The current anti-German outbreak in Greece was, to begin with, to be expected. Aggrieved national feeling and the bugbear that "The People" are subject to prosecution from all points of the compass is the well-tried recourse of bankrupt politicians who want to divert attention from their own failures and crimes. But beyond that it is also a sign of the complete ignorance here of the history of the project of European integration and of the history of Germany in particular.

The approach to Europe by the Greek ruling elites has always been instrumental. There is a more benign version of this instrumentalism, as represented by the elder Karamanlis in the 60's and early 70's. The idea here was basically to "shield" the country from its own weakness and disability, economic and political. Its integration into a populous market would confer obvious benefits to Greek business. Politically European norms and institutions would prevent the relapse into the kind of strife that brought about the military dictatorship of the sixties.

After the Cyprus crisis of 1974 another layer was added to these calculations, namely that Greece as a member of the European community would now have behind it the unanimous support of its fellow members in its various disputes with Turkey.

The economic calculation proved spectacularly right with the massive inflow of European structural funds, which the local rulers immediately set about to devour and to squander. That is the reason why the rabid opposition of the left to Greece's accession to what they idiotically called "the den of lions" was abandoned. And with the rise to power of the mock-socialist party in the early eighties this opposition was transmuted into an incessant "struggle" within Europe to extract financial benefits and advantages for "The People" (i.e. for the increasingly venal party and union apparatchiks) with the most minimal adherence possible to the common rules. This obstructionism and obstreperousness was of course irritating to Greece's partners, but it was put up with for political reasons.

This done, the emphasis now was increasingly placed upon the "national" goals to be obtained through Europe, primarily the check-mating of Turkey and later on the political obliteration of poor Slav Macedonia. The demand put forward was that Greece would itself define what its "historical rights" were in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean and that the others would simply fall behind these claims and self-definitions. When they did not, an anti-European clamor was raised.

Thus, as more and more European moneys streamed in to be transformed into Mercedeses and ugly imperial villas for the political elites and their retinue, the more intense the anti-European sentiment fomented by these crooked politicians and their squalid allies in the media. As the material well-being of the average Greek was rising rapidly and the country was being transformed from a dirt poor third world outpost into a tolerably developed state close to the European average, its political orientation veered towards a primitive thirld-worldism, with Ghadafi and Saddam and of course Milosevic and (yes) even Bin Laden later on as the shining lights of its opinion-makers. A vicious anti-westernism took general hold permeating all sides of the political spectrum including the dazed and putrescent so-called right. These antics, egged on after 1998 by an Orthodox Church that had itself adopted xenophobic nationalism as its standard, isolated the country on the European level, as civilized people could simply not comprehend this collective regression to the murderous psychoses of the early twentieth century.

I do not want to go into the details of the "national" debate -it would be a stomach-turning business. Suffice it to record one telling detail: when China, Russia and even "brotherly" Serbia recognized Slav Macedonia as the "Republic of Macedonia" no one batted an eyelid. When the US proceeded to do the same some years later it was perceived as an earth-shattering treachery and there were violent riots in Athens and Thessalonica. This gives you a measure of the perversity into which the public mind had by then sunk.

The important consideration is this: the very heart of the project of European integration was the abandonment of the nationalist isolationism that has soaked the history of the continent with blood. The chief aim was the suppression of ancestral hatreds through the cultivation of open communication and shared institutions. And there is no greater and more inspiring example of this progressive effort than the Franco-German reconciliation under the leadership of De Gaulle and Adenauer. Rivers of German and French blood had flown into the Rhine in mutual massacre, but all this was consciously put behind for the sake of a peaceful and prosperous future. But this point was entirely lost upon the Greek ruling classes, who preferred to cement their rapacious and socially unjust rule by precisely cultivating the most atavistic forms of national hysteria.

One particularly sad note here concerns the active complicity of the left in this moral and intellectual degeneration. Their traditional anti-imperialism was effortlessly transmogrified into thoughtless anti-European hatred, stressing the "violation" of Greek "national rights" by the west with vehemence even shriller than that of the extreme right. Their ingenious way of camouflaging their reactionary nationalism as a "progressive" stance was the claim that the Bosnian Muslims, for instance, and the Macedonian leadership (even under the communist Gligorov) were agents of the Americans acting to secure imperialist control of the Balkans. On this reading the Yugoslav wars were caused, instigated, deliberately started by the foreign villains. They would never have happened if the Serbs and the Croats who were so much in love with each other and had such a history of harmonious coexistence had been left alone. This silliness was the guiding dogma of the Greek left who anointed Milosevic as the hero of anti-imperialist struggle.

The same profound ignorance and misrepresentation stamps the dominant ideas on Germany. That despite the inevitable survivals of Nazism, the post-war federal republic has made the most determined effort in its general culture and educational process to face up to the historical guilt of the country and to cultivate mentalities that would prevent any relapse to racist nationalism is something that no one is aware of here. That whatever resurgence of nazi-tinted racism one observes in the country emanates primarily from the formerly communist east, where the "workers and peasants" regime did nothing at all to deal with German historical guilt but rather cultivated militarism is a fact that would be vehemently denied. That Germany's participation in the unification of Europe and especially its abandonment of the mighty Deutschmark was the most important manifestation of this determination to anchor the country in a common European destiny, rather than adopt a renewed course of national aggrandizement with its concomitant Drang nach Osten, is also something no one has an inkling of or would appreciate. That Germany incurred significant economic liabilities as a result of these choices, by being for example by far the largest net contributor to the EU budget, is also something nobody notes. That the agricultural subsidies that for more than a generation now have fed and fattened an increasingly parasitic and destructive Greek so-called farmer class have come out of German pockets nobody admits. That the German tax payer has coughed up over this period something like 10000 euros per each inhabitant of Greece (according to some figures I saw lately) does not count for anything in the mind of the inflamed dervishes of nationalism here. All was fine as long as we were gobbling up Germany's (and others') contributions for the private gratification of our execrable (as everyone readily admits) rulers. Suddenly, now that they refuse to pour more of their own people's sweat into this black hole the righteous wrath of the "anti-imperialists" is ignited and the memories of the occupation return. The Germans "have not paid war reparations" and are out to get us. This is so disgustingly pathetic.

It is also stupidly self-destructive. There is a vigorous debate currently going on in Germany concerning the wisdom of rescuing Greece, while in the background the populist press is screaming for blood. If you want to strengthen the side arguing against the rescue, i.e. if you wish yourself in hell, then you adopt the moronic anti-German stance that is becoming increasingly loud here.