greeks to whom our civilization is owed.
I have no desire to return to Greece, dreading what the tourists
and the property speculators have done to it. But I know that,
whatever the changes, it is inconceivable that Greece should have
developed in the same way and with the same rhythm as France or
Germany. Of course the country has been modernized. Roads have been
built and towns expanded. The tourist trade has wiped out the
gentle manners of the villagers. Sexual intercourse has begun —
somewhat later than 1963, which is when Philip
Larkin famously dated it, but nevertheless with the same
devastating effect on marriage and the family. No doubt the old
modes of the folk songs have been forgotten, and no doubt the
multinational brands have slapped their logos on shop fronts across
the land. But for sure the culture of local obligation has
remained. For sure people still regard leisure as more important
than work, and debts as less important, the further away the
creditor lies in the network of human relations. If you don’t know
this from visiting Greece, you could learn it easily enough from
reading Kazantzakis, Ritzos, Seferis, or any other of the writers
in that great moment of literary flourishing which succeeded the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire. You could even get it from Louis de
Bernières and Captain
Corelli’s
Mandolin. Anybody with his eyes open and his heart in
place would know that Greece is the product of a distinctive
culture, and that this culture, however it develops, will always
take the country in a direction and at a speed of its own.
YET THE ARCHITECTS of the euro did not know this. If they had
known it, they would have known also that the effect of imposing a
single currency on Greece and Germany would be to encourage Greece
to transfer its debts to Germany, on the understanding that the
further away the creditor the less the obligation to repay. They
would have known that if the Greek political class can use
sovereign debt to pay family, friends, and dependents, and to buy
the votes needed to stay in office, that that is what the political
class will do. They would have recognized that laws, obligations,
and sovereignty don’t have quite the same meaning in the
Mediterranean as they do on the Baltic, and that in a society used
to kleptocratic government the fairest way out of an economic
crisis is by devaluation—in other words, by stealing equally from
everybody.
Why didn’t the architects of the euro know those things? The
answer is to be found deep within the European project. For it was
a project with a secret agenda, and that agenda was to destroy, and
meanwhile to deny, the reality of nationhood. And since nations are
the carriers of culture, this meant denying that culture matters.
Cultural facts were simply imperceivable to the Eurocrats. Allowing
themselves to perceive culture would be tantamount to recognizing
that their project was an impossible one. This would have mattered
less if they had another project with which to replace it.
But—like all radical projects—that of the European Union was
conceived without a Plan B. Hence it is destined to collapse and,
in the course of its collapse, to drag our continent down. An
enormous pool of pretense has accumulated at the center of the
project, while the political class skirmishes at the edges, in an
attempt to fend off the constant assaults of reality. But this pool
of pretense is a festering wound at the heart of things, and one
day it will burst and swamp us all with poison.
Thus we have to pretend that the long-observed distinctions
between the Protestant north of our continent and the Catholic and
Orthodox south is of no economic significance. Being a cultural
fact it is imperceivable, notwithstanding Weber’s attempt to make
it central to economic history. The difference between the culture
of common law and that of the Code
Napoléon, between the Roman and the Ottoman legal
legacies, between countries where law is certain and judges
incorruptible and places where law is only the last resort in a
system of bribes—all these differences have to be put out of mind.
Times and speeds of work, and the balance between work and leisure,
which go to the heart of every community since they define its
relation to time, are to be ignored, or else regimented by a futile
edict from the center. And everything is to be brought into line by
those frightening courts—the European Court of Justice and the
European Court of Human Rights—whose unelected judges never pay
the cost of their decisions, and whose agenda of
“non-discrimination” and “ever-closer union” is designed to wipe
away the traces of local loyalties, family-based morality, and
rooted ways of life. Not surprisingly, when you build an empire on
such massive pretenses, it very soon becomes unstable.
IT WAS MARX WHO ARGUED that the foundation of social order and
the motor of social change resides in economic structures, and that
culture is merely the by-product—the assemblage of institutions
and ideologies—that rises from the economic foundations and keeps
them in place. Hence it was to Marx that we owed that first and
disastrous attempt to organize society on economic principles
alone, and to assume that culture will look after itself. In fact
it is culture that creates economics, and not the other way round,
and if any proof of this is needed we need only look at the result
of the Marxist experiment. Better still, we might look at the
successful economies in the modern world—the American for
instance—and note the extent to which they have depended on a
respect for law, on honest accounting, and on individual
responsibility, the ethic of family life, and the forms of social
interaction. To analyze all the strands that have been woven
together to form the American capacity for long-term economic
probity you would have to trace the culture of this country back to
the founding and beyond. You would have to take account of
Protestantism, the common law, the tradition of private colleges,
and the little platoons of a society of volunteers. You would have
to understand the frontier spirit, the deep local loyalties, and
the cultural miscegenation that gave rise to jazz, Hollywood, and
the Broadway musical.
Of course, I share the belief of many American conservatives
that this culture is being lost, and indeed that America has taken
fatal steps in the European direction. But this change has itself
been initiated at the cultural level. Left to itself the American
economy would not have incurred the truly fantastic debts that have
been heaped on it by the maladministration of Bush and Obama. In
each case cultural factors have driven the leadership to hold the
country hostage to ideological goals. And the same is true of
Europe. It was not economics but culture that engendered the
euro—a culture of a ruling class at war with the people of Europe,
wishing to establish trans-national government at all costs, and
hoping to wipe away yet another trace of nationhood. By destroying
those ancient currencies through which the people of Europe had
expressed and managed their apartness, the European elite hoped to
make a decisive move toward the goal of Union. Instead they have
burdened the continent with new debts, new resentments, and a
looming disaster that was not foreseen only because it had been
ruled out as impossible.
