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Table of Contents

A Note About the Author

Copyright Page

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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?

At one point, Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, remarked in a state of exasperation that to resolve the drama we needed ‘adults in the room’. She was right. There was a dearth of adults in many of the rooms where this drama unfolded. As characters, though, the people in the room fell into two categories: the banal and the fascinating. The banal went about their business ticking boxes on sheets of instructions handed down to them by their masters. In many cases, though, their masters – politicians such as Wolfgang Schäuble and functionaries such as Christine Lagarde and Mario Draghi – were different. They had the ability to reflect on themselves and their role in the drama, and this ability to enter into dialogues with themselves made them fascinatingly susceptible to the trap of self-fulfilling prophecy.

Indeed, watching Greece’s creditors at work was like watching a version of Macbeth unfold in the land of Oedipus. Just as the father of Oedipus, King Laius of Thebes, unwittingly brought about his own murder because he believed the prophecy that he would be killed by his son, so too did the smartest and most powerful players in this drama bring about their own doom because they feared the prophecy that foretold it. Keenly aware of how easily power could slip through their fingers, Greece’s creditors were frequently overpowered by insecurity. Fearing that Greece’s undeclared bankruptcy might cause them to lose political control over the West, they imposed policies on Greece that gradually undermined their political control, not just over Greece but over … the West.

At some point, like Macbeth, sensing their power mutate into insufferable powerlessness, they felt compelled to do their worst. There were moments I could almost hear them say

                             I am in blood

Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er:

Strange things I have in head, that will to hand;

Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d.

Macbeth, act 3, scene 4

An account by any one of the protagonists in a cutthroat drama such as this cannot escape bias nor the desire for vindication. So, in order to be as fair and impartial as possible, I have tried to see their actions and my own through the lens of an authentic ancient Greek or Shakespearean tragedy in which characters, neither good nor bad, are overtaken by the unintended consequences of their conception of what they ought to do. I suspect that I have come closer to succeeding in this task in the case of those people whom I found fascinating and rather less so in the case of those whose banality numbed my senses. For this I find it hard to apologize, not least because to present them otherwise would be to diminish the historical accuracy of this account.