By Roberto Orsi
In the aftermath of the tumultuous events in Brussels and Athens, public opinions in Europe and elsewhere have been rapidly polarised, to an extent perhaps not seen in decades. The dramatic deterioration of Greek finances (both public and private) with the consequent set of social and political impacts, have produced the mobilisation of very strong language and imageries from all sides. Many commentators, some as authoritative and diverse as Jürgen Habermas, or Slavoj Žižek, have explicitly sounded the alarm that this may well be the end of the European project, preluding a return of inter-state rivalries and possibly wars. The handling of the Greek crisis has allegedly shown both within the EU as an organisation, as well as in the mindset and behaviour of the European political leaders, a lack of concern for “core values” such as democracy and solidarity.
This polarisation owes much to the uncomfortable landscape of political communication in Europe, dominated as it is, for reasons which escape the scope of this piece, by slogans built on gross oversimplifications and emotional appeals to knee-jerk reactions. The Greek government has been particularly active on this front by using the escamotage of a snap referendum to present its course of action and its position as the “democratic” one. It does not actually matter what is meant here by democracy in analytical terms. The point is that, in a binary opposition (Germany vs. Greece), if one side occupies the ground of “democracy”, i.e. of something practically all Europeans have been raised to consider as a synonym of “absolute good”, the other must rest on the ground of “absolute evil”. Any attempt at showing that the matter is more complicated than this is doomed to fail considering that it would require a somewhat more sophisticated form of communication, currently restricted to a certainly influential, nevertheless rather small part of the population and the electorate. The same is true of “solidarity”, whose alleged counterpart, the dreaded austerity, cannot be but the manifestation of sheer sadism, greed and other moral evils, incarnated by essentially degenerated individuals. More nuanced analyses of the Greek economic and political situation, often with remarkable long-term historical insights, are plenty, but they can hardly scratch the thick skin of the Manichean behemot. Continue reading “Weaponisation of War Memories and Anti-German Sentiment”