From Inference Review:
Greek to a Greek
Adults in the Room: My Battle with Europe’s Deep Establishment
by Yanis Varoufakis
The Bodley Head, 560 pp., $49.00.
by Yanis Varoufakis
The Bodley Head, 560 pp., $49.00.
What a strange book—strange but indispensable nevertheless. From January to July 2015, Yanis Varoufakis served as the Greek government’s finance minister. Adults in the Room is an account of his battle with what he calls Europe’s deep establishment. It is often self-indulgent, sometimes sentimental. He also takes pains to show he is human. He describes his happy marriage. He takes dinner with friends. He remembers his student days, and argues with his daughters. He encounters German secret service agents who unaccountably urge him to continue fighting the good fight. His mistakes he assigns to a nature that is too trusting given the intrigues both abroad and at the court of Alexis Tsipras, his prime minister and the leader of Syriza.Mr. V. seemed much more jolly when talking to FT Alphaville's Izabella Kaminska and Jemima Kelly back in April:
And yet, the book is indispensable. For whom? For the journalists who helped the masters of Europe get rid of Varoufakis; for the armies of European functionaries, les ronds-de-cuir; and, one might hope, for teachers and students of the policy sciences. Varoufakis’s book provides an honest account of how our world is governed. It will be plausible to anyone who has tried to make sense of political life without falling victim to the charm of political power.
What Varoufakis describes is the politics of disorganized irresponsibility. One sideshow follows another. A parade of drifting busybodies and stuffed shirts makes senseless decisions, or no decisions at all. In his travels, Varoufakis encounters many nice people. Their tone is pleasant; they express sympathy with the plight of the Greeks, even support. Jeroen Dijsselbloem is less forthcoming. He offers Varoufakis nothing. Press statements are released after amicable meetings, but Varoufakis’s friends turn out to be his enemies. A secret meeting at a Berlin pizzeria turns out to be anything but secret. Mario Draghi and Wolfgang Schäuble know all about it. So, it would seem, does Angela Merkel. The pace is fast, new problems pop up every day, opportunities beckon, losses must be managed. In the end, nothing changes. With no agreements reached, the Greek economy undergoes a period of financial waterboarding—Varoufakis’s term; the European leaders call in the Greek debts, and the call-in causes bank runs, chases out investors, and brings the banks repeatedly to the brink of closure. As the waterboarding goes on, Draghi, Christine Lagarde, Pierre Moscovici, Sigmar Gabriel, Jean-Claude Juncker, Michel Sapin, and Emmanuel Macron express their sympathies. Conversations take place on a first-name basis, although no one in Germany would ever dare address Schäuble as Wolfgang. Varoufakis might well have ended up in a leading position at the European Central Bank (ECB), the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or the World Trade Organization, had he been prepared to believe in the reasonability of the unreasonable.
It is not that Varoufakis had no allies. But they were a strange bunch: fellow-leftists, such as James Galbraith, and men no longer holding political power, such as Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, and Norman Lamont, the former chancellor of the exchequer. A good deal of Scotch with Summers in a Washington bar fails to produce much beyond the beginning of a wonderful friendship. All those emails, references, telephone calls, nightly conversations, and the memos that sprang from them—one wonders whether any of the principals ever read them....MORE
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