The Two Europes

by Francis Fukuyama

American Interest
May 8, 2012

The Greek election on Sunday was a predictable disaster: the two mainstream parties, the socialist PASOK and the center-right New Democracy (ND), were displaced by new extremist parties that appeared on their right and left, including the left-wing Syriza and KKE (Communist) parties which won a quarter of the vote between them, and the right-wing Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn parties getting almost 18 percent.

The main issues in the campaign revolved around whether Greece should fulfill the terms of the pact that had been negotiated with the EU and IMF and continue the austerity that implied. None of the parties, however, was willing to take up what from the beginning was the source of Greece’s problems, and the reason it got into such trouble with its public debt in the first place, which is the country’s pervasive clientelism.

There has been plenty of talk about two Europes, which evolved from being a story about the peripheral PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain) to being one about the EU’s north and south, because it was clear that Italy and potentially France also faced large debt and bank problems. This is often portrayed as a contrast between a hard-working, Protestant, disciplined northern Europe (Germany, Holland, and Scandinavia) against a lazy, profligate Catholic-Orthodox south. But the real division is not a cultural one; it is between a clientelistic and non-clientelistic Europe.

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