A look back over 2015

 

Marion-Maréchal Le Pen (Wikicommons - Remi JDN). This year, she received 45% of the popular vote in one of France's regions, as a Front National candidate.

 

We must act now to bring anti-globalist parties to power: the UKIP in Britain, the Front national in France, the Partij voor de Vrijheid in the Netherlands, the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, and the Sverigedemokraterna in Sweden. How, you may ask? It's not too complicated. Just go into the voting booth and vote. You don't even have to talk about your dirty deed afterwards.

I wrote the above last January, fearing that Europe would see an acceleration of the massive demographic change already under away—the Great Replacement, to use a term coined by Renaud Camus:

Oh, the Great Replacement needs no definition. It isn't a concept. It's a phenomenon, as obvious as the nose on your face. To observe it, you need only go out into the street or just look out the window. A people used to be there, stable, occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And all of a sudden, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or more other peoples have substituted themselves for it. It's been replaced. It's no longer itself.  We should note that the tendency to consider individuals, things, objects, and peoples replaceable or interchangeable is fairly widespread and in line with a threefold movement whereby people have become industrialized, deprived of their spirituality, and dumbed down. Call it a later and more generalized stage of Taylorism. At first, we replace only the parts of manufactured goods. Then, we replace workers. Finally, we replace entire peoples. (Camus, 2012)

Two breaches have been made in the dike that used to hold back this process of replacement: one in Libya and the other in Syria. Through them is pouring the demographic overflow that has been building up in Africa and the Middle East. Meanwhile, there has been an incredible loss of will among Europe's leaders to do anything, other than hectoring recalcitrant nations like Hungary for not taking their "fair share."

I'm not using the word "incredible" lightly. This wave of immigrants won't be a one-time-only thing. It won't come to an end when conditions improve in their home countries. Indeed, once it gets under way it can only increase in magnitude, and spreading it over a wider area will do nothing to stop the increase. Instead of being confined to Western and Southern Europe, the Great Replacement will be extended to Eastern Europe. Swell. You call that a solution?

Instead of replacing native Europeans, why not replace their leaders? Why not vote them out of office? That was the solution I advocated back in January and still do. Political change is more certain when done by peaceful means at the ballot box, as opposed to being imposed by coercion and illegal acts. Unfortunately, this option faces a number of obstacles.

The obstacles are threefold:

Unwillingness to play by the rules

In this, the problem lies not so much with Europe's nationalist parties as with their opponents. It's the latter who are not willing to play by the rules.

This was the case in Belgium, where in 2004 a court ruling shut down the Vlaams Blok, a party that had won 24% of the popular vote for the Flemish parliament the same year.

In October 2000, the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Opposition to Racism, together with the Dutch-speaking Human Rights League in Belgium registered a complaint at the Correctional Court, in which they claimed that three non-profit organisations connected to the Vlaams Blok (its education and research office and the "National Broadcasting Corporation") had violated the 1981 anti-racism law. The publications which were referred to included its 1999 election agenda and 1997 party platform. The challenged passages included those where the party called for a separate education system for foreign children, a special tax for employers employing non-European foreigners, and a restriction of unemployment benefits and child allowances for non-European foreigners. (Wikipedia - Vlaams Blok, 2015)

Elsewhere, nationalist parties have faced a combination of judicial and extrajudicial harassment. Indeed, when antifas commit brazen acts of violence that go unpunished, one cannot help but wonder whether the correct term is "quasi-judicial." The antifas are functioning as a kind of secret police that is allowed to do what the regular police cannot do.

Even without the antifas, the level of harassment is considerable. In 2013, for example, the European Parliament stripped Marine Le Pen of her parliamentary immunity for having denounced the illegal blocking of French streets for Muslim prayers:

For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it's about occupation, then we could also talk about it (Muslim prayers in the streets), because that is occupation of territory. ...It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply. ... There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation and it weighs heavily on local residents (Wikipedia - Marine Le Pen, 2015)

For that comment, she was dragged before the courts, being finally acquitted this year. Compare that with the indulgence reserved for the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur when it featured a tweet on its twitter page that called for the mass rape of women who vote FN. The tweet was removed but there was no apology, and there certainly won't be any prosecution by the Minister of Justice—as was the case with Marine's comment.

This is the reality of political debate in Western Europe. One side can speak with impunity, whereas the other has to watch what it says.

Extremist image of nationalism

In 2015, the progress of nationalist parties was not uniform. In Greece, Chrysí Avgí (Golden Dawn) seems to have stalled at 7% of the popular vote. In Norway, Fremskrittspartiet (Progress Party) lost support in local elections, this being part of a decline that began in 2011 … with Breivik's terrorist attacks.

In Norway, it is now difficult to be a nationalist without being associated with Anders Breivik or church burnings by black metallists. In Greece, nationalism is tarred with Nazi-like rhetoric and imagery—this, in a country that Nazi Germany had occupied during the last war. It is a sign of just how bad things are that so many Greeks are still willing to vote for a party that revels in an extremist image.

This problem is inevitable with any movement that begins on the fringes among people who feel alienated. As nonconformists they tend to be lone wolves, and as lone wolves they tend to act without restraint, sometimes mindlessly. Such people are both a help and a hindrance for any new political movement.

Assimilation into the dominant political culture

There is also the reverse problem. In the Venice state election, the Liga Veneta received 41% of the popular vote. This might seem to be good news, since the Liga Veneta is part of the Lega Nord, which in turn is allied with the Front National in France.

Unfortunately, things are not as they might seem. When a new party comes closer to power, it tends to assimilate mainstream values because its leaders now have to navigate within that culture—daily encounters with the media, meetings with campaign donors, invitations to wine and cheese parties ... The result may be seen in the Liga Veneta’s political platform for 2010-2015:

The challenges that Veneto should face in the next decades, said the party, were to enhance "internationalization" in the era of globalization, to overcome the traditional Venetian policentrism and interpret Veneto as a united and cohesive region: a "European region in Italian land". The program stressed also concepts such as "Europe of the regions", "Europe of citizens", "global Veneto", "openness toward the world", "green economy", "urban planning" in respect of the environment, "respect for diversity" and "integration" of immigrants, along with the more traditional "think globally, act locally". (Wikipedia - Liga Veneta)

It is not enough for nationalist parties to gain power. They must also have confidence in their ideas and change the way other people think. Otherwise, they'll end up assimilating into the dominant political culture.

But there was progress in 2015

Despite these problems—harassment, lack of discipline, ideological assimilation—most nationalist parties are moving forward. In the first round of France's recent regional elections, the Front National took first place in six of the thirteen regions in Europe (four others are overseas). Yes, it was shut out in the second round, when left-wing parties threw their support behind the main right-wing party, but this defeat was only a partial one. While not securing the office of president in any region, the FN is now represented on all regional councils of European France, ranging from a high of 34% of council seats in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur to a low of 8% in Corsica. Imagine a similar situation in the United States: a nationalist party with at least 8% of the seats in every state legislature.

This year saw gains for nationalist parties elsewhere. In Poland, Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (Law and Justice) took power with 38% of the vote, in large part because of its opposition to immigration. In Switzerland, Schweizerische Volkspartei (Swiss People's Party) became the leading party, receiving 29% of the popular vote, up from 27%. In Denmark, Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People's Party) earned 21% of the popular vote, up from 12%.

Outside Europe, in other European-descended societies, the picture is more mixed. In the United States, Donald Trump has shattered the phoney consensus on massive demographic change, but even if elected he will face a long uphill battle against opposition from the bureaucracy and from entrenched factions in society at large, particularly the business community—which has long been a source of funding for the Republican Party.

In Canada, the Conservative Party lost power in Ottawa and the Parti Québécois lost power in Quebec City. To be honest, I feel little regret for either loss. In their earlier incarnation, as the Reform Party, the Conservatives were committed to a sharp reduction in immigration. But that promise fell by the wayside once they took power, and they instead chose a neo-con policy of "Invade the world! Invite the world!" They followed that recipe to the letter and—Surprise! Surprise!—it wasn’t what their own voters wanted, let alone the rest of the electorate. Well, good riddance.

As for the Parti Québécois, it began in the 1960s as an alliance of the traditional left and the traditional right. Over time, both factions withered away, being replaced by the new synthesis of globalism and post-nationalism. The PQ became an anti-nationalist nationalist party. They lost power largely because they could no longer energize their natural constituency while failing to make inroads into others. Well, good riddance.

*****************************************************

This will be my last column for 2015, and I wish all of you a very Merry Christmas! Although I no longer go to church, I still consider Christmas to be a very important time of year when we can spend more time with our loved ones and enjoy the traditions of this mid-winter celebration.

I don't know whether I will resume my column in the new year. The legal environment in Canada has changed over the past few months, especially with the adoption of Bill 59. If need be, I will concentrate on writing papers for academic journals.

References

 

Camus, R. (2012). " Renaud Camus à L'AF : " J'ai une conception lazaréenne de la patrie " ", L'Action française, no 2832,

http://www.actionfrancaise.net/craf/?Entretien-Renaud-Camus-a-L-AF-J-ai

 

Wikipedia - Liga Veneta. (2015)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liga_Veneta

 

Wikipedia - Marine Le Pen (2005).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_Le_Pen

 

Wikipedia - Vlaams Blok. (2015).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlaams_Blok#Court_of_Cassation_ruling_.282004.29

 

The past is another country

 

Male figurine, pottery, c. 7,000–5,000 years ago, Greece, Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, Wikicommons

 

A very important recent finding is the recovery of the entire genomes of three prehistoric farmers who lived in northern Greece 7500-5500 years BP. The data have been analyzed and are expected to shed light on the ancestral relationships of the first Europeans and provide a wealth of information about functional and morphological characteristics. Already it is known that some of our Neolithic ancestors could not digest milk, i.e., they were intolerant to lactose, and had brown eyes and dark skin. (Anon, 2015)

This is one of several findings with a common theme: the farther back in time we go, the less familiar people look. And we don't have to go very far.

This fact came up in a column I wrote about the Americas. If we turn back the clock, Amerindians look more and more European, yet their genes say they're still Amerindian. We're just getting closer to the time when both groups were the same people. If we turn back the clock even farther, those "proto-Amerindians" give way to a very different sort of human, much like the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea (Frost, 2015).

What happened to those first Americans? They were "replaced." If you're looking for family entertainment, don't study history or prehistory.

Ironically, one of the comments on that column argued that European settlers had stolen this land from the Native Americans and had thus forfeited any moral right to complain about immigration. Well, one genocide doesn’t justify another. I would also venture to say that the universe cares little about our notions of morality. There is only survival or extinction. Everything else is sophistry.

Early and not-so-early Europeans

Ancient DNA is telling a similar story about early Europeans. As late as 8,000 years ago, only the hunting peoples of northern and eastern Europe had white skin and a diverse palette of hair and eye colors. Farther west and south, in Spain, Luxembourg, and Hungary, we find hunter-gatherers with a strange mix of brown skin and eyes of blue, green, or grey. Central Europe was also home to early farmers with white skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. If we go still farther south, beyond the Alps, we see faces and bodies that seem to evoke another continent (Gibbons, 2015; Olalde and Lalueza-Fox, 2015).

This is in line with earlier work on skeletal remains. Angel (1972) found that "one can identify Negroid (Ethiopic or Bushmanoid?) traits of nose and prognathism appearing in Natufian latest hunters [...] and in Anatolian and Macedonian first farmers." In the Middle East, the Natufians (15,000-12,000 BP) were anatomically more similar to present-day West Africans than to present-day Middle Easterners (Brace et al., 2006).

Many African-looking skulls and skeletons have been found in an arc of territory stretching from Brittany, through Switzerland and northern Italy, and into the Balkans. Most are from the Neolithic, but some are as recent as the Bronze Age and the early Iron Age (Boule and Vallois, 1957, pp. 291-292)

Does this mean that prehistoric Greek farmers were more closely related to sub-Saharan Africans than to present-day Greeks? The genome analysis isn't complete, but I think not. They may have looked un-European, but their genomes would probably place them a lot closer to present-day Europeans than to anyone else. We saw the same thing with Kennewick Man. His skull looked European, yet genetically he was closer to Amerindians.

Those prehistoric Greeks were descended from a wave of modern humans that entered Europe some 40,000 years ago. In the north and east, the new settlers encountered selection pressures that recolored and reshaped their most visible features, making them look very different from their African-like relatives to the south and west. Yet this new look came about through changes to just a tiny subset of the genome.

This is not to argue that "we're all pretty much the same under the skin." One could just as well say that humans and chimps are pretty much the same under the skin. They are, actually, if one looks only at flesh and blood. Nonetheless, a human is not a chimp with a body shave.

A second look at the spread of farming

This portrait of early Europeans is still incomplete, and some findings seem contradictory. For instance, why did those Greek farmers lack the alleles for white skin and lactose tolerance when the same alleles were present in Central European farmers from the same time period? In fact, it now seems that both traits evolved in Europe (Gibbons, 2015). A year ago, almost everyone pointed to those Central Europeans as proof that white skin and lactose tolerance must have come from the Middle East, along with farming itself.

It has become popular to argue that farming spread out of the Middle East and into Central Europe through a process of population replacement. The argument seems logical. Because farming supports a larger population per unit of land area, immigrants from the Middle East should have overwhelmed the native hunter-gatherers of Europe by force of numbers. Apparently, things weren’t so simple. Early European farmers were a mixed bunch, and their relationship to the Middle East looks just as problematic. Farming did spread out of the Middle East, but the extent to which this diffusion was genetic or cultural is far from clear. Even the hard evidence looks soft when given a second look.

For instance, we know that a sharp genetic boundary separates late hunter-gatherers from early farmers in Europe. That's good evidence for population replacement. But when a Danish team used a more complete time series of ancient DNA samples, they found that the genetic boundary actually separated early farmers from somewhat later farmers. Haplogroup U, the supposed genetic signature of Europe's ancient hunter-gatherers, reached its current low level after the Neolithic, according to that time series (Melchior et al., 2010). The genetic boundary must therefore be partly due to something else than population replacement, perhaps new selection pressures.

Another piece of hard evidence is the cultural conservatism of hunter-gatherers, who generally prefer to die out than embrace farming and who especially dislike having to plan their lives over a yearly cycle. But that finding is based on tropical hunter-gatherers. Northern hunter-gatherers plan ahead over the coming year and are better able to make the leap. If we take the Mississippian culture of the American Midwest and Southeast (c. 800 -1600), we find that small groups of hunter-gatherers had little trouble making the shift not only to large-scale intensive maize farming but also to life in large towns of up to 40,000 people—all this in half a millennium.

Indeed, if we look at pre-Columbian America, we see that farming first developed in Mesoamerica and then spread north through cultural diffusion. There were very few cases of farmers demographically replacing hunter-gatherers. Why would the situation have been so different in prehistoric Europe? As a general rule, it seems that population replacement occurs only when there is a profound difference in mental makeup that cannot be easily changed.

A final question

Southern Europe and the Middle East were initially home to dark African-like people, who were then replaced by European-like people, apparently from the north, beginning around 12,000 ago. The process of replacement was still incomplete, however, during the time of those northern Greek farmers 7,500 to 5,500 years ago. That last date is very close to the dawn of history. Only a millennium and a half later, the Minoans were building the palace of Knossos. Are those African-like people remembered in European myths, legends, and folk tales?

h/t to Dienekes

References

Angel, J.L. (1972). Biological relations of Egyptian and eastern Mediterranean populations during Pre-dynastic and Dynastic times, Journal of Human Evolution, 1, 307-313.

 

Anon. (2015). The Archeological Museum of Thessaloniki. Report on ancient DNA -Learn what eye color your ancestor had and what he ate in the Neolithic! Iefimerida

http://www.iefimerida.gr/news/219751/ekthesi-gia-arhaio-dna-mathe-ti-hroma-matia-eihe-kai-ti-etroge-o-neolithikos-progonos

Boule, M. & Vallois, H.V. (1957). Fossil Men. New York: Dryden Press.

 

Brace, C.L., N. Seguchi, C.B. Quintyn, S.C. Fox, A.R. Nelson, S.K. Manolis, and P. Qifeng. (2006). The questionable contribution of the Neolithic and the Bronze Age to European craniofacial form, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A., 103, 242-247

http://www.pnas.org/content/103/1/242.full

 

Dienekes. (2015). Prehistoric farmers from northern Greece had lactose intolerance, brown eyes, dark skin, Dienekes' Anthropology Blog, August 7

http://dienekes.blogspot.ca/2015/08/prehistoric-farmers-from-northern.html

 

Frost, P. (2015). Guess who first came to America? The Unz Review

http://www.unz.com/pfrost/guess-who-first-came-to-america/

 

Gibbons, A. (2015). How Europeans evolved white skin, Science, Latest News, April 2

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2015/04/how-europeans-evolved-white-skin

 

Melchior, L., N. Lynnerup, H.R. Siegismund, T. Kivisild, J. Dissing. (2010). Genetic diversity among ancient Nordic populations, PLoS ONE, 5(7): e11898

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011898#pone-0011898-g002

 

Olalde, I. and C. Lalueza-Fox. (2015). Modern humans' paleogenomics and the new evidences on the European prehistory, Science and Technology of Archaeology Research, 1

http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1179/2054892315Y.0000000002

Greece at the crossroads

The Greek government's debt became unmanageable after autumn 2008, but the EU didn’t respond until over a year and a half later. (source)

In the post-national Greece that developed after 1974, the clear winners were the middle class.  Thanks to the strong purchasing power of other European currencies, and later the Euro, they could travel abroad and buy imported goods at little expense. Domestic goods and services likewise remained cheap thanks to outsourcing of jobs to lower-wage countries and insourcing of lower-priced labor for agriculture, shipping, domestic help, and construction.

The clear losers were the working class. Not only did they have to scramble for fewer and fewer jobs—those that could not be relocated to lower-wage countries— but they also faced growing competition from legal and illegal immigrants who would work for half the going market rate. This two-way movement of jobs and workers curbed the rise in wages of low-income earners and increased the rate of permanent “structural” unemployment.

And it has been the least skilled who bear the brunt of the effects of competition from clandestine immigrants on the job market. […]. In the functioning of the Greek economy, peripheral or marginal workers (women, unskilled young people, Roma, seasonal workers, etc.), who play a key role in the functioning of the parallel economy, have seen their status undermined by the mass entry of clandestine immigrants who offer their labor for even less. But this is also true for other categories of wage-earners such as construction workers, who are nonetheless among the most unionized and best protected of all workers. In this sector, clandestine foreign workers make up over 50% of the total workforce, and their wages reportedly do not even reach half the legal minimum.

The rise of unemployment in recent years more greatly affects unskilled workers whose traditional sectors of employment have today become the main ones where clandestine workers are most heavily concentrated. (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 178)

Native Greek workers thus became steadily impoverished, at first in comparison to other Greeks and, later, in absolute terms.

Responses of the Greek government

The Greek government was aware of the plight of the working poor and responded by greatly increasing social assistance, pensions, and public-sector employment. While this response provided displaced workers with more secure incomes, it also increased their dependence on the State. A kind of clientelism developed where recipients of government benefits supported the party in power as long as it maintained or increased their benefits. One example was the lowering of the retirement age to 55 for men and 50 for women in the case of arduous occupations. The definiton of "arduous" was then gradually broadened to cover even waiters and hairdressers. Early retirement became a way to create loyal voting blocs and also to thin the ranks of older unemployed people, thus making the unemployment rate seem lower than it really was.

The government did try to attack the root problem, i.e., the outsourcing of jobs to lower-wage countries and the insourcing of lower-priced labor. This two-way movement, however, benefited the middle class by providing cheaper goods and services, and it was this class that influenced public policy the most, either directly as politicians or civil servants or indirectly through the media and popular culture. For the middle class, it was too easy to portray the pauperized working class as losers in the new global economy.

As a result, protectionist measures were half-hearted. There was certainly an awareness that Greece was drifting into an uncompetitive dead zone: unable to compete against lower-wage countries for manufacturing jobs and also unable to compete against higher-wage countries for high-tech jobs:

The Greek sectoral structure consists mainly in low knowledge sectors. Many such sectors have lost their comparative advantage due both to the low labour costs of some less developed countries and to the high value added business strategies aiming at niche markets in more developed countries (Ministry of Development, 1997, p. 7)

For the Greek government, the solution was to specialize in “high technology and knowledge intensive sectors.” Such an industrial policy would evidently favor workers with high intellectual capacity, i.e., the upper third of the IQ distribution. But what about the other two-thirds?  To bring as many people as possible into the knowledge economy, there would be an expansion of technical education and “a policy to increase the mobility and to improve the quality of the labour supply” (Ministry of Development, 1997, p. 14).

This industrial policy was never really carried out. Part of the problem was lack of money. The main problem, however, was wishful thinking. Few of the structural unemployed were suitable for retraining as knowledge workers. It was even more naïve to see immigration as a way to meet this need. Finally, more should have been done to identify specific market niches where Greece could compete globally. It simply wasn’t enough to point to the knowledge economy as the wave of the future.

The government might have kept things from getting worse by halting the inflow of lower-wage migrants. It did make some attempts, which generally took three forms: 1) legalizing the existing illegal immigrants; 2) taking measures to prevent further illegal immigration; and 3) penalizing employers who hire illegal immigrants (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 179). Of the three, the first one was the easiest to put into practice. But it also made the other two even harder to implement. By raising hopes that future rounds of legalization would be in store, it encouraged even more immigrants to come. Employers responded similarly, seeing illegal status as only a temporary obstacle. Measures against employers were also difficult because lower-level inspectors could be bribed and higher-level functionaries pressured to water down enforcement.

The debt crisis

As Greece entered the new millennium, the pauperization of native Greek workers remained a worsening problem. More and more money had to be found to keep them at a First World level. For a time, this seemed possible, especially during the boom years of 2000 to 2007 when the economy was growing at an annual rate of 4.2% —one of the highest rates in the Euro zone.

Yet even during those boom years, with money pouring into the public coffers, the government not only continued to run deficits but also ran them at levels higher than what the EU officially allowed.

At the beginning of 2010, it was discovered that Greece had paid Goldman Sachs and other banks hundreds of millions of dollars in fees since 2001, for arranging transactions that hid the actual level of borrowing. The purpose of these deals made by several successive Greek governments, was to enable them to continue spending, while hiding the actual deficit from the EU. 

 

[…] the revised statistics revealed that Greece at all years from 2000-2010 had exceeded the Euros stability criteria, with the yearly deficits exceeding the recommended maximum limit at 3.0% of GDP, and also the debt level clearly exceeding the recommended limit at 60% of GDP. (Wikipedia, 2012)

The boom ended in autumn 2008 as the subprime mortgage crisis spread to Europe. Greece’s main industries of shipping and tourism were badly hit, and by early 2010 the government was openly admitting that its debt level was no longer sustainable. In April, rating agencies downgraded this debt to “junk bond” status. In May, the EU finally responded by organizing a bailout loan with the IMF in exchange for austerity measures.

Why did the EU take so long—over a year and a half—to respond? One reason was that it had been repeatedly misinformed on the extent of the debt crisis.  Another reason was the ongoing effort to admit Turkey as a full EU member. Greece’s support was crucial, particularly given the continuing Turkish occupation of northern Cyprus, and there was some reluctance among EU leaders to come down too hard on the debt issue.

Greece at the crossroads

Today, Greece has two options. One is to remain in the EU, pay off its huge debt, and accept a package of austerity measures. The other is to leave the EU, cancel at least part of its debt, and let the value of its national currency depreciate to bring imports and exports into balance.

For now, Greece will remain in the EU. There is a strong element of national pride at stake here, and also a fear of the costs of moving back to a national economy with its own currency. But the status quo will also be costly, as seen in the measures of the latest austerity package (February 2012):

• 22% cut to the minimum wage from the current €750 per month

• Holiday wage bonuses to be permanently cancelled

• 150,000 jobs to be cut from the state sector by 2015

• Pensions to be cut by €300 million in 2012

• Laws to be changed to make lay-offs easier

• Spending cuts to health and defense

• Industry sectors to be given the right to negotiate lower wages

• Closed professions to be opened up to allow for more competition, particularly in the health, tourism, and real estate sectors

• Privatizations worth €15 billion by 2015, including Greek gas companies. Over the medium term, the goal will be €50 billion (Wikipedia, 2012)

There is nothing here to prevent further pauperization of native Greek workers. In fact, the business community will have an even freer hand to relocate jobs to lower-wage countries or bring in lower-priced migrant labor. The package will also scrap the remaining refuges from globalization by cutting back on public-sector employment, by lowering the minimum wage, and by opening up closed professions.

Staying in the EU is an option that lacks even the virtue of stability. It will probably worsen the existing class conflict in Greek society. To maintain their position of relative affluence, the post-national middle class may openly abandon the native working class and stigmatize them as bums who deserve to be replaced by hardworking immigrants.

In contrast, leaving the EU would shift the costs from the working class to the middle class. By going back to the drachma, and letting it devaluate, the country could stem the outflow of foreign exchange by making imports more costly and exports cheaper. Less money would be wasted on frivolous spending, especially trips abroad and imported luxury items, and more spent on Greek-made goods, thus creating local employment.

Rebuilding a national economy would not be easy, but the main stumbling block is not the transitional costs, however painful these costs may be. It’s the current post-national elite. Leaving the EU would severely undermine their legitimacy … and their lifestyle.

References

Ministry of Development. (1997). International competitiveness and a consensus-based industrial strategy for Greece: The main points of consensus, Project “The Future of Greek Industry”

http://www.cibam.jbs.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/futuregreekindustry/downloads/fgi003.pdf

Pteroudis, E. (1996). Emigrations et immigrations en Grèce, évolutions récentes et questions politiques, Revue européenne de migrations internationals, 12, 159-189 (Espagne, Portugal, Grèce, pays d'immigration).

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/remi_0765-0752_1996_num_12_1_1503

Wikipedia (2012). Greek government-debt crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis

Electing a new people?

Immigrants in the port of Patras, Greece (source). An immigrant community as large as three million people, in a country of eleven million.

It was during the early 1970s—the time of the Colonels—that Greece began to receive large numbers of immigrants, mainly Africans recruited for insecure low-paying jobs in construction, agriculture, and shipping.  In 1972, they numbered 15,000 to 20,000 officially and 60,000 unofficially (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 163).

The same years also saw the start of a related trend: loss of employment in manufacturing. These jobs were relocated to countries with cheaper labor and less stringent work regulations. But other jobs could not be relocated by their very nature—jobs in tourism, construction, agriculture, and shipping. It was in these same sectors that employers began to import low-wage labor:

 […] the economic crisis that hit Greece beginning in the mid-1970s led to a process of deindustrialization. But not all sectors of industry were affected in the same way. The more traditional labor-intensive sectors that served the domestic market were less penalized than the more modern sectors that were open to foreign competition. The traditional sectors that held up were also those in which the possibility of using foreign labor was greater (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 164).

When one employer began to hire lower-priced foreign labor, usually without authorization, pressure grew on others to follow suit. By the mid-1990s, foreigners made up 10% of all workers and even more of the “informal” labor force:

More generally, the development of the parallel economy was linked to clandestine immigration. Other than tourism and agriculture, the underground economy assumed considerable proportions in the sectors of construction, industry, and trade. The parallel economy contributed in the early 1990s to 30-35% of Greece’s GIP […]. For some authors it was the development of the size of the parallel economy that attracted the clandestine immigrants […], whereas for others the use of clandestine labor supported the informal economy (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 164).

In theory, the clandestine foreign workers were distinct from the documented ones.  In practice, legal immigration facilitated illegal immigration:

Not all of the non-European Community foreigners present in Greece were clandestine workers. In some sectors they coexisted with documented workers. This was for example the case with the merchant marine. As early as the late 1970s, this strategic sector of the national economy resorted massively to foreign labor, especially in low-skilled jobs. In 1990, there were around 10,000 foreign sailors out of a total of 37,000 people employed on Greek ships. But according to other sources, alongside the documented workers, the merchant marine was employing 12,000 to 14,000 workers from Egypt and Pakistan and 30,000 clandestine foreigners. (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 165)

According to a review of the literature in the early 2000s, this immigration was slowing down the rise in incomes of poorer Greeks:

[…] the wages of Greek workers have not been reduced during the period of immigration (since 1990) but the rate of increase is much lower, in real terms, than in the past. It is interesting to note that the money wages of workers paid with minimum wages have increased at very low rates, between 1% - 2% per year, whereas wages in general have increased by higher rates. The difference between the increases of the two wage rates may be attributed to the fact that those working with minimum wages are unskilled workers without work experiences and therefore these are the people who, in general, are in competition with immigrants in the labour market. (Lianos, 2004, p. 11)

Nonetheless, little has been done to restrain the influx of low-wage workers. In fact, it has actually increased. Why?

Several reasons may be given:

Costs and benefits fall on different people

A big reason is that the adverse impacts fall on those people (the working poor) who have the least input into public policy.

[…] immigration is increasing the inequality of income among various categories of income and profit recipients. A general equilibrium study […] has found that immigration to Greece has indeed this effect. It has reduced real disposable incomes of poor households and has increased the incomes of middle and rich households. (Lianos, 2004, p. 13)

The latter households, who benefit from immigration, have the most input into public policy:

It is interesting to mention that many economists in Greece see immigration as an important factor in keeping wages low, thus keeping the cost of production low and therefore the rate of inflation in a period when Greece was making a serious effort to join the economic and monetary union (EMU). One can go one step further and argue that the policy of low inflation was served by immigration and perhaps even better by illegal immigration. Thus, the lack of haste on the part of the Greek governments to regularise illegal immigrants is attributed to a conscious policy rather than to a lack of administrative ability. (Lianos, 2004, p. 11)

Besides influencing public policy directly, the elites also exert an indirect influence via the media, the arts, and entertainment. This influence builds on an existing tendency among artists, entertainers, and writers toward individualism and post-nationalism.

Post-nationalism

In Greece, post-nationalism has replaced nationalism since the Colonels left in 1974 and even more so since the country entered the European Community in 1981. The increasingly prevalent view is that the nation-state no longer matters and that there are only individuals buying and selling in a global marketplace

Post-nationalists are aware that many immigrants see things differently. But this fact is usually blamed on the host society; if the Greek people would just be more welcoming, fewer immigrants would seek refuge in their own cultural and religious identities.

Such refuge is even seen positively as an understandable response to the challenges of an alien society. Post-nationalism has thus become wedded to multiculturalism.

Belief in unrestrained markets

There has also been a growing belief in the virtue of unrestrained free markets, especially among government officials:

“I am enthusiastic about the Albanians. They certainly work illegally, but that is a prerequisite to their being able to offer their labor at a low price,” declared the minister of the economy in 1993 […]. The usefulness of this very flexible labor is to maintain the competitiveness of certain branches of work […] It is estimated that the cost of clandestine labor is 50% less than that of documented labor (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 177-178)

Collapse of the Eastern bloc

Finally, external circumstances have greatly increased the pressure of immigration, both legal and illegal. One set of circumstances was the end of the Cold War and the collapse of regimes throughout Eastern Europe:

But the increase in the volume of clandestine immigration is to be understood above all as a consequence of the opening of the countries of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Until 1989 there were practically no citizens from the Eastern bloc in Greece. Only a few thousand Poles had requested asylum […]. But the collapse of the communist regimes and the opening of the borders fundamentally changed migration between the East and the West of the continent (Pteroudis, 1996, p. 165-166)

The 1990s brought hundreds of thousands from the former Eastern bloc. They were difficult to keep out because of the long land border and also because many were entitled to Greek nationality by virtue of having Greek ancestry (i.e., jus sanguinis, as in Israel and Germany). These “ethnic Greeks” usually had only a vague connection to their ancestral homeland. While studying in Voronezh, I worked at a language school where one of our students was preparing to “return” to Greece. He had in fact only a limited understanding of Greek.

These legal immigrants thus created a cosmopolitan environment that could support and conceal illegal immigrants from the former Eastern bloc and, increasingly, from elsewhere.

A Third World baby boom comes of age

Another external circumstance has been a baby boom in a zone stretching from West Africa and the Sahel, through the Horn of Africa and parts of the Middle East, and into South Asia. This boom is fueled by three interacting causes: traditionally high fertility, modern medicine, and relative peace. As these children come of age, most have nowhere to go but out. And “out” is increasingly Europe.

Initially, they went to the countries of their former colonial masters, usually Great Britain or France. This flow of people was seen as “chickens coming home to roost”—payback for the sins of colonialism and imperialism. In the 21st century, however, the chickens are also flocking to other homes. Something else is going on, and it isn’t payback.

How many?

In the mid-1990s, Pteroudis (1996, pp. 174-176) cited Greek estimates that ranged from a low of 180,000 illegal immigrants to a high of 1 million. The number of legal immigrants was likewise uncertain. The 1991 census gave a total of 167,000 whereas other sources pointed to a much higher figure.

Today, estimates range from a low of one million foreign-born to a high of three million. That’s a lot for a country of eleven million people. The low figure is extrapolated from the 2001 census:

[…] the number of immigrants living in Greece in 2001 was 762,191, making up approximately 7 percent of the total population. This figure includes all foreign born irrespective of immigration status, as well as the 46,869 individuals who were citizens of the countries comprising the European Union at that time.

[…] Nevertheless, the actual size of the foreign-born population is estimated to be significantly higher: Many analysts believe that there are between 1 million and 1.3 million immigrants in Greece, making up as much as 10 percent of the population. (Kasimis, 2012)

We may know more when the results of the 2011 census are fully released. But even those numbers will be doubtful, since illegal immigrants tend to shun census-takers. As Kasimis (2012) notes: “The data from the 2011 census […] are not expected to be detailed nor particularly credible because of the problematic organization and management of the census.”

The problem here is not just methodological, It’s also definitional. The term “foreign born” excludes Greek-born children of immigrants. Yet children tend to identify with their parents’ ethnocultural background, and this is especially true for Muslim immigrants (Gogonas, 2011).

Here we come to the high estimate of three million, which is denounced as fear-mongering and yet is probably close to the truth. There might indeed be that many if we add the children of the foreign-born. Of that total, fewer than a quarter are easily assimilable, i.e., ethnic Greeks and other Orthodox Europeans. The rest are mostly Muslim Albanians, Middle Easterners, South Asians, and Africans. 

Conclusion

The past forty years have drawn Greece into a two-way movement of jobs and workers. On the one hand, industries have been relocating to countries where labor costs are cheaper. On the other hand, low-wage labor has been coming in and displacing Greeks from those jobs that cannot be relocated.

This two-way movement initially caused wages to rise more slowly than they would have otherwise. Now, a second phase has begun: a downward leveling of wages and working conditions.

Of course, this phenomenon isn’t unique to Greece. It’s unique only to the extent that the Greek people are (1) less able to keep up the fiction of a First World lifestyle by borrowing money and (2) geographically more exposed to the forces of globalization. Greece is, so to speak, the canary in the coalmine.

But there’s a larger question at stake. Will the Greek people survive? If we accept the logic of post-nationalism and globalism, there can be only one answer and that answer is “no.”

Keep the following points in mind:

-        The Greek people number only eleven million and are on the front of a massive population expansion that is pushing out of Africa and southwestern Asia.

-        Their fertility rate is only 1.3 children per woman, in contrast to rates up to six times higher only a short distance to the south.

-        The ideological environment is hostile to any collective defense of the nation-state. There is a transnational system of defense, NATO, but its aims reflect the geopolitics of another age.

These are admittedly current circumstances, and circumstances can change. But change will have to come soon.

References

Gogonas, N. (2011). Religion as a core value in language maintenance: Arabic speakers in Greece, International Migration, 50, 113-129.

Kasimis, C. (2012). Greece: Illegal Immigration in the Midst of Crisis, Migration Information Source

http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=884

Lianos, T. P. (2004). The impact ofimmigration on Greece’s society, European Migration Network, Greek National Contact Point, Center for Planning and Economic Research.

http://www.emn.at/immigration/docs/b04.pdf

Pteroudis, E. (1996). Emigrations et immigrations en Grèce, évolutions récentes et questions politiques, Revue européenne de migrations internationals, 12, 159-189 (Espagne, Portugal, Grèce, pays d'immigration).