Who is to blame and what is to blame
In the last decade, during Greece’s debt crisis, there was a lingering question: Who is to blame for this crisis that we were experiencing? In every conversation, even on festive occasions, there was the search for the culprits. I remember a marathon discussion I had with a shop-owner friend about the economic crisis. “OK, you were also tax evading for many years,” I reprimanded him in anger. “And whose fault is that?” he asked. “Whose?” I asked. “The state’s because it didn’t audit me,” he replied smugly.
Yes, it was an unprecedented crisis. We were all somewhat confused and were looking for explanations, especially the most convenient ones. But, one of the reasons that the economic crisis lasted as long as it did in Greece (compared to other European countries that were also bailed out) is that the debate focused on who is to blame and not on what is to blame.
We all agree that there were big and small culprits for the crisis, and the sin of late PASOK foreign minister Theodoros Pangalos was that he did not prioritize when he correctly told the Parliament in 2010 who he believed was to blame: “The answer to the opprobrium the country’s politicians face from people asking, ‘How did you squander the money?’ is this: ‘We gave you public sector jobs. We all ate from the trough… It was all in the framework of a relationship of political clientelism, corruption, bribery and debasement of the very meaning of politics.”
He was partly right, but even in the simple context of “political clientelism,” the salary of a politician who appoints is different from that of a citizen who is appointed. Therefore, “we all ate from the trough,” but very different portions.
The problem with the Greek crisis was not that we – citizens, journalists, politicians – focused on who was to blame, but that we stopped there
The problem with the Greek crisis was not that we – citizens, journalists, politicians – focused on who was is to blame, but that we stopped there. We took out our frustrations in the squares, but we didn’t reach any conclusions. We reduced our incomes but did not change the way we operate, thus recycling the causes of the crisis.
A simple example of this is the current goat plague in central Greece. “The biggest problem is that thousands of lambs and goats enter Greece from Romania, which are intended first for fattening and then for consumption,” the representatives of the livestock breeders said, and everyone is asking the government, “Why are there no border inspections?” The deeper meaning of what the livestock farmers’ unionists are saying is that “it’s the state’s fault that it doesn’t check us,” something the shop-owner friend of mine would agree with.
Let’s get a few things straight. Border checks on livestock animals cannot be done. Not because many farmers “hellenize” entire herds that cross the border at night, but because there cannot be any such restrictions in the single market. The European Union, in which we participate, has free movement of people, goods and capital. So the government is right when it says that such inspections are prohibited by European law. They also go against logic, we would argue, especially in a country that is constantly asking for more Union, everywhere.
Quality checks can and should be done by the buyers – i.e. Greek animal breeders – especially when they buy the product from “suspicious” countries. But checks cost money. They require organization, large livestock units to share the costs or even cooperatives that will do this demanding work for the sake of the many small producers.
In Greece, therefore, although the conditions have changed dramatically – we have a single market and therefore lambs come and go – the production structures have not changed in the slightest. Every small farmer works alone, and if – despite our optimism (“What could go wrong?”) – a plague begins to spread, the national sport of finding who is to blame begins.
