Tower and Town, October 2017 (view the full edition)Book Review: Adults In The RoomAdults in the Room, by Yanis Varoufakis
Yanis Varoufakis, a passionate Remainer, was Greece's Finance Minister for 162 days as his country tried to re-negotiate the terms of its bailout by the so-called Troika - the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission. His blow-by-blow account of those 162 days makes absolutely gripping reading. In the process, he comes to a view of which we in Britain would do well to take heed, namely, that the EU regards it as against its interests to allow any re-negotiation to succeed since that would set a precedent for others to try the same thing. The EU's iron rule, he concludes, is to make the process so appalling that no-one else ever sees fit to try it again.
Varoufakis identifies a number of techniques used by the EU.
First is 'the eurozone runaround'. "A finance minister who wants to table, say, debt-restructuring proposals, is simply denied the name of any person to speak to or a telephone number to call so that he or she simply does not know who to talk to."
Second is what he calls 'the Swedish national anthem'. "I would take [my carefully argued proposals, tested on some of the highest authorities in their field] to Greece's creditors...only to observe a landscape of blank stares. It was as if I had not spoken...I might as well have been singing the Swedish national anthem."
Third, he identifies 'the Penelope Ruse'. Penelope, wife of Odysseus, was pestered by suitors during her husband's long absence at the Trojan war. Her technique for keeping them at bay was to promise an answer to their proposals once she had finished weaving a certain burial cloth that she had on her loom. Unbeknownst to her suitors, all the work she did during the day, she undid during the night, so the burial cloth was never finished. Time and again, when Varoufakis thought he had made progress on the Monday, come Tuesday something would happen - often, he found, as a result of a discreet phone call from Berlin - to put things right back to square one.
Varoufakis's sisyphean efforts to engage with the Troika were consistently rebuffed and undermined; engagement was simply refused. However, the story is greatly saddened by the fact that the Greeks themselves were not united in their approach, and in the end the Troika succeeded in driving enough wedges amongst them that they capitulated and signed up to the very Memorandum of Understanding against which they had been elected to fight.
I came away from this book with a vivid insight into Greek tragedy and a much sharper sense of what is at stake in our own EU negotiations. It should be compulsory reading for all MPs.Hugh de Saram |