How the world sees Greece
Greece has sought to allay fears over its bailout following figures showing that manufacturing in the country has fallen to a two-year low. Both Greece and France were ‘mired in contraction’ according to closely watched PMI figures. Greek’s score ...
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Greece is so far off course on its $172bn bailout programme that it faces losing vital International Monetary Fund support unless European lenders write off significant amounts of its sovereign debt, the fund has warned Athens’ eurozone creditors.The warning, ...
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Greek deputy Prime Minister Yiannis Dragasakis will have a meeting with the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, on Tuesday at 17:30 in Frankfurt, according to government sources. Alternate Foreign Minister for International Economic Relations ...
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Police in Larissa, central Greece, on Sunday discovered the body of an 82-year-old woman in the home she shared with her two sons, aged 45 and 50, after neighbors complained of a bad smell coming from the apartment.
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A 4.2-magnitude earthquake struck under the Mediterranean seabed south of the Greek island of Crete on Monday.
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The early losses of the Greek stock market’s general index were reversed and turned into minor gains as the new week – and month – began with measured hopes for a deal between the government and its creditors.
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Berlin has distanced itself from recent statements by German President Joachim Gauck, who voiced support for Athens’s demands for reparations for the Nazi occupation of Greece during World War Two.
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Greek prisons are controlled by criminal rackets rather than prison staff, according to Citizens’ Protection Minister Yiannis Panousis.
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Health Minister Panayiotis Kouroublis on Monday unveiled a plan aimed at helping some 2.5 million uninsured citizens gain access to free healthcare.
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Unless the government comes to some sort of agreement with the country’s creditors and is able to put an end to the economic uncertainty, Greek tourism’s positive course in terms of foreign arrivals is at risk of reversal.
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As negotiations continue at the technical level in Brussels, Greek government officials have significant meetings planned on Tuesday in European capitals in a bid to tackle the country’s looming cash crunch even as the International Monetary Fund raises the pressure.
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The dominant feature of the Greek business sector in recent months has been stagnation, even in cases classified as entrepreneurship of necessity. The trend that started in fall 2014 strengthened in the first quarter of 2015, resulting in a 21.8 percent year-on-year drop in the creation of new enterprises in January-March, according to the General Commercial Register.
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European bond markets are showing real signs of Greek debt-crisis fatigue.
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The number of registered unemployed at the Greek Manpower Organization (OAED) posted a small annual decline of 1,171 workers in March, bringing the total to 1,057,050 people. In February it had come to 1,061,221.
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Once upon a time, there was a country called Greece. Eager to meet European Union rules on deficits, it decided to improve the appearance of its ...
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The 57th annual Greek Festival starts Friday! Preparations are already underway at the "Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church" on Highland.
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The UK votes Thursday, the end of what probably feels like a long election cycle, though by US standards the actual time campaigning remains short.
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Greek police say they have arrested a man on suspicion of killing his 4-year-old daughter, boiling her pieces and disposing of them. The post Police Say Man Killed Daughter, 4 appeared first on The National Herald.
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And the model was once again on form as she unleashed her inner Greek Goddess in the new advert for the fragrance, Versace: Eros.
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Athens is set to repay loans to all creditors, including the IMF, said the government's spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis. Finance Minister Yanis ...
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ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greek police say they have arrested a man on suspicion of killing his 4-year-old daughter and disposing of the body, more than a week after he declared her missing, sparking a nationwide alert.
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Fund gives eurozone lenders ultimatum to write off Athens debt
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Greek police in Corinthia, Greece discovered 26 wild horses that were shot dead after receiving a phone call from concerned vacationers who spotted the animals lying on the rugged slopes of the 2,376-meter Mount Cyllene. The preliminary police investigations revealed that the horses which were found dead on Thursday, April 30 were killed by gunfire. In fact three of the horses were found alive but unfortunately they died as well. The horses belonged to a 73-year-old man from Nemea, Peloponnese who spends his summers in the area of Goura in Corinthia. The man’s daughter filed an official complaint to Greek police, while a veterinarian visited the site in order to determine whether all the horses had died due to gunfire. The vet determined that the animals were shot earlier in the week since he found evidence of advanced sepsis, while the police officers conducting the investigation found several shotgun shells. This is the second time that the 73-year-old Greek has faced a similar situation. His granddaughter, Paraskevi Bekiari revealed that her grandfather was the only person who owned horses in the area and that they did not want to believe the rumors that a shepherd had killed the horses because as she stressed “someone who loves animals could never commit such an act.” She also noted that her grandfather, who loved horses, had paid a lot of money for any agricultural damages that they may have caused without ever receiving any subsidies. Furthermore, she stressed that this was the second time that her grandfather’s horses were killed. Two years ago someone shot his herd which consisted of twelve animals at the time. Finally, she expressed her hope that police would find the perpetrator.
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Greece is so far off course on its $172bn bailout programme that it faces losing vital International Monetary Fund support unless European lenders ...
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| READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT www.ft.com |
So long as Europe beckons like a golden magnet on the northern horizon over the Mediterranean Sea, Euro warships may rescue many migrants from drowning but will not be able to stem the demographic tide. In fact, the more folks that are rescued at sea and brought ashore on European soil in Italy, Spain or Greece, the more people from Africa and beyond will be encouraged to try their hand at crossing the sea -- bypassing Europe's laws and its immigration authorities. We have seen this deadly dynamic before. In the Caribbean, when I worked as a reporter in Miami during the early 1980s, thousands of Haitian boatpeople rode aboard wooden coastal sailing freighters that tried to run the 600 miles to South Florida, praying to survive the hurricanes and sharp rocks along the way. At first, U.S. Coast Guard vessels did what the Europeans decided to do: provide help along the way and lift the Haitians from wrecked boats to bring them ashore on U.S. terra firma. In some cases, the Coast Guard was too late and Haitian bodies washed ashore on Ft. Lauderdale's beaches - sparking calls for US action. But the rescue missions by the Coast Guard proved to be what refugee analysts call "a magnet." The assurance of rescue sparked more boat building and more people-smuggling and more deaths along the way. Three solutions were proposed: --refugee activists said admit all who want to come - not widely popular. -- return the boat people to Haiti -- provide economic development to Haiti. The United States and European nations are among the signatories to the 1951 Convention that created the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. They are legally bound to grant refugee status, protection and aid if migrating people can prove that they cannot return to their homeland "owing to a well- founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion," according to the Convention. The Convention aimed to prevent a repetition of the inhumane refusal to protect Jews fleeing from Nazi ruled lands during World War II. But a few paragraphs down, the text offers nation states wiggle room, stating that: "Nothing in this Convention shall prevent a Contracting State, in time of war or other grave and exceptional circumstances, from taking provisionally measures which it considers to be essential to the national security . . . " In the 1980s, U.S. State Department legal experts interpreted the treaty as meaning that would-be refugees who cannot prove they have a "well-founded fear" of returning to their homeland can be considered economic migrants and thus can be returned. Hundreds of millions of people in Latin America, Africa and Asia would love to move to Western Europe or the United States, where wages are 50 or 100 times higher. Europe's population swelled from 500 million in 2008 to 740 million today, largely through immigration - legal or otherwise. Some of the growth was welcomed, providing youthful labor as Europe ages. But Africa has 1.1 billion people and Asia many more. Does Europe welcome an unchecked inflow of immigrants, often from widely differing cultures, religions and lifestyles? I think not. Like the United States - which resorted to building fences, deportations and patrolling its border with Mexico to control illegal immigration - Europe is looking for a way to say "no" politely - in keeping with European niceties. Well, some 35 years ago, the United States decided to impose its own solution to Haitian boat people - it dispatched its powerful cutters to patrol the passage between Haiti and Miami. When they intercepted a boat, they took the people on board and then conducted quasi-legal hearings to try and determine who could prove they had a "well founded fear" of persecution if they went back home. "US government statistics show that between 1981 and 1991, over 22,000 Haitians were interdicted at sea, and that only 28 of these were allowed into the United States to pursue asylum claims, according to a UNHCR World Refugee report. The rest were hauled back to the dock in Port-au-Prince. I raced to be there ahead of one of the first intercepted boatloads. I watched their downcast, disappointed faces as they walked down the gangplank. I followed them to the Red Cross which gave them bus fare back home, and a box of rice, sugar, soap, toothbrush, toothpaste, hair brush and comb. A young couple agreed to let me accompany them back home. At their village in the Artibonite Valley, the woman's mother greeted the couple with sadness, not the joy I had expected. Turns out the family had sold everything - their land - to pay the smugglers. That is another unmentioned fact amid the activists' calls for rescue and admittance to Europe for all: the ones on the boats are the ones with several thousand dollars to pay for the voyage. In the Haitian village, sadly, what the couple had fled was soon apparent. Three months after they were intercepted and returned, I came back to visit them. The woman had been pregnant on the boat trip and had delivered the baby. But after a few days it got sick and they had no money for a doctor or medicine. The kid died. And the man was growing a sickly patch of rice the size of a Miami living room, and had to pay 50-percent of the harvest to the landowner. Perhaps fleeing abject poverty should be a human right. But under international law such as the 1951 Convention on Refugees, poverty alone does not legally qualify people to receive asylum in rich countries, or to get UN protection from being "refouled" - sent back home. UNHCR was not happy at the unilateral US decision to send back Haitian economic migrants. But UN criticism was ignored by US authorities. After all, the United States was the largest donor to the UN. To compensate for this seemingly inhumane decision, US aid groups, missionaries, investors and Florida political leaders tried to spur development in Haiti so people might have jobs at home. It all came to little as well meaning aid groups came up against politics, instability, eroded land, lack of law, poor governance, corruption and gangsterism. But interdiction did unplug the magnetic pull of Miami. In 1992, the Coast Guard interdicted (sent home) 31,000 Haitians. By the year 2,000, only 1,000 were picked up and sent home. Europe is now on the verge of making the cruel decisions the United States made in Haiti and in Mexico. Wealthy northern countries must decide if they want to change the way of life they have created over centuries and accept tens of millions of people fleeing poverty and corruption. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Talks on an interim funding deal between a reshuffled Greek negotiating team and representatives of the European Commission, the European ...
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European bond markets are showing real signs of Greek debt-crisis fatigue. Many investors frankly seem to be so exhausted by the debate about ...
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Greece's talks with international creditors dragged on as the European Commission prepares new forecasts that are likely to underscore the scale of ...
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The candidates in line for the role of finance minister could help determine how far debt-stricken Greece will be pushed in its ill-tempered negotiations ...
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Both the French and the Greek economies saw their manufacturing sectors “mired in contraction” in April, according to the respected Markit survey. The French economy is the second largest in the eurozone after Germany. The country’s manufacturing output declined for the 11th month in a row and the pace of decline was the fastest so far this year.
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Even if Greece reaches an agreement with its international lenders, it's still too late for a country buried with debt, poverty and unemployment. The post World Press View: Debt Deal Still Won’t Save Greece Yet appeared first on The National Herald.
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Weekend negotiations between Greece and rescue lenders have made progress as Athens said it needed new monies fast. The post Greece Seeks Deal, Swift Payout appeared first on The National Herald.
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“The market has become less pessimistic toward a Greek deal. In the past seven sessions, the 10-year Greek yield has fallen by about 350 bp to a little ...
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In what has been a relatively muted session, movements in the USD-index have been the catalyst for most of the price action in major pairs amid a ...
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Turkey says it has stopped over 200 migrants from reaching EU-member Greece in recent days.
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The Greek newspaper Kathimerini has confirmed the rumors that circulated the media when known Greek terrorist Christodoulos Xeros was arrested in Anavyssos, on Saturday, January 3. According to the rumors police had provided one million euros as a reward to the informant that led them to arrest the November 17 terrorist. According to the article that was published by Kathimerini, a few days after Xeros’ arrest, government officials ordered the transfer of 1 million euros to a secret bank account controlled by the country’s Ministry of Public Order, so that the money would be deposited without revealing the identity of the informant. On January 16, a new decree was signed and the money, originally credited to the budget code for “Special Public Security Costs,” was transferred to the Ministry’s “Confidential expenses.” Furthermore, a Ministry of Public Order official told the newspaper that Xeros was arrested with the assistance of an informant, adding that the reward money would be disbursed under specific and safe procedures. Xeros violated his furlough terms in January 2014, when he disappeared for a year. The then Public Order Minister Nikos Dendias offered 1 million euros to anyone who could provide information leading to his arrest. Furthermore, Dendias also offered another 3 million euros for information leading to the arrest of known terrorist Nikos Maziotis and his partner Pola Roupa, as well as the two unidentified assassins who murdered two Golden Dawn members in Iraklio, Athens.
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The Amphipolis tomb excavation site is in danger of being buried under the sand due to neglect and weather conditions, said Greek Deputy Minister of Culture Nikos Xydakis. The Amphipolis tomb discovery was one of the ten most important findings in the world in 2014. Now, the burial monument is at risk of being buried again, but this time to the knowledge of archaeologists. The major archaeological discovery in northern Greece cannot be opened for visitors at the moment as heavy rains have created stagnant ponds and forced mounts of dirt to cover most of the site. When water dries, the ground will be even more unstable. Water needs to be drained and a drainage system must be put in place. “The surrounding wall with wonderful marbles from Thasos needs drainage works urgently,” Xydakis said. Drainage works must be completed before autumn, when bad weather starts again. An emergency meeting took place between the excavation crew and culture ministry officials. A new geostationary study needs to be conducted in order to decide what precautionary measures to take to save the site. However, financial reasons do not allow the study to be done. And the geostationary study is essential before further, specific studies of stones, mortars, support methods and so on. Restoration of the monument at the moment is very difficult due to lack of funds for all the studies needed. Certain restoration procedures have taken place already, but further restoration studies and works need the approval of the Central Archaeological Council, other than the necessary funding.
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Greek police revealed the tragic end to the case of the 4-year-old girl from Bulgaria who was declared missing by her mother. Young Ani Borisova’s disappearance caused concern to the authorities who were struggling to find out what exactly happened. According to the mother’s first report she had left her child with a friend for a few days in order to travel to Bulgaria. Upon her return she was informed that her friend had taken the child out for a walk and lost her. However, after further investigation Greek police found the father and cross-examined the evidence to find that both parents had given false statements. Further investigation revealed that the young girl’s mother had traveled to Germany and upon her arrival the child’s father told her that he had lost their daughters. The parents panicked and instead of reporting the disappearance they fled to Bulgaria where they stayed with a family friend, whose statements helped police solve the case. “When I asked about the child, they told me that she was probably dead,” he said. Their friend’s statement, along with the traces of blood found in the father’s apartment helped police solve the case. The 27-year-old man who murdered his daughter was arrested on Monday afternoon, May 4, on the charges of manslaughter. Stavros Georgiou, the parents’ lawyer was at a loss for words. “I’m going to talk to the mother to find out exactly what happened,” he said.
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The draft omnibus bill due to be tabled in Parliament will contain a series of measures designed to combat the clandestine trade in fuel and fuel smuggling, sources revealed on Sunday. These will include the extension of inflow-outflow monitoring systems throughout the entire fuel supply chain, combined with a general audit of businesses in the market, as well as the use of “tracers” in fuel used as raw material by smugglers. The task of combating the contraband fuel trade has been undertaken by Greek Alternate Finance Minister Dimitris Mardas, who has decided on a first batch of measures to be taken immediately. Already installed in fuel stations and heating oil suppliers, the inflow-outflow systems will now also be extended to the entire supply chain and to all types of vehicles and boats used to transport fuel, as well as the installations of large-scale consumers, such as the Public Power Corporation, armed forces, police and fire brigade. The contents of all large storage facilities, including those of consumers that exceed two cubic meters, will be audited, while chemical substances that allow easy tracing will be added to diesel used in ships and fuel destined for export, which are tax free, as well as fuel sent to military installations. (source: ana-mpa)
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The Financial Times report that, with his attitude, Finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, has managed to lose his only remaining European friend _ his French colleague, Michel Sapin: In Riga at the end of April, Greece may have ...
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He complained that Greece had submitted false statements (assisted by a U.S. investment bank with the initials GS) to get into the system in 2001.
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Greece's new government is struggling to deliver economic reforms and budget measures that are deemed acceptable by creditors in order to secure ...
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“This is a big week for Greece when it comes to liquidity. Concerns of a deteriorating liquidity situation seem to be forcing the government to cave into ...
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The European Union is currently facing several existential challenges. The recent parliamentary election in Greece resulted in the victory of a political party that rejects the austerity measures the EU and the IMF have insisted on as a condition for bailing out the Greek economy. The debt-ridden country is now on the verge of a possible withdrawal from the Eurozone. Meanwhile, Euroskeptic parties elsewhere in EU - the National Front in France, the UK Independence Party, the People's Party in Denmark - have been gaining ground at the polls. And the EU as a whole has witnessed minimal economic growth, leading to overall disenchantment with the project of political and economic integration. As a result, the European Union is experiencing strong centrifugal forces. The richer countries like Germany remain strongly anchored in the quasi-federal structure, and Germany is only getting richer. Countries like Greece and Spain, on the other hand, have been getting poorer, and they are beginning to resent the control that the EU - and German banks - exerts over their political and economic decision-making. It all sounds eerily familiar for some EU members. After all, the counties of former Yugoslavia experienced the political and economic tensions of their federal structures for a couple of decades before the country fragmented in the early 1990s and descended into war. Slovenia and Croatia, the richer republics, resented the political control exerted by Serbia as well as the redistribution of funds to the poorer republics. "It is nationalism that tore Yugoslavia apart, and it will be nationalism, albeit masked in economic terms, that may rip apart the Eurozone and the enlarged EU," the Slovenian poet and cultural critic Ales Debeljak told me in an interview in August 2013 in Vienna, where he was on a Bosch fellowship at the Institute for Human Sciences. "This is a striking parallel, maybe superficial but nonetheless telling, and which many Slovenians are not willing to stomach: the situation in the 1980s in Yugoslavia on the one hand and the situation of the EU of today on the other. I'm talking here about the difference between the debtors and the creditors. Slovenia occupied the position of creditor within the former Yugoslavia." As a creditor, Slovenians came "to see themselves as the best part of the former Yugoslavia," Debeljak continued, "and they have been seen as such by many Yugoslavs - all of us conveniently forgetting that the economic nationalism and the ethnic homogeneity of the community helped pave the way for the unrest that occurred after independence. They've also forgotten that there's a very thin line between defensive and militant nationalisms. Slovenians were saying, 'We won't pay for the debts accrued by the Kosovars' - in other words by the less developed, by those 'sub-humans,' by that ultimate 'other' in the land of southern Slavs." What goes around comes around. "Slovenians were creditors in Yugoslavia, and now in European times they are the debtors," Debeljak concluded. "Before, Slovenians were loath to adopt the attitude of solidarity and agree with the redistribution of wealth that would have perhaps deprived them of what they thought was rightfully theirs. And this sense of entitlement derived simply from sharing the border with Austria and Italy, seeing over the border at how consumer capitalism can boost appearances and blind their eyes with spectacle. That was what we wanted. That was our standard, nothing less. We were egotists. But now we say, 'Wait a moment, what about European solidarity? What about renegotiating the debt? What about the tremendous profits that creditors get from debtor countries? Shouldn't we rethink solidarity?'" We had a wide-ranging conversation that touched on some of the same themes from our discussion in Ljubljana in 2008 (excerpts reproduced at the bottom): the reasons for Yugoslavia's unraveling, the literary landscape after the wars of the 1990s, the challenge of constructing a pan-European history, the brittleness of social and political institutions. The Interview Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you heard about the fall of the Berlin Wall? That fall, I had just returned from classes at the Maxwell School of Citizenship at Syracuse University in the wasteland of upstate New York. I was staying at a dilapidated, student-rented villa that I shared with two fellow graduate students from India, both Marxists from Delhi, which was always interesting, and a young German scholar of law, Wolfgang, who broke the news to me. Then we went to watch TV. Being on a different continent yet keenly following the events, I was myself taken by surprise because I believed in endless reform not in revolution. These "velvet revolutions" turned out to be "refolutions," a combination of reform and revolution. While we were busy explaining to the interested observers from the West that Western democracy did not emerge without bloodshed and without huge societal conflict, either, it turned out that Adam Michnik was right on the mark when he said that nationalism is the last stage of communism -- and that has been proved with a vengeance, not least of all in the country of my birth, Yugoslavia. In 1989, what did you think was going to happen in Yugoslavia Did you have any inkling that Michnik's prediction would apply to Yugoslavia, or did you think that the future would be endless reform? As far as I can recall, my analytical capacities were hampered because I was caught up in the popular movement that clamored for an independent nation-state for Slovenia. I must say, however, that I'm fully aware that the choice to go it alone was the least evil of all the choices available. One must not forget that it was way into the second half of the 1980s that the Slovenian Communist leadership attempted to seek and secure compromise in an ongoing process of reform only to see all those efforts scuppered. From asymmetrical federation to Swiss-style confederation, a variety of modes of convivencia were tabled and ended up in the dustbin under the desk of Slobodan Milosevic. With the rise of Milosevic it became clear that the Serbian leadership, and indeed it seemed a great deal of the population at large as well, was committed to transforming the federal state from a common project into a continuation of Serbia by other means. When the Serbian authorities broke into the Yugoslav bank reserves and appropriated the commonly held funds, it became clear that the gloves were off. As I said, I was taken by surprise, but that was quickly replaced by horror. The summer of 1991 certainly changed my world. I had just returned from the United States for a summer-long vacation in Slovenia. I'd kept abreast of developments and expected a lot of name-calling in the newspapers and an increased rhetorical frenzy. But I was taken aback by the clear and recognizable physical threat. I came back the day before Slovenia's proclamation of independence on June 25, 1991. The night of independence we were all joyous and vivacious. We sat outside in the sidewalk cafes of old Ljubljana quarter under the Castle Hill. I saw Dimitrij Rupel, the foreign minister who was, it later turned out, foreign minister forever. That shows you the popular, not populist, attitude at the time that the people had toward the government. Rupel and other newly-minted politicians were strolling in the old town and participating in that post-announcement celebration. It was the wee hours of the morning, about 4:30 of the next day that the new country's first democratically elected president, Milan Kucan, the leader of the transformed Communist party, so ominously predicted would be different, that I returned home. As I was returning in the early morning to my parents' apartment to finally go to sleep, I glanced at the unusual sight of the "Spanish riders," the anti-tank barriers on Celovška Street, the main northwest entry to Ljubljana, but it seemed so out of place that it didn't even register. It wasn't long after I hit the sack that my father woke me up and said that it was war. It sounded like something from the movies. I simply couldn't believe it. I got up, jumped on my bicycle, and pedaled back to downtown where the editorial offices of the magazine Nova Revija was quickly turning into a mass communications switchboard. The CNN crew was already in Ljubljana. "Aha," I thought, "the vultures are in town smelling blood." The first field interpreter for the crew had quit after the first day. So they popped into the Nova Revija office and asked if anyone would like to join. Without much ado, I said I would. And I did. I remember witnessing the battle in Gornja Radgona. I was standing next to Jim Clancy, interpreting into his ear what the subject in front the camera was saying. But it was barely discernible because of the gunfire on the square a hundred meters away. We were shielded by the church wall, though, behind which we were conducting the interview. I couldn't believe it. One hundred meters away was serious gunfire that I'd only heard before in partisan movies. I couldn't rationally or emotionally stomach the fact that this was real. I thought: no, this can't be happening. Mercifully it lasted only 10 days in Slovenia. But the rest of the country? Now they dedicate books, special issues, collections of testimonies to this big subject of the past, a past so bloody that nothing in my life prepared me for. All of these attempts to explain the war in former Yugoslavia -- in terms of rural versus urban elements, nationalist versus Communist, secular versus religious, Serbs versus Croats -- carry some validity as far as they go. But I have not come across a single convincing argument or series of arguments that maintain that it was bound to happen. If it wasn't bound to happen, then why did it happen? Why did we allow it to happen? As someone who has attempted to wrest nationalism from the hands of right-wing politics, not willing to cede an important, albeit contradictory, source of one's personal makeup in this titanic war of narratives between cosmopolitanism, communism, and nationalism in the 20th century, I believe that it was nationalism that nevertheless carried the day. Nationalism is simple and gut-felt. It neatly divides the world into us and them. And it has succeeded in naturalizing history. No other competing narrative has managed to do that. After Tito's death, the ideology of socialist brotherhood and unity was slowly shredded to pieces. In the absence of an integrative ideology after Tito's death, the top echelons of power could only come up with the slogan "After Tito, Tito." They couldn't think of anything else! The discrediting of political imagination became painfully visible. Never mind the debt the country accrued in the 1980s in particular. In the absence of an integrative narrative -- if ideology is too much of an abused word -- the elites in the respective republics of former Yugoslavia had little recourse to anything else. They reached for what turned out to be the only game in town -- the tools and methods of national homogenization. We had a lot of wishful thinking about the defensive nature of Slovenian nationalism and the collective natural right of self-determination. But we sobered up when the question of the Erased came up and made a fundamental stain in the makeup of the Slovenian nation-state. The Erased had permanent residency in Slovenia. They were mainly, but not exclusively, citizens of Yugoslavia, and at the same time, citizens of one of the Yugoslav republics. After Slovenia became an independent nation-state on the 25th of June 1991, citizens of the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia automatically became citizens of the newly declared independent Republic of Slovenia. Citizens of other Yugoslav republics that have had also permanent residency in Socialist Republic of Slovenia, had the opportunity to apply for the citizenship of the newly declared independent Republic of Slovenia. They had six months to apply. After the 27th of February 1992, and in the days that followed, those who had not applied for the citizenship of Slovenia also lost their permanent residency and all the social rights that were connected to that specific legal status. The Constitutional Court of Slovenia established already in 1999 that the erasure was illegal. Even though it is hard to come to terms with that, it's the difference between critical patriotism and chauvinism. It is nationalism that tore Yugoslavia apart, and it will be nationalism, albeit masked in economic terms, that may rip apart the Eurozone and the enlarged EU. This is a striking parallel, maybe superficial but nonetheless telling, and which many Slovenians are not willing to stomach: the situation in the 1980s in Yugoslavia on the one hand and the situation of the EU of today on the other. I'm talking here about the difference between the debtors and the creditors. Slovenia occupied the position of creditor within the former Yugoslavia. Economic nationalism played a considerable role as early as 1964 when Stane Kavcic, the liberal-minded leader of Slovenian Communists, had to swallow a big defeat by not being able to build a highway across Slovenia, with the money earmarked instead for the construction of the Crvena Zvezda (nickname: Marakana) stadium in Belgrade. That was the way the redistribution of income or GDP was carried out, with an authoritarian hand. Slovenians have gradually come to see themselves as the best part of the former Yugoslavia, and they have been seen as such by many Yugoslavs - all of us conveniently forgetting that the economic nationalism and the ethnic homogeneity of the community helped pave the way for the unrest that occurred after independence. They've also forgotten that there's a very thin line between defensive and militant nationalisms. Slovenians were saying, "We won't pay for the debts accrued by the Kosovars" - in other words by the less developed, by those "sub-humans," by that ultimate "other" in the land of southern Slavs. The Albanians, of course, were not by any means the only minority. Yugoslavia could boast of the legal protection of 10 minorities in the last constitution which again makes it similar to the EU. The last constitution of SFRY was adopted in 1974, but national minorities were not mentioned specifically. However, nationalities that were recognized and were also listed in 1981 in census were: Albanians, Bulgarians, Czechs Hungarians, Romanians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Italians, Roma, and Turks. It was this ability to balance centripetal and centrifugal forces that Tito excelled at, but at a price. I'm not suggesting that the EU should adopt his particular recipe. But we should look into what went wrong in the multinational, multi-linguistic, multi-confessional political organism that was Yugoslavia and that is today the EU (even though of course I know that there are many differences). Slovenians were creditors in Yugoslavia, and now in European times they are the debtors. Before, Slovenians were loath to adopt the attitude of solidarity and agree with the redistribution of wealth that would have perhaps deprived them of what they thought was rightfully theirs. And this sense of entitlement derived simply from sharing the border with Austria and Italy, seeing over the border at how consumer capitalism can boost appearances and blind their eyes with spectacle. That was what we wanted. That was our standard, nothing less. We were egotists. But now we say, "Wait a moment, what about European solidarity? What about renegotiating the debt? What about the tremendous profits that creditors get from debtor countries? Shouldn't we rethink solidarity?" Solidarity, for me, is a fundamental concept in the understanding of European identity. When I was a grad student in the late 1980s, including the annus mirabilis of 1989, we would sit around with raduate students from around the world, including Americans, and no matter the topic we'd ultimately come down on different sides of the fence. All Europeans, whether from the east or west, took the varieties of welfare state for granted, as embedded in who they were as Europeans. That was contrary to most Americans, for whom it was okay, for example, for the highways to have potholes and trains to be poorly developed and health care to be exorbitant. This was interesting. At the time I was wondering about the cultural makeup of Europe and how the bewildering variety coalesces into a story, an image, or an anecdote that evokes an emotional response. In the end, it's not the cultural variety, which exists everywhere - in India, in Latin America -- that binds together Europe. It is the internalized idea of the welfare state, articulated or not. The fear of losing that drives many a protest across southern Europe. It is a political idea that has succeeded in permeating the societal tissue. It will be hard to curtail it without severe consequences. That's very true. Even at the moments of the greatest laissez-faire enthusiasm in Eastern Europe, there was a belief deep down that the welfare state should continue. We see that even more palpably today when laissez-faire principles have come up hard against the brick wall of austerity. I want to come back to something you said earlier, that you haven't heard a convincing argument about why Yugoslavia fell apart. Let me throw two arguments at you. One is that it was Milosevic and a few people around him. If Ivan Stambolic had become the leader of Serbia, we would have seen much different reactions in the other republics. The other argument is the insistence by the international community, and actors on the ground here, on democratic elections in the absence of real political parties and a democratic culture. Only nationalists could profit in the short period of time allotted to the creation of a democratic process. To read the rest of the interview, click here. -- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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