Writes Suzanne Moore in the Guardian: "By infantilising Greece, Germany resembles a child who closes its own eyes and thinks we can not see it. We can. The world is watching what is being done to Greece in the name of euro stability. It sees a nation stripped of its dignity, its sovereignty, its future."
John Cassidy in the New Yorker called it "an agreement that is perhaps the most intrusive and demanding contract between an advanced nation and its creditors since the Second World War." He characterized it as a Greek "surrender" to the demands made principally by Germany and its allied banks,"at great cost to the country’s [Greece's] political sovereignty, the political landscape of the continent looks different, and not a little ominous." The headline on the article reads "A Humiliating Deal for Greece."
In general, these articles support the basic pattern which N. Klein exposed in The Shock Doctrine, in which entire nations are forced into policies and debt that enriches the rich, the banks and big corporations, at the expense of the 99% and the nation as a whole.
It has been contrasted to the forgiveness of German loans after World War II that enabled Germany to prosper.
The new and perhaps most unsettling element is the role these articles attribute specifically to Germany and its Chancellor Merkel. Cassidy's article ends: "But if what happened over the weekend doesn’t quite amount to a coup, it has nevertheless been a ruthless display of power politics on Germany’s part and a chilling reminder of the remorseless logic of a monetary union dominated by creditors and pre-Keynesian economics. In the words of Paul De Grauwe, a well-known Belgian economist who teaches at London School of Economics, a “template of future governance” of the eurozone was written over the weekend: “Submit to German rule or leave.” In the years and decades ahead, Germany may discover that many Europeans would prefer the second option."
According to the New York Times:"The strict terms of the deal imposed on Greece by fellow members of the eurozone on Sunday inspired hundreds of thousands of comments on social networks deriding the agreement as the equivalent of a coup against the left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras."
An unsigned editorial in UK's Telegraph also refers to the deal as "nothing less than national humiliation. The country that quarried the foundation stones of Western civilisation is now humbled, forced to impose more austerity measures and allow billions of euros of state assets into an internationally-controlled trust because its creditors do not trust its politicians to keep their promises. All this only days after the Greek people clearly voted against austerity as a condition for international bailouts."
Later this editorial also puts its finger on the nature of the crisis precipitated by the deal itself: "There is a certain bleak irony to the Greek agreement. Europe has gone to extraordinary new lengths to stop the integrationist project falling apart, yet never has that project looked so unstable and unsustainable as it does today."
There is more turmoil to come as the government of Greece will debate accepting these terms. But at first blush this looks like the most serious challenge to what had been the most hopeful international project of the past 100 years or more: what Jeremy Rifkin called "the European Dream": the peaceful, democratic unification of Europe, previously the center of centuries of war, culminating in the two most destructive wars in human history.
Update/Last Word: In a Washington Post piece entitled "Greece has surrendered but Europe loses too" Matt O'Brien begins: "At least they still get to call it Greece."
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