Home > The Greek Tragedy. The Antigones against Creon

The Greek Tragedy. The Antigones against Creon

by InformationGuerrilla - Open-Publishing - Saturday 4 July 2015

3 / 7 / 2015

There were no so everlasting tragedy in the Athens of the V century. Neither were they so articulated, complex, played by a variety of psychological and public roles making them nearer to the contemporary television drama than to the one of Sophocle’s piece.

During last month, as we got nearer to the dead line of the 30th of June, we have seen the performances of all the typical characters: Schäuble, the German Minister of Finance, played the role of the austere and severe antagonist who has always rejected the Greek programs and accountings; Dijsselbloem, seemingly German even if he’s Dutch, makes himself the victim because it was Varoufakis’ fault if the negotiation has stopped; Merklel, with her futile companion Hollande, discovers a kind of political maternage for which she is open to listen to Greek claims, without stating anything about the negotiation before this week or about the vote. She has to make Germany look like neutral when it’s not. We cannot forget Juncker, the European Commission leader, who has been the softer (italic) one; nor Draghi who has spoken from the top of the Eurotower as the friend/enemy, endorsing both the help to Greece with the operation of the ELA and the punishment with the exclusion from the Quantitative easing. Background actors are the intransigent Latvians and Finnishes or Renzi and Padoan, who have been joyful of Syriza’s victory because it means flexibility for the austerity, but at the same time they ahve applied all the mesures imposed by the European institutions.

In these days the main character who has dramatized the situation, though an initial open-mind attitude towards the discussion of the Greek debt, is Christine Lagarde, president of IMF.

The IMF has left one time the table of the negotiation and now it demands the restitution of its 1,5 billions loan. Once the negotiation between Greece and the European institutions has ceased, there is no allowed save-State capital, thus preventing the Greek finance to give back the debt.

This is the conclusion of all the attempts to dialogue inside the Eurogroup and the Brussels Groups which reunite the European governments and the creditors. Nevertheless in the last week there has been a spark of concession by the creditors and the politicians, Syriza’s complete and precise document scared them. The defence of pensions and public wages, the lowering of the VAT tax and the taxation of the big capital enterprise don’t correspond to the ordo-liberal criterions on which Europe has been built.

How liberalising the labour and enhance the capitalistic profits on the precariety exploitation, if the laws and the remunerations are not changed? Morover, how can they keep the hierarchies inside the European Union if the blackmail of the debt doesn’t work anymore? The heterogeneity of the european space wouldn’t be functional to the German European order whose aim is to strengthen the competition between different zone in a same monetary area.

The scenes of this big tragedy have been desired by the european élites for instance because they wanted to make Tsipras bow to the social, economical and political order. Merkel knows she cannot legitimate her internal policy if she allows that there is an alternative, a practical and not only thinkable one. The European governance has to give a reaction to the centrifugal forces arising from some of the European corners, both from the right-wing and from the left-wing, for instance Podemos.

Austerity reasons are rooted in these issues, they have brought to the denial of the Eurogroup of Thursday, putting aside the initial intentions of mediation. Here lies the tragic element of the event: the fracture produced inside the governance institutions. It’ now time to talk about another literary tradition in the place of the contemporary drama. In one of the most famous of Sophocle’s works Antigone is a danger and the representation of conflict before Creon. She enters the public scene of the agorà usually reserved for men and thus she challenges the royal power. Syriza has imposed in the close and restricted halls of Bruxell a claim which comes from the outside. This claim origins in the years of mobilisation of social movements and it creates a short circuit in the discussions of the austerity priests.

European institutions’ reactions were expected after the declaration of the next Sunday referendum. Draghi has decided that there will be no increase of the emergency liquidity, putting Greece in a difficult situation to arrive to the vote of Sunday. The European Central Bank can control the four most important Greek banks: it has decided that they cannot have the right to receive more liquidity because they risk to be insolvent. Governance’s bite uses its post-democratic tools to impose a choice over the political government of a State.

But Tsipras’ choice about the referendum responds to a sharp strategy. Syriza wants another actor to enter the stage, an actoe who doesn’t play on the ground of the negotiations because he’s independent. It’s civil society meant as a general will whose expression relies in the vote of January: it’s not neutral. An entire population is called to declare whether or not it agrees with the proposal of the new memorandum; noti f it wants to remain inside the European Union. It’s quite the contrary: teh referendum is a mean to baldly interrogate Europe on its freedom, democratic and equality values. “Europe is the common house of its peoples” where “there are no guests and masters”, remembers Tsipras. It’s a reminder to another European project than the one we know.

Sophocle’s tragedy ends with Antigone’s death: she is crashed by the mascolinity of the power she wanted to use to destroy the power itself. But Antigone was alone, she couldn’t be followed by the polis. It’s different in this present Greek case. The popular vote and the entrance of movements in Greece and in Europe to make it be finally free has the whole potential to overcome the places and tools of the governance. The strength power cannot remain on the level of a singular State and the governance, it has to be placed between a new idea of European citizenship and the one based on rigour and debt. With the entrance on the stage of movements we see the possible success of a victory for a worthy existence in Greece and in Europe.

How would Sophocle’s tragedy have ended if there had been many Antigone to transform the agorà from a place of power to a constituent space for a better and new life?