Grexit, Brexit, Fixit … The Dynamics of Division in the Age of Trump
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12463 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
Grexit, Brexit, Fixit ... The Dynamics of
Division in the Age of Trump
James K. Galbraith
The University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
This essay discusses the drift toward European disunion in the wake of the Athens Spring and its repression, through the
Brexit vote, the French elections, and the new political context of the administration of Donald Trump. I argue that certain
dynamics of division, rooted in the creditor-debtor relationship, apply both to Europe and to the United States.
Policy Implications
•The European project is at risk of collapse.
•The principal source of that risk is a failure of economic imagination and policy.
•The principal source of that failure is that policy has been tied to the economic interests of the creditor class.
•The Greek revolt (or “Athens Spring”) of 2015 represented an enlightened effort to challenge the dynamic of disunion in
Europe.
•The repression of the Athens Spring contributed to the accelerating slide of the EU toward disunion in the Brexit vote and
the rise of the National Front in France.
•The rise of Donald Trump has momentarily focused European minds and arrested the advance of ethno-nationalist pop-
ulism in Europe, but this is only provisional, as deep divisions of class interest have been engaged.
•The class divisions and disunion dynamics visible in Europe are also visible in the United States, and will make themselves
increasingly felt over time.
My family connection to Greece goes back two generations;
Andreas Papandreou was a student of economics at Har-
vard, then a professor at Northwestern and Minnesota, and
finally chair of the department at Berkeley in the late 1950s,
as my father was achieving renown at Harvard. Andreas
went back to Greece and entered politics, and in April 1967
when the CIA-backed colonels overthrew the government
he was arrested and the word reached the Evening News
that he would shortly be shot.
At that time, in the United States, the execution of an
economics professor was considered a fairly serious matter.
The professors took to their phones, to alert my father and
implore his intervention. Dad at that time had not spoken
to President Johnson for over a year, given their deep differ-
ence over Vietnam, but as the evening deepened the anxi-
ety wore him down. About midnight he called the White
House, reaching Joe Califano. Califano advised that the Pres-
ident was awake; together they summarized the matter in a
half-page memo and Califano took it upstairs.
As I learned much later from Walt Rostow, LBJ called him
in. ‘What do you know about this man?’The national secu-
rity adviser replied that he wasn’t very nice. ‘When he left
Berkeley there were unpaid poker debts and a lot of angry
women’. Johnson stared back at Rostow, ‘That’s not a reason
to kill a man’. At two in the morning my father was awak-
ened by a call from Nicholas Katzenbach, undersecretary of
state, with a message that he read verbatim: ‘Nick: call Ken
Galbraith and tell him I’ve told those Greek bastards to lay
off that son of a bitch, whoever he is’.
My first visit to Greece as an adult came only in 2006, to
speak to a convocation in Athens on the tenth anniversary
of Andreas’s death.
1
The Papandreou family,
2
the economics
professors of the Athens universities and the full leadership
of PASOK, the Pan-Hellenic Socialist Alliance, were all pre-
sent in a cathedral-like setting of utmost gloom. Also the
President of the Hellenic Republic, to whom, I was told, I
should address my speech. Of course I told the story.
The years from 2000 through 2009 were of European illu-
sion, as the euro took hold and the economies of Spain,
Portugal, Ireland and Greece boomed, thanks to low interest
rates and easy credit. The boom took different forms: com-
mercial real estate in Ireland, houses in Spain, and in Greece
mostly public sector spending, including military hardware,
infrastructure, the 2004 Olympics and to cover deficits in
public health and elsewhere. The credit flows in turn fos-
tered German exports, building up a vast imbalance of trade
inside the Eurozone. This could continue only so long as
banks were prepared to make risky loans –which after the
financial system collapsed in 2008, they could no longer do.
In early 2010 I returned to lend moral support to the new
government of George Papandreou, beset at once by the
onset of the European phase of the financial crisis. My
Global Policy (2017) 8:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12463 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 3 . September 2017 381
Policy Insights
To continue reading
Request your trial