Dear Chancellor,
You eventually succumbed to the vulgar German populism that has always searched for nation-victims in order to justify its «superiority». With contempt for history, just to win a few more votes, you adopted the inarticulate cries of the extreme Right and the extreme Left that Greece should not have been in the euro: that its integration was a fundamental error of your predecessor Gerhard Schröder, whom you also insulted with plenty of characterizations. To get to this blatant lie implies that you deliberately chose to forget not only the sincerity a leader should exhibit, but also the actual events that took place 15 years ago. It would then be useful to be reminded of the following:
1. It is true that Greece, to join the EMU, made use of the less strict Maastricht criteria in 1999, but with a major difference. It was not Gerhard Schröder who had relaxed those criteria to help Greece, but your mentor, Helmut Kohl, in order to help France, Italy, Belgium, and especially Germany, which then had either large deficits or large debts. If the criteria had not changed, from the original core-countries in EMU only the Netherlands and Luxembourg would qualify and the euro would have become the shortest joke.
2. You are undoubtedly well aware of the agonizing changes made by these countries to be able to satisfy even the relaxed entry criteria. France removed the state-owned social security organizations from the public purse, Belgium bought back the gold from the Central Bank, and your country took hospitals out of the budget and concealed budget deficits of the various states. The only thing Greece did was to classify defense spending under the debt and only gradually under the deficit. This method became the norm for the entire European Union, but is retroactively not applied to Greece in order to maintain the myth of its incorrect inclusion in the euro zone. If you wanted to be fair, go ahead and create a committee with five Nobel Laureates of your choice who would examine how all countries entered the EMU. It is then that the discussion would become interesting, and that is a promise.
3. You should also remember that it was not only Greece who immediately had problems with the Stability Pact, but your own country as well with large deficits in the 2000-2004 period. While it was technically confirmed that Germany had violated the Pact, Germany avoided a disgraceful sentence and heavy fines to be paid in 2003 only thanks to the Greek intervention and resulting vote in the Eurogroup. You should also remember that there were many who spoke about the inadequacy of Germany being in the EMU, but those who eventually prevailed were those who believed in European solidarity and strongly defended your country and the common path of integration.
4. The great experience you had as a leader of Germany ought to have taught you that a country can fail when, at a critical moment, the wrong political choices are applied and no one intervenes to halt them or stop them. It was also you who neglected to notice the swelling of the Greek deficit after 2007 and along with the ‘amazing’ Barroso took no action in order to avoid displeasing your equal-minded supporters. When things got worse in 2010 you accepted (some say you even insisted) the joining of the IMF in the supervision of Greece as a supposedly necessary evaluation mechanism. Thus, you forgot not only that IMF policies have always led to abject (blatant) failures everywhere, but also its intervention is needed only in currency crises, which, of course there was no such case.
Until then, the IMF had no jurisdiction or say in euro matters and you now managed to make it dominate the politics of the eurozone, you allowed it to give advice to France, to command Spain and other such grotesque and historical absurdities. Even your Minister of Finance wants the IMF to leave, but the damage has been done and it is very large. Your responsibility is equally large and for this, you should be more careful when you communicate with your electorate.
5. And one last thing: You should be less critical of your predecessor, Chancellor Schröder and be more grateful to him. You owe him at least two things: firstly, it was his own tax reform and the agreements he had with the unions that brought back investments to Germany and made a deficit-ridden country into a competitive once again. It is the fruits of Schröder’s policies that you have reaped and managed to become the strongest economy in Europe today.
Secondly, it was Schröder who, along with Chirac of France and Simitis of Greece as President in 2003 of the European Union, opposed the Anglo-American plans to invade Iraq. Germany was spared not only of not sending thousands of soldiers to their death, but also of not having to bear the stigma of the invader that would have been attached to you until today, as it is happening for the UK.
It is likely, as having grown up under a Marxist regime, to believe that history is written every time in order to serve the interests of the party. However, after so many years at the helm of Germany, you should have learned that history’s falsification is the first step that undermines and devastates a society, both of the one that is subject to it at the time as well as the one that commits it. You can think of it using your own historical examples.
Mr. Nikos Christodoulakis is a former Minister and professor at the University of Economics.
