Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Note About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
For all who eagerly seek compromise but would rather be crushed than end up compromised
A Note on Quoted Speech
In a book of this nature, in which so much depends on who said what to whom, I have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of quoted speech. To this end, I have been able to draw on audio recordings that I made on my phone, as well as on notes I made at the time, of many of the official meetings and conversations that appear in this book. Where my own recordings or notes are unavailable, I have relied on memory and, where possible, the corroboration of other witnesses.
The reader should note that many of the discussions reported in this book took place in Greek. This includes all conversations that occurred with my staff at the finance ministry, in parliament, on the streets of Athens, with the prime minister, in cabinet, and between my partner Danae and me. Necessarily, I have translated those conversations into English.
The only discussions I report that took place in neither Greek nor English were those I had with Michel Sapin, the French finance minister. Indeed, Mr Sapin was the only member of the Eurogroup not to address the meetings in English. Either we communicated through translators or, quite often, he would address me in French and I would reply in English, our grasp of the other’s language being good enough to carry on those conversations.
In every instance I have confined my account strictly to exchanges that are in the public interest and have therefore included only those that shed important light on events that affected the lives of millions.
Preface
When Donald Trump began to look like a possible winner towards the end of 2016, the liberal and centrist establishment in the United States went into an understandable paroxysm. It assailed the fake news spread by the alt-right and the deeply disconcerting prospect of illiberalism gone mad: the vilification of political opponents via character assassination, the adoption of loony economic policies and, last but not least, the campaigns to bring back torture and to hand over environmental protection to climate change deniers.
And yet the establishment’s protestations did not entirely ring true to me, and to many others who agreed that Trump’s rise deserved an outraged response. Why? Because for years before the arrival of Trump, Brexit and other populist disruptions, the West’s establishment had itself practiced character assassination, truth reversal, loony economics and downright illiberalism.
This book tells a story that highlights the Western establishment’s atrocious violation of its own principles as I experienced it personally. During my stint as Greece’s finance minister in 2015, I struggled to extricate my country from the great depression to which the same establishment had condemned it five years before.
The book could be described as a memoir of my dealings with Barack Obama, Jack Lew, Larry Summers, Bernie Sanders, the US ambassador in Athens, Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schäuble, Emmanuel Macron, Mario Draghi, et al. Or simply as the tale of a small, bankrupt country taking on the Goliaths of Europe and America in order to escape from debtors’ prison before suffering a crushing if fairly honorable defeat. However, such a ‘spin’ would sacrifice the book’s deeper significance for Americans and Europeans alike.
That significance goes well beyond kiss-and-tell revelations. The story it tells is not only symbolic of what Europe, Britain and the United States are becoming. It also provides insight into how and why our polity has fractured. As the establishment protests against Trump’s authoritarian populism, it is salutary to be reminded that in 2015 this same establishment launched a ferociously effective campaign against the pro-European, democratically elected government of a small country in Europe.
Shortly after the ruthless suppression of our rebellion, the opposition lost its momentum in Spain; no doubt many voters feared they would suffer a fate similar to ours. Having observed the leaders of the European Union and its allies callously disregard democracy in Greece and scare off the Spanish, many supporters of the Labour Party in Britain went on to vote to leave the European Union in June 2016. Brexit boosted Donald Trump. Donald Trump’s triumph blew fresh wind into the sails of xenophobic nationalists throughout Europe and the world. Vladimir Putin was suddenly rubbing his eyes in disbelief at the way the West was undermining itself so fabulously.
And then, a little like the parricide who throws himself at the court’s mercy, demanding lenience because he is now an orphan, the establishment began to sulk and to protest. Alas, it had already lost the moral high ground. Once upon a time, the democratic project was about the readiness to ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and the success of liberty’, to use JFK’s stirring words. Alas, those ideals had been expunged from the practices of the West’s leading powers a long, long time ago—and the story of Greece in 2015 offers a grandstand view of this loss.
The powerlessness of establishment power
But as useful as I hope the insights offered by this book into the establishment’s troubles may be, my motivation for writing it goes deeper. Beneath the specific events that I experienced, I recognized a universal story—the story of what happens when human beings find themselves at the mercy of cruel circumstances that have been generated by an inhuman, mostly unseen network of power relations. This is why there are no ‘goodies’ or ‘baddies’ in this book. Instead, it is populated by people doing their best, as they understand it, under conditions not of their choosing. Barack Obama, Germany’s leadership, Christine Lagarde, indeed each of the persons I encountered and write about in these pages, believed they were acting appropriately but, taken together, their acts produced misfortune on a continental scale. Is this not the stuff of authentic tragedy? Is this not what makes the tragedies of Sophocles and Shakespeare resonate with us today, so long after the events they relate became old news?
