Greece is part of Europe, not the EU

To understand Monty Papandreou’s Flying Circus of Greek announcement and counter-announcement earlier today, you have to have some degree of affinity with Greece. As it happens, I do: in my 20s, I went there are great deal, bumming around the various beaches and rooms that the generous Greek people and climate had to offer. Very few cultures know how to enjoy a stiff drink and a silly dance like the Greeks, and once older and married, I continued to go there – albeit by then in a bit more style. My elder daughter was conceived on the island of Keffalini, and while I don’t remember any mandolins way back then, I have some unforgettable memories of getting browner and blonder by the day….when life was young, and every restaurateur grinned with a guttural “Parakalor!” as you entered his taverna.

Nobody should take this as in any way patronising on my part, but Greece doesn’t belong in anything called a zone. It wouldn’t fit well in anything fiscally controlled, and fits badly into a Union of industrialised stuffed shirts trying to compete in a glass-and-steel globalist landscape. The Turks went to Germany and worked in the factories, but the ordinary Greek would no more do that than pay tax. Greece is about music and fishing nets, summer affairs and old ladies or grey-bearded men in black, whitewashed walls against sharp blue skies, windey cobbled streets, barbecued half-warm food, aubergines, and – on every level – warmth.

There may come a day when Europe has regained its diversity and senses, but until it does my best solution for the Greeks (economic arguments aside) is to get the f**k out of the EU, and go back to being the nearest thing to Paradise, in that odd place between southern Europe and the near East. I am not being whimsical when I say this – and I have the best interests of both sides in mind when I posit such things: there is a type of artistic and alternative German who loves Greece and all things natural, but they are in a minority. Such folks became the basis of Die Grune; they live in delightful arty colonies like Worpswerde, and are strangers to Bankfurt.  The Germans en masse holidayed in Greece for decades  because it was cheap, hot, water-sporty and outdoor. But the towel on the lounger by 7.31 am is about as Greek as Islamism.

Cat Stevens is a Greek Cypriot and oddly enough, these days, Islamic. He calls himself Yusuf, but in the early 1970s he released two albums of immaculate musicality. He had the looks, romance, softness and voice of the Greek islands I loved forty years ago. He is not, of course, in any way related to the now lost genes that shaped Greece’s classical greatness. But he had a sort of floating, laid-back, slightly muddled outlook that will always sum up all things Hellenic for me.

In the Greece of my heyday, ferries arrived when they arrived, and meals were served when the restaurant owner judged that the ambience was right. The starters were served with a sort of paraffin called Retsina, and the digestif Metaxa brandy (usually complimentary) after every meal burned in a way that suggested a night of passion ahead rather than a headache the next day. The streets of Greece were littered with feral cats, the evenings with chance encounters and gentle musicians. Everything was chaotic in a way that chimed perfectly with the times. The last thing Greece should ever have done was start wearing red braces and go join Wall Street.

Of course the various Greek governments should never have accepted cheap euroloans. Of course they should never have supped with the Devil in the detail of Goldman Sachs. Of course their constituents should have paid more tax. But the ‘should have’ view of life is antithetical to the Greek way of living. While the French have become immensely rich in the EU – and the Germans, with more effort, richer still – they too should have eschewed stupid europride in favour of good sense. The stark reality is that Zorba the bear-hugging Greek cannot, and should never, be forced into the straitjacket required for eurozone (and EU) membership.

When I voted to ‘stay in Europe’ during the 1970s, my dream was of an EC (as it then was) celebrating the best of every country therein. This was, I realised years ago, a vain hope as long as things continue to be run by the suits. What we have in 2011 is an EU in denial about cultural diversity – and incompatibility. The loopy eurocrats suffer from the same fantasies as the UK’s multiculturalists. Do we want an EU where Greek retailers and fishermen pretend to be British accountants? Or do we prefer a Europe where there is a place for everyone from the Irish musician and the French viniculteur to the German car designer and the Italian farmer?

I don’t know about you, but I know where my heart lies. Is my heart naive? Bollocks it is: the heart informs the head, and stops it from swelling too much.