Greece vs. Germany: Two Competing National Narratives

One reason behind the bitter turn in Greek talks is how the two countries view themselves

The Wall Street Journal

By STEPHEN FIDLER

March 5, 2015 4:34 p.m. ET

The tone of Europe’s political debate about keeping Greece afloat has turned bitter, particularly between Germans and Greeks. One important reason is the stories the two nations are telling themselves about their own recent history.

Germans see themselves as having built economic success from the ashes of World War II through self-sacrifice, personal reliance and hard work. When their economy started to underperform in the 1990s, they enacted a series of tough reforms more than a decade ago that laid the platform for economic strength today.

For many Germans, there’s an element of morality here. Their virtue has been rewarded, as it would be for others if they followed the same wise course. Germans’ view of Greece is informed by the popular view of themselves: Small wonder that a country that has chosen the opposite course of profligacy, debt dependence and irresponsibility finds itself suffering an economic disaster.

On the other hand, Greeks have seen themselves as victims of foreign interference since the country was a part of the Ottoman Empire. Kevin Featherstone, professor of Greek studies at the London School of Economics, says there’s an “enduring history of a sense of victimhood” that has been in evidence from the origins of the modern Greek state to the present day.

That hasn’t been German-specific. But it is overlaid on the experience of World War II. “There is a family memory of the severity of German occupation of Athens in the 1940s. It was one of the more brutal in Western or Southern Europe,” Mr. Featherstone says. Old people remember family members literally starving to death.

That sense of Greeks as victims of foreign intervention has carried through to the current debt crisis. From this perspective, Greece’s problems are caused not by the excess borrowing that predated the crisis but by the terms of the bailout imposed afterward to make sure German and French banks were repaid in full. In Mr. Featherstone’s view, the narrative is being manipulated by the government of left-wing Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

These narratives can be challenged. Germany’s economy isn’t a universal model because not every country in the world can run a trade surplus of 6% of gross domestic product. Some countries need to import.

Moreover, Germany’s major reforms of a decade ago came at a time of reasonable global growth—and a relaxed fiscal environment because Germany was allowed to ignore the eurozone’s budget rules. West Germany’s growth was built on a platform created after World War II by the victorious powers, which pumped in money and forgave the country’s debts. Among the signatories of the 1953 London conference that eased the German debt burden was Greece.

The Greek narrative of corrosive foreign intervention also has its challengers. Great-power support for Greece during its War of Independence in the 1820s can be seen as the first liberal humanitarian intervention. The 19th-century construction of the Greek state—by Bavarians—built its institutions, wrote its law code and separated the church from the state. British intervention in Greece’s savage civil war in the late 1940s to ensure victory for the anti-Communists—still a source of controversy—left Greece as the only country in the Balkans outside the Iron Curtain and paved the way for years of growth as rapid as Japan’s. The predecessor of the European Union, which admitted Greece into the fold in 1981, five years before Spain and Portugal, pumped billions into the country. “These interventions have been objectively positive for Greece,” argues Stathis Kalyvas, a professor of political science at Yale University.

“Modern Greek history is a history of being bailed out,” he says. By contrast, the Germans “are not used to bailing others out.”

The idea that Greece’s troubles are externally imposed allows many Greeks to depict themselves as blameless. The left-wing protest narrative, says Mr. Featherstone, depicts a corrupt political elite in collusion with a handful of oligarchs and superrich. When Greek and French banks needed repaying, it was ordinary people who suffered. The right-wing story is that the Greek elites have failed to stand up to foreign domination.

But the stories don’t acknowledge that many Greeks were beneficiaries of the system that prevailed before the financial crisis. Friends, families and connections all benefit from a state that everyone knew was characterized by clientelism and nepotism. “We didn’t need a crisis to tell us that Greece has a problem with corruption,” Mr. Featherstone says.

The popular narratives on both sides are therefore at best only partly true or ignore countervailing factors. They may impede solutions because, when fervently believed, they absolve each side from taking responsibility.

And there are costs for the longer term. For all the turmoil in their country’s modern history, Greeks have viewed Europe and, more recently, the EU as representing progress, modernity and better government, Mr. Featherstone says. That idealistic vision has been replaced with a utilitarian one. Greeks don’t love Europe now, they fear what would happen if they left the euro.

Write to Stephen Fidler at stephen.fidler@wsj.com