The Gift Horse: The Euro crisis

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. The advice has endured for many centuries. Far more recent is the advice to the Greeks to beware of Europeans bearing gifts, such as that which slashes what they owe by 50%. The Greeks, though, know a thing or two about deceptive gifts. They invented them. Or it. The European Trojan Horse that the Greeks are expected to admit into their walls comes stuffed with an army-load of more austerity. Ingrates they may be, sending the markets back into further turmoil, but when presented with a dubious gift, they do the only sensible thing – and that’s to call a referendum.

When the Greeks say no and send the Trojan Horse packing, they’ll be waving it goodbye from a dock side in Piraeus with banners proclaiming the default it was meant to avoid and their fond adieus to the Eurozone. Why bother waiting? Let them default now and get on with it.

Of course there is another way of looking at it. The referendum ruse is a way of extracting more gifts. 50%? Why not make it 25%? Or one can also see it as the Greeks wanting to get a bit of pride back. They have spent the last few months being portrayed as tax-swindling, idle ne’er-do-wells and now have to put up with Sarkozy saying that they made their numbers up on the back of a fag packet after a good night on the retsina.

Well, they probably did make up their numbers, pre-Euro admission, but then most European countries have played fast and loose to different degrees with “the rules”. The French, for example.

In the days – when were they, as they seem like centuries ago – when Gordon Brown was arriving at his tests for the UK’s entry into Euroland, a key measure was the ability to comply with the stability pact, the one that the French (and the Germans) regularly flouted. In fact, everyone did with the probable exception of the powerhouse that is Luxembourg.

Anyway, let’s not worry too much about who made up what figures, more pressing is what happens when Greece goes totally belly-up, as in Papandreou loses the referendum, Greece exits the euro, total chaos ensues and hyperinflation takes over with the printers pumping out so many notes that it will require pantechnicons to carry the money and not the wheelbarrows of the Weimar Republic.

Hmm, ah yes, Weimar Republic, economic and political chaos, hyperinflation. The Germans should know all about what follows from such circumstances. Indeed the Greeks should have a shrewd idea what can happen as well.

But then it is only Greece. Except of course it isn’t. There is always, well, Spain for instance. So just hypothesise for a moment. Poor old Mariano Rajoy, some time into his tenure as prime minister, finds himself in dire need of a bail-out, Europe comes along bearing gifts (assuming any of the trillion or so is left or the Chinese keep pumping money in) and effectively takes over the government, which, more or less, is what would happen in Greece. Referendum follows. Chaos ensues.

Leaving the Eurozone doesn’t mean leaving the European Union, but much would depend on how the political chaos is handled. The Greeks, and the Spanish, have, when all said and done, some form. It wouldn’t be a case of choosing to leave the European Union but of possibly being booted out. Idiotic concerns about having an identity residence card or not would be supplanted by rather different concerns.

The Spanish hypothesis might remain just that – an hypothesis. Much though a Greek no could create the long-anticipated domino effect that brings Spain to its financial knees, the possibility exists that Europe would still support Greece. It is also just possible that the Greeks would vote yes. Faced with more European-imposed austerity or leaving the Eurozone, they may decide to err in favour of the Euro.

Much might rest, however, on what voices come to the fore in the meantime. As this is as much a political as it is an economic issue, chuck some highly populist mouthpiece into the equation, one that damns Europe and anyone or anything else, and who knows what might happen. This might be the worry, either before or after a Greek referendum, and so it might also be for other countries, Spain included.

Whither the European Odyssey now? Who can predict with certainty, just as who could have predicted how the journey would unfold before the adventure was embarked upon. Whether the Greeks prefer to look a gift horse in the mouth will depend upon what they understand by “gift”. In German the word means poison.

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.

And You Will Go To Mykonos

I’m back in 1973. On a ferry crossing the Aegean. Two Irish girls have become my travelling companions. We are passing the uninhabited island of Delos, heading for the windmills of Mykonos.

In the early ’70s, Mykonos, together with Crete, were the end-of-the-line destinations for the grand tourers. The island attracted hippies, gays, nudists, artists, Australians, and some who were all of these things. It also attracted some regular tourists as well as boat loads of American day visitors, eagerly snapping photos as they landed; the trophy shot was one with the pelican who lived in a bar on the harbour front.

Mykonos was both Bohemian and hedonistic in a style far removed from the later lager tourist who was to lay waste to Greek islands such as Zante. It was distant enough from the mainland to have a streak of independence. Locals would speak to you, albeit in hushed tones, about the brutality of the country’s military regime.

Despite the poor image that followed the 1967 coup, Mykonos and the Greek islands gradually became a new, but still unspoiled world for the tourist. Like Spain under Franco, there was a questionableness as to the morality of tourism; not that this deterred the hippies or the intellectuals who would gather at the tavernas in Mykonos town every evening.

And like Franco’s Spain, and therefore Mallorca, Greece looked for economic salvation from tourism, which it got, along with a construction and inward investment boom.

For the teenaged grand tourer, the contrary liberal attitudes of Mykonos were only one part of the Greece story. You didn’t go to Greece without doing the culture as well. The Irish girls and I sat under a tree and ate watermelon, shaded from the ferocity of a July heat traipsing around the Acropolis. For those who ventured to Crete, the hippy enclaves of Plakias and elsewhere were the base camps for visiting the cradle of Minoan civilisation.

Come forward to today, and Greece and the Greek islands have a new poor image – twice over. Greece is Euroland’s basket case; there is no more construction, and the economy has all but collapsed. The islands have attained a reputation tarnished by the movement across the Mediterranean of a particular type of holidaymaker. For all this though, like Mallorca, the islands are anticipating a boom summer, the beneficiaries of the north African upheavals. While all else in the economy may be failing, tourism is being seen, once more, as the salvation.

Helena Smith, writing in “The Guardian”, stirred the memories of Mykonos. She also described a situation with similarities to Mallorca.

The Greek prime minister sees tourism as the “model for economic development”, but the country and its islands need re-branding, says the president of the Association of Greek Tourism Enterprises. “The immense cultural wealth” has to be tapped into. Yet, this wealth, says the prime minister, is something “we either don’t know or have no idea about promoting in a proper and organised way”.

It is the coinciding of re-branding and culture that has resonance for Mallorca. The development of cultural tourism, long wished for, has been dashed on the rocks of a lamentable inability to conceive a brand image that isn’t dominated by sun and beach. Partly this is because Mallorca, much though some in positions who should know better might believe, doesn’t have strong culture. Certainly not in the way that Greece does. And if the Greeks can’t promote culture, then frankly what the hell hope is there for Mallorca?

It seems crazy that the Greeks, with that immense cultural wealth, should need to think about its branding. It should sell itself. As it used to. In 1973, though I might also have had more basic pleasures in mind, it never occurred to me not to do the culture. It was one of the reasons why you went. And nowadays, you can even get guided tours of the archaeologically and mythologically important Delos, which was off-limits back then.

Perhaps it is something in the nature of today’s tourism and tourists from the old world of Britain and northern Europe. Destinations, be they Mallorca or Mykonos, overtaken by development, have bred the contempt of familiarity and convenience. What once was a curiosity, a leap into the unknown, an adventure has gone. And it has taken with it any natural and unforced enquiry and interest in culture. You can promote it, but does anyone listen?

Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.