The negotiation that never happened…

There are – there have always been – two approaches to the Greek crisis. One, that realises that there is a domestic problem (high debt, propensity to produce new debts, state and market inefficiencies, weak institutions and export base) and many political and legal external constraints (no-bailout clause, belief in fiscal discipline and the ideology of structural reforms, the statutory clauses of the ECB and the IMF); and thus seeks to explore a possible set of arrangements that will enable a – least costly – solution. And a second one, which sees the crisis as the outcome of global capitalism, of antagonistic economic and political relations, of hierarchies and power struggles within the Eurozone, of pressures emanating from powerful (and neoliberal) elites, and as a means to attack human (and distinctively Greek) rights; thus favouring a confrontation approach that essentially refutes the existence of the problem in the first place.