Summer of hopes and fears.

I have been away from my blog for a long time. A hard winter and a busy spring with loads of work, going back to teaching, a conference paper, writing, and reading - tons of reading, and still not enough of it done - kept me away.

And all this time this tree was standing outside my window,
blossoming in beautiful indifference.

Now it’s the heart of the summer and another referendum has come up, this time in my other home, my native one, Greece. It’s funny how I belong to countries whose lives are rife with drama and adventure, to countries  placed at the two diagonally opposite edges of Europe, northwest and southeast, in geography although not in spirit. Greeks and Scots are quite similar in many things: vocal, strong-willed, obstinate people, who have been at different times in their long histories at the forefront of cultural and political innovation, and who have suffered semi-colonial conditions for long periods in their history.

Last year it was Yes or No to Scottish independence. This time it is No (ΟΧΙ) or Yes (ΝΑΙ) to neoliberal austerity imposed on Greece in a frenzy of blind devotion to an economic dogma which by most accounts does not seem to work. Yet history has shown how pragmatism rarely gets in the way of doctrine. A brief look at sixteenth century  religious conflicts is enough to convince anyone. People are willing to go to extremes in order to fight - and punish - those who disagree with them, who believe differently, who propose something else; facts and reason rarely have anything to do with it. 

I cannot go to Greece to vote in the referendum. But from what my relatives and friends are telling me, and from my own observations, the debate is hot and raging, and in many ways reminds me of what was happening here in the months leading to September 2014. People in Greece now are almost equally split between ΟΧΙ and ΝΑΙ, the media and the local ‘elites’ are almost unanimous in supporting NAI (quelle surprise! No, not really), friends and families are fighting one another, everybody accuses everybody else of thinking only of themselves and explaining their own decision as something they do ‘for their children'. There are those who hate the idea of being called to make decisions for themselves, there are those (on both sides) who are driven by secret and not so secret agenda, there are those who fear and those who hope - as it happened in the Scottish referendum. 

But a referendum is always a good thing: it is the very heart of democracy,  it is a moment when a citizen has to take a stand and make a decision. And if people quarrel and split up over this, it only means they are not used to accepting their co-citizen’s democratic right to differ. The only cure for this would be to call for a referendum more frequently in order to get more into the habit of dialogue and decision-making, not to avoid it in the name of a (fake) social unanimity and peace. As long as there is stark inequality in a society - and there is very much of that in Greece right now - it is suspicious to claim that a democratic process is the problem and to be silent about the policies which created this inequality in the first place. 

There are so many things one could say about this referendum. Many people have made the case for OXI very well, among them many leading economists (they have convinced me, but as I said I won’t be there to vote), and there are some points for NAI too, I suppose - if one still believes that a country can offer carte blanche to those people who have proved to be extremely bad managers of its problems so far (I mean the current eurozone leaders and the IMF and the ECB, as well as the former Greek governments of the last two decades at least) to keep doing more of the same, and still be considered an equal partner. Once again I hope that Greeks will dare choose hope over fear as the Scots didn’t; but no matter what, the discussion will not stop there. It didn’t stop in Scotland and it won’t stop in Greece. History never stops happening, and agency is only one vote away.