Nikos Kotzias on Europe.
“We lack vision and real values.”
Austerity policy is jeopardizing a whole society: Since 2010, 7,000 Greeks have ended their own lives, and 200,000 have left their country. Nikos Kotzias sets out his impression of Greeks and Europeans.
Question: The Friedrich Dürrenmatt novel “The Judge and His Hangman” gives us the excellent character Inspector Bärlach, an intelligent man who enjoys life. He likes wine and good food, but he is ill: he has stomach cancer. Following a particularly rich meal, he lies down on the couch, groaning, and poses the philosophical question: What is man?
Response: I’m just coming from a meeting with ambassadors of the Asian countries, from China and India, with whom we discussed the many things we Greeks have in common with their peoples, through the course of our ancient civilization. Because we have posed the fundamental question “What is man?” for three thousand years now. What is it that drives man? And to link the question with the current situation in my country: Over the past years we have given people a mathematical dimension; we made them slaves to numbers. Since the 1970s we have seen the prevalence of the political conviction that “when the numbers prosper, people prosper too.” Others see us as numbers, and at the same time they are indifferent to the real world. The most important thing to us should be not to break people’s backbones, but to sustain their pride, their optimism and their hope.
Question: How is this evident in Greek daily life?
Response: When the three most important news items our young people hear every day are limited to the words “punishment, memorandum and sanctions,” we have a serious social problem. When we say that “dreams are prohibited,” we have undermined our moral foundation. It is as if we are saying to our youth that nothing good has happened until now, that our Greek way of life has no value. I interpose the following: Until recently, the Germans admired us, this great nation with the wonderful culture. They were the ones who, through Greek philosophy, made us important again. This was an act of love in history. We are in fact happy, optimistic, and we enjoy life. So does this attitude to life have to be “counterproductive”? Does the economic market make better people?
Question: What do the young learn of Europe and their neighbours?
Response: I have the feeling that they feed them stereotypes; that visions and real values are missing. I’m not saying that specific decisions, sanctions and memoranda shouldn’t be the work of “political organs”. But our approach to people should not be limited to these organs. We Greeks didn’t lose a war or destroy anyone’s industrial infrastructure. But we have corruption and bad institutions. We need to eradicate the former, corruption, and improve the latter, the institutions.
Question: The organization “Doctors of the World” maintains a branch in Athens for the sick who, due to unemployment, no longer have health coverage and can’t pay to see a doctor or buy medicine. In the waiting room there is a poster that asks the question, “Why do people exist?”
Response: For one to be a person, one has to develop the human element. This is the humanization of humankind. In the end, humans struggle for two things: on the one hand, to realize grandiose dreams, and to dare. And on the other, to bring small things to pass. He kneels in the sand, on the shore, and builds a small mound. Until at some point a single grain shifts the mound, and he lets it roll.
Question: To build from the example of the futility of a mound of sand: Was Sisyphus happy, as Albert Camus claimed?
Response: We mature when we come face to face with major problems. I compete against problems, not against people. To compete against people means that you belittle the other. But humankind’s imperative need to come to grips with something apparently impossible, to make things better, is certainly a form of happiness.
Question: The German author Wiglaf Droste has given one of his book the provocative title “The dignity of man is subjunctive mood.” How much dignity have the Greeks been left with?
Response: One maintains one’s dignity when one feels that one is not chasing after things that are illusory. When one pits human nature against need. One person has dignity when the other, the vanquished, needn’t feel shame. Personally, I feel ashamed when I can’t help others. I hope I said that with dignity.
Question: On Friday evening you will be appearing in Cologne in the capacity of philosopher. In fact, your subject will be “How does one save a people?”.
Response: The work “people” seems to me to be an ideal metaphor for the creation of a new emancipated Greece. A Greece that will finally find the courage to rise. One can save a state, Greece, by saving its people.
Question: The anarchist group of authors, “The invisible committee”, under the Frenchman Julien Coupat, recently posited in one of its essays – which was discussed in depth in Germany – that there is no such thing as “the people”. In the sense that there is no opposite pole to the government, because the government itself shouldn’t exist either. So, what is “the people”.
Response: The Invisible Committee’s proposition falls within the tradition of neoliberal anarchism. In Greece, this group propagandizes the slogan "uprising or oppression”. Since 2010, 7,000 people have committed suicide in Greece. This shows that the absence of prospects is the worst thing we can offer people. Since 2010, 200,000 young people have left our country. And these aren’t uneducated young men, like those who once went to Germany to do heavy manual labor. They are highly trained university graduates, doctors, lawyers, mathematicians. Their training has cost the Greek state 12 billion euros. Europe, Germany, have gained these young people free of charge. These young people are the natural future of Greece, the country’s productive youth. We, the Greek people, have sent out 14,000 doctors. Their training cost three billion euros. This isn’t just economic shifts within Europe, but mainly, from Greece’s point of view, shifts of people.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
Nikos Kotzias was born in Athens, in 1950. He studied Economics, Political Science, Law and European Integration. He did research and taught at the universities of Marburg, Oxford and Harvard, and he is currently a professor of Political Theory and professor of International and European Studies at the University of Piraeus. As of January 2015, his is the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Greek government of Alexis Tsipras.
June 2, 2015