2015 – it’s 1521 all over again.
‘Forget all the bribery and prodigal spending of the southern Europeans – only God will save you!’ claimed Martin Luther, if not in those exact words. ‘Forget all the bribery and prodigal spending of the southern Europeans – only Austerity will save you!’ claims Angela Merkel and her co-religionists, 494 years later.
In 1521, the states and princedoms that were eventually to make up Germany were fed up with funding the Latinate excesses of southern Europe. Pope Leo X was an extravagant and generous man, funding charities, arts institutions, poets and painters, hospitals and foundations for the sick and poor. He was a Medici variant of the enlightened welfare state. Martin Luther – the crabby Augustinian monk who was to revolutionise the church and set northern Europe on a path freed from Popery, only to end his days a disgraceful anti-Semite – was summonsed to the city of Worms to answer for his crimes before the Holy Roman Emperor, young Charles V.
1521: we’ve had enough of all that wasteful Popery
Five hundred years on and now, not content with telling southern Europe how to run their economies, Angela Merkel and her team have waded in and suggested they might like to follow her advice on how to vote as well. This is a critical year for elections in Greece, the UK and Spain. In a new variant on taking coals to Newcastle, Merkel is giving lessons on democracy to the Athenians.
Parts of the Greek press are up in arms, comparing this to a declaration of war. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras is calmly calling the Germans’ bluff. Merkel leads the charge of conservative Europe alarmed at the rise of Syriza and Spain’s Podemos, as all polling indicates 2015 might just be their time. If Luther had considered the Pope to be the ‘Anti-Christ’ there is something of that primal fear in how Europe’s masters of fiscal orthodoxy view Alexis Tsipras and Pablo Iglesias. Europe is apparently being prepared for the Grexit – a nasty sounding word to describe a potential exit of Greece from the Euro. Underlying all this anger and fear is an old elitism, a distinctly troubled concern at people not knowing their place.
Angela Merkel: lessons for the Greeks
In Spain, Pablo Iglesias heard the dog whistle. ‘We will not put up with some German coming here and telling us how to run our country,’ he boomed this week, after Angela Merkel had sent a veiled warning to the Greeks they had better vote they way she wants them to in the upcoming January 25 elections. Iglesias and Podemos are allies and strong supporters of Syriza; for all their differences – and the very different challenges facing Greece and Spain – Syriza and Podemos are usually lumped together as the ‘radical’ or even ‘revolutionary’ Left by a broad range of conservative pundits – journalists, economists and other commentators for hire.
Pablo Iglesias: just a hint of Nigel Farage
Curiously, Iglesias’ denunciation carried more than just a ghostly hint of Nigel Farage. They say that opposites attract, and the forces lining up against Germany’s hegemony of Europe are both diverse and legion; they all bring their own agendas from the Right and Left. 2015 is shaping up as a year in which southern Europe, on multiple fronts, will continue its drive to halt the Anglo-German austerity model and may well, in some instances, to gain a democratic mandate to do so. These are worldviews in clear conflict. It’s the Counter-Reformation all over again, with the same tropes as 500 years ago: the extravagant southerners versus the rational north, laziness versus industry, sunshine versus sobriety, oranges versus lemons.
Germany cannot continue to preach austerity without recognising all the ways it has benefitted from being a part of Europe. The Greeks are not backwards in coming forward to remind them of the massive assistance packages that rescued Germany itself from the ruins of the Third Reich. In recent times, anecdotally, a considerable portion of all the corrupt money awash in Spain ended up spent on luxury German cars. All those 500 euro notes – that strange bird of purple-pinkish plumage, rarely seen in the wild – were the lingua franca of every nudge and wink, every under-the-table deal, every quiet envelope that passed between friends, every bribed mayor or developer, every stacked briefcase that attended the years of Spanish fraud. The black economies of southern Europe ended up sending a lot of money back to Germany.
Luther at Worms: Here I stand…
Back in the day, Luther was supported by German princes – from Saxony, Hesse, Augsburg, Württemberg and others – not so much on theological grounds, as because they preferred the money collected for Rome to stay within their own domains. These Germanic princes were tired of shelling out to pay for the Popish luxuries, all the purple silk and golden altars, all that cash going in exchange for indulgences that acted as passports to Heaven. Help me build St. Peter’s Basilica, Pope Leo X promised, and you’ll have a free pass here on earth. Never mind your temples, the Germans responded: we’d rather keep the money here to build our own.
Big-spending Pope Leo X: “Since God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it.”
So 2015 shapes up as a year of huge political change and challenge. For there is one thing, in all their pitiless accounting, the bankers, politicians and financiers who promote the austerity model have miscalculated: the people’s capacity for poverty and humiliation is not infinite.
luke stegemann 