Greece: it’s not all about the economy, stupid

The riots in Greece, which have raged in Athens and university towns since the police killing of a 15-year-old Athenian boy on Saturday, have not only severely shaken the Greek government. They have also rattled outside observers.

Across Western Europe, both conservatives and radicals see the violence as a possible sign of things to come in 'credit-crunched Europe'. They argue that while the rioting might have been triggered by an act of police brutality, its real driving force is anger at the government's €28billion bailout package for failing banks. One British observer says the violence is a response to 'the fact that the government has thrown 12 per cent of the country's GDP at the banks', the implication being that 'bailout Britain' might see similar anger soon (1). A UK-based radical left newspaper celebrates the riots as an expression of 'rage' at the Greek government's 'neoliberal economic policies', and hopes that other uprisings will take place across Europe: 'Things are collapsing at the top of society, while people on the ground are in a fighting mood.' (2)

It is true, of course, that the serious political violence in Greece is about more than the killing of a teenager. And it is true that many people in Greece are deeply concerned about the country's economic predicament. This week's general strike, which paralysed Greek schools, the transport system and other services, was planned before the police killing and the subsequent riots, with the aim of protesting against unemployment and cuts in government spending on social needs (3). However, it is a massive oversimplification to label the violence in Greece as an automatic response to economic woes or a positive uprising against 'neoliberalism'. Such analyses are driven by the fears and fantasies of outside observers – and they overlook Greece's deep, historic problems of political legitimacy, alienation and thwarted aspirations, many of which are peculiar to that nation and which have made 'street instability' a fairly common thing.

The violence ultimately reveals that Greece's youthful middle classes, the main protagonists in the riots, have Western European aspirations in a country that is far from being a full or legitimate member of Western Europe. Greece may be in the European Union, and a much-valued member of NATO (by the US in particular), yet it remains very much on the outskirts of modern Europe. For historical reasons, many of the values and trends that developed in Western Europe following the end of the Cold War in the 1990s – the demise of the left-right divide; the rise of various 'Third Way' ideas; what some described as 'the end of ideology' – have not taken hold in Greece, where there remains a far more conflictual form of politics and a confrontational left-wing. The riots have exposed a ruling elite that enjoys little legitimacy or authority, and a fairly cosmopolitan middle class – many of whom have travelled abroad for work and education – who feel utterly alienated from their rulers and from Greek society. And peculiarly for modern Europe, this divide tends to be expressed in an old-fashioned language of right vs left, or authoritarians vs anarchists.

The idea that the current Greek riots, the most serious in a series of violent uprisings in recent years, might be repeated verbatim elsewhere in Europe overlooks what is specific and curious about Greece's political development. On BBC TV's Newsnight this week, a discussion between a leading British academic and a former Greek official raised concerns that 'exactly the same thing' might happen in other countries where, like Greece, there are high numbers of graduates (higher education has been expanded across Europe in recent decades) but few useful or meaningful jobs for them to do (4). However, there is much that is novel, in the modern European context, about Greece's continuing conflictual system, its high levels of distrust of the state, and the readiness of young people to take action and even riot against the police.

The intensity and the lingering nature of the political tensions in Greece – where the state tends to be viewed as a legacy of the right and where there is still a relatively thriving youth culture of anarchism and leftism – have been forged over the past 50 years. A combination of external meddling in Greek affairs and internal political ruthlessness have ensured that the modern Greek state has won little legitimacy in the eyes of great numbers of its citizens. One key element has been British and American complicity, from the Second World War through to the mid-1970s, in the isolation and exiling of the Greek left, and their support for right-wing authoritarian regimes in Athens. Much of the scene for modern Greece was set by the British Churchill government's grotesque betrayal and destruction of the left-wing forces that liberated Greece from Nazi occupation, which led to the exiling of much of the Greek left and the intensification of the deep right-left dichotomy in modern Greek politics (5).

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