I promise only one of these, though they occur several times a week.
This was provoked by someone else: a discussion started by a Greek (American educated I assume) this morning. The guy grew up in Greece at the time of the Colonels and considered himself and his friends as left wing. But he despaired of the current Greek politics which he thought was largely class based and tended always to blame the Americans for everything.
The basic problem we both agreed was lack of investment, caused by the economic environment which has strong labour laws and corruption in economic development. The Ministry of Development has little idea what a ministry could achieve in the way to attract investment. However I fear the caravan has already left (as they say in Ukraine) since wages are already higher in Greece than in Eastern Europe, especially compared with the Baltics, with well educated, English speaking locals and liberal labour laws.
The current deficit caused by the Olympics and fiddling with statistics is eventually going to lead to some sort of economic shock (being thrown out of the Euro zone?) and a Greek economic transition to parallel the transition from socialist economies in Eastern Europe, because that is where Greece still is: stuck in a socialist concept of the economy where investment by foreigners (except for real estate on the islands) is not welcome, and only small scale private enterprise is welcome.
He himself was surprised that given the numbers of Greek Americans returned or American educated Greeks working in Greece that the problem had not already been solved, but said that the civil war was still being fought out in the same terms 50 years later. Marches to the American Embassy were the solution to all foreign policy issues. Private interests (dominated by foreigners) were at the root of all economic problems and were to be resisted at all costs.
From my office overlooking Omonia Square, I thought I was back in the late 60s or 70s, with a demonstration every month in 2003, as the unions revved up their claims and blackmail before the Olympics. On one occasion (a protest against market reforms in the electricity sector, reforms which had been applied to all other countries in the EU) we even had a police guard on the door to protect us. It was hard to feel protected by young policemen in blue T-shirts sitting slouched on the pavement, sipping cappuccino from the Starbucks across the road, even if they had the full kit of baton, riot shield, pistol and in some cases, gas cylinders and something a lot bigger than a pistol.
On November 17 (remembering the day the students at the Polytechnic were attacked by the Colonels’ tanks) the full panoply of demonstrators assembled to the music of the Communist Party (unreformed, not a glimpse of Eurocommunism) which unluckily for me was directly across the road. Martial music as beloved in the USSR blared out all day, deafening us, and making me really wonder what country I was in. It wasn’t till I realised it came from the KKE offices that I recovered from a real insecurity that I had somehow got caught up in a Russian holiday.
Although these problems of reluctance to change are often described in Eastern Europe as mentality problems, in Greece it seems to be something different. Even those with a nostalgia for the better things of socialism (and there were some) can see that the system failed overall and that change is necessary. In Greece there is a large group of the population who believe that nothing should get in the way of their lifestyle, much envied by foreigners it has to be admitted..
This consists of good cheap (ish) food and wine, time to party all night and all weekend and to disappear for days to the islands whenever possible. Put like that, most people would vote for it, but wonder who was paying. The Greeks cannot seem to accept that there are no free lunches and they have had to sacrifice something to keep this life style. There is the same socialist commitment to “you pretend to pay us and we pretend to work”, the same refusal to take responsibility or make decisions, the same bureaucracy which can only got round, not abolished, as it provides extra jobs and encourages bribes to compensate for low wages.
Many of the foreign educated young Greeks work in shops or any job they can get, until their parents fix them a job for life in a Ministry, when all their problems are solved, even on a low wage. Jobs have been allocated by party patronage over the last 20 years, but with the change of government, few of them were sacked, just given an out of the way office and told to carry on doing nothing.
And yet there are lots of exceptions.Although bureaucracy to get a work permit is notorious, as an EU citizen I managed it in two visits. A tax number, without which you cannot get a mobile phone in Greece took one visit and an exchange of faxes. Buying a car and registering it was easy once we had collected the right papers, a couple of evening visits to the police station to swear that I was who I was. People have gone out of their way to be helpful when they can, and when you are not frustrated and angry with them. Usually if you get bad service somewhere you can go somewhere else and get good service.
However, this extracts a toll on expectations. We lived with a series of broken or not working household devices for six months, dreading the effort needed to sort out where to get them fixed and how long it would take. In the end when we tackled the backlog one a week over the summer, it cleared without as much effort as we expected.But still we live without tackling problems that would be easy in Lithuania.
But I can’t stand the lack of development planning and the mess caused by unregulated construction of concrete blocks. Our visit to Kynouria was so nice because we could see well-maintained stone houses and no mess on the pavements. There were pavements. Unfinished construction has reached the same level as in Ukraine in the mid 90s. And this includes metro and railway stations, which drain away revenue from the current track. And no buses to the metro station so everyone takes the car and there is nowhere to park And desolation round a new metro station which should have attracted a whole lot of new homes, shops and offices, instead of just dereliction.
What really bugs me is living in a country where I can’t respect people and their government, because of the choices they are making now. But perhaps I have just abandoned socialist ideas for Anglo-Saxon capitalism in my older years. Plus ca change!
Here starts my usual comparison of Lithuania with Greece:
Better in Lithuania
Really cheap cost of living (except rents)
24 hour shopping
big shopping centres (Maxima and the Acropolis) with room to park
cheap telecomms and broadband coming
big pharmacies in shopping centres
no traffic jams
cheap radio taxis which come to meet you.
Better in Greece
Climate Food and drink Islands
