Leave the Ballot Blank -- The Greek Choice for Europe

Greece should refuse a false choice by turning in a blank ballot. Refuse in this way the elite-mongering decisionism from which this scandalous insult to voting arises. Let it all go down. Around that the leaders and negotiators will have to adjust. Maybe then some small and sober and unexpected light will appear.
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Tragedy is the art of the bad choice. It is an art wedded to politics, where the possible, and thus the impossible, reign over the good. Ancient Greece was the crucible for both. From such invention and fire Europeans -- Germans with special fervor among them -- have spent centuries idolizing the Greeks.

The moderns -- think of Germans again, like Nietzsche, Max Weber, Freud -- taught us that the idols of the fathers are the object of most vicious demolition. Remember that the European Union is founded this way, against the "ways of one's father" (that's where the word patriotism comes from).

On the world stage today, the hatred by Europeans of what Europeans themselves avow as their core is a looming presence. If you think that "hatred" is too strong a word, keep in mind that as much as the Germans have sought to collect debts, they have peppered Greeks with withering insult. On display, however, is not just political tragedy. It is the Western addiction to tragic politics, expressed in the transfiguration of each problem of the community into a single moment of decision (another German Idea, beloved by an infamous Hitlerite named Carl Schmitt). In such a moment, yes and no are worlds apart and at stake is the world itself. The choice -- symbolically, you say, but maybe not -- is between annihilation and self-annihilation.

On what altar must such a ritual occur? For where the ancients could not live without gods, the moderns, too, must have their idols. This may be universally true but at least it was recognized from the beginning of our era (recall Lord Francis Bacon, writing in 1620 an adoring rejection of the Greeks that opened the door to modern science.) And around the time Europeans really found their essential core in Greece -- in 18th century Enlightenment passion for reason, freedom, equality, and, eventually, democracy, and in the deepening secular image of humankind abandoned to ourselves by an omnipotent God and living in a history of our own making -- it was around that same time that fundamentalists put forth a new idol in whose name the old ones could be ravaged. As foundations were laid for the idol of the Market, both politics and tragedy lost much of their meaning.

Every extravagant image of the Market -- its mystical "hand," its disconnected and dispassionate "rational actor," its purported "laws" and inexorability -- these all play into this core belief of an increasingly neo-liberal Europe. However, what we are asked to, and do, hold against Greece today is not exactly the rule of the Market itself. Even democrats bring to thinking about Greece a deep frustration in not having found our own way out from under the thumb of bankers and the grip of public government ever more oligarchic and bureaucratic.

What unfolds before us on the stage of the world is a new phase of this titanic clash of idols: the Market versus the tragic politics of the weak in the uplifting spirit of democracy's "will of the people." Each appears as antithesis or antidote for the other.

Appearance, however, is not everything. Even to allow the nomination "Europeans" to the bankers and bureaucrats is to speak as if Greeks -- and everyone else who might have reason to object to the sovereignty of the Market -- were already out. In fact, "Greece" cannot be excised from the self-conception of "Europe" just as "Europe" cannot be excised from the modern democratic self-conception of "Greece." On both sides annihilation and self-annihilation arrive at the same station.

Keep in mind that the issue is idols. Those "Europeans" -- Merkel and Schäuble, Djisselbloem and Lagarde -- make debt relief for Greece out to be an economic question. They are bunkered behind commitment to the sanctity of the Market. This is a perversely tragic dogma, not truth. For, unsustainable debts emerge everywhere in business and are "factored into" it. Thus, what matters most about relief is how to distribute it. Or onto whom the risks of illiquidity will be shifted. Contrary to such dogma, what operates here is the visible hand of political will. And actual Economic Man in France, or Holland, or even in Germany, understands that self-interest cannot permit system-failure as the cost to preserve the idol of the Market. Even Economic Man sees in practice that the competing idol of Europe's aspiration to democracy is a constituent of "his" reason.

It is not the Market itself that the Troika fears and fetishizes: it is the failure of the idol of the Market. It has become clear in these protracted negotiations to save Europe that "Europe's" bottom line is not fiscal constraint and responsibility. It is the legitimacy of the financial regime, or the political bandwidth of capitalism. This is something that Syriza -- and, spoiler alert for the years to come, no leftist government -- can uphold. This reiterates the essence of the Cold War -- a cultural conflict about the scope of politics -- all over again. Here the conflict, if not the choice, is clear, for it seems at this point that Europe is more likely to collapse on the question of who is in charge than on the issue of how much is owed.

In the current -- astonishing? ironic? -- turn of events, the idol of Tragic Politics has come again under the auspices of contemporary Greeks. Perhaps the question we should be asking is Who better to defend the truth of "Europe" than the Greeks? For the people who accept the decisionist task of Yes or No, who agree to the transfer of responsibility from leaders to citizens, who seek to know and realize their own collective will -- these are the children of Europe even more than Europe is the offspring of Athens.

But for just these reasons the Greek Left are children of the Europe that has turned against them. And they cannot acknowledge this betrayal. Instead they extend it.

Blame will fall to Tsipras and Varoufakis. Notwithstanding their utter lack of real resources or leverage, circumstances have compelled them to assert that they are the saviors of Europe. This absurd trap of narcissism is as shockingly cruel as it is embarrassing. Did they not understand how easy it is to suffocate an economic entity, including a country, by restricting liquidity? Did they not understand that after several centuries of adulation and cross-cultural pollination, Germany's heart-felt response to the hubristic Greek claim "you need us" would be "we are the good 'Greeks' and you are the bad ones?" Did they not understand that mechanisms of popular legitimacy like a referendum are only powerful where mobilization leads to victory?

But this is siege warfare. The "will of the people" to starve together hardly makes a difference in the outcome. If the gambit for legitimacy by recourse to the people had been played in the age of democratic revolutions it might have won the day; likewise against the background of popular front politics before World War II. Today, calling for the people to choose where there is nothing to choose is like an invocation of ancestral spirits to ward away the devil. Yes, an idol returns. But it is defunct and without its charms. Confusion ensues. Disorder. It is a disaster.

On the road to disaster, the Greek people are called upon with great fanfare to vote. First by their duly elected leader. Then --- in a mind-bending unanticipated correspondence --- their deepest antagonists demand exactly the same thing. Everyone insists that the Greek people must vote, and vote in the name of something that no longer exists.

I do not mean by this the proposal that was withdrawn by the "Europeans" in order to punish the "bad behavior" of Tsipras and Varoufakis. What no longer exists is the sovereignty of the Greek people. They vote to exhibit their powerlessness.

Of the real forces in play today, which will change with the so-called "vote?" Will the idol of the Market rise or fall on their say? Hardly. Will the validity of politics be extended? To the contrary. Will the tragic mode -- action towards the lesser of two evils -- be reaffirmed? Even less so. It is simply too late to cover over brutal or failed policies of both sides with recourse to the "will of the people."

We have been told a thousand times that today the Greek people are voting between Europe and non-Europe, between Left and Right, or simply between Yes and No. It is true that my admired acquaintances and colleagues and friends and family in Greece stand on the brink. It seems a weirdly Archimedean position. They are asked to push one way or the other. But the forces in play are not their own and leverage is what they do not have. They have been made into scapegoats twice over for titans and fools. No one is pure, but no one deserves this.

Unlike others who speak on this matter, I do not pretend to know "what I would do" at the polls. But all things considered the best option for them may be not to push at all. To vote not-yes and not-no. Refuse the false choice by turning in a blank ballot. Just set the lever down. Refuse in this way the elite-mongering decisionism from which this scandalous insult to democracy arises. Let it all go down. Around that, the leaders and negotiators may have to adjust. Maybe then some small and sober and unexpected light will appear.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot