June 24, 2011
Misfortune spread throughout the state. There were many cases of corruption. Our creditors asked for a settlement; and the ambassadors were very pressing.
Yannis Makriyannis, Greek military hero and memoirist (1797-1864)
Economic distress, bribery, debts and foreign pressure: it can sometimes seem as if not much has changed in Greece down the ages. The events to which Yannis Makriyannis referred took place soon after the war of independence against the Ottoman empire, a costly 11-year struggle that culminated in 1832 with the Greek state no sooner born than facing demands for loan repayments from European powers.
Today, Greece’s debts are so large that the country is again a ward of the international financial system, obliged to swallow unpleasant economic medicine prescribed by foreigners so that they can get their money back.
True, certain differences stand out. Though Greece accounts for only 2.5 per cent of the 17-nation eurozone’s economic output, its debt crisis has the potential to destabilise the public finances and banking sectors of other European countries on a scale unimaginable in the 1830s. However low an opinion Germans have of Greece’s fiscal improvidence and blood-sucking of the state, it is unthinkable that they would emulate the Europeans of Makriyannis’s era and impose a teenaged Bavarian prince as Greece’s head of state.
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