>a USB of the conversations he had secretly recorded while attending a Eurogroup discussion in Brussels
People in private converse completely differently (more freely) than in public. Judging people on what they said there by a public standard (it's impossible that this will not happen) is extremely unfair. Especially since Varoufakis knew that he will be recorded, he has probably chosen his wordings accordingly.
Let us not forget the pressure the ECB (and other european institutions) put on some countries that have come to light after the fact. (Like only allowing emergency liquidity assistance to be used based on bailout conditions, thus interfering and blackmailing supposed sovereign governments)
edit: And to be fair, while I don't like Varoufakis, the fact his party wants these recordings to come to light, means there is probably something there are is damning to someone
I honestly don't think it's that simple.
While decisions should always be public, in order to come to reasonable compromises on issues, it can be valuable for leaders to be able to have closed-door conversations outside of the spotlight, where they don't have to engage in political grandstanding; after all, it's that kind of compromise that allows democratic systems to function.
In fact, I would make the claim that at least one reason why the US democratic system has become so utterly paralyzed by polarization is because so much of political debate is now happening in the spotlight of social media, instead of behind closed doors where politicians can have the more nuanced conversations that might displease an electorate that is too busy cheering for their team to worry about actually getting anything done.
That's not to say this isn't without peril. Behind closed doors, corruption might happen as easily as compromise. I'm just not convinced the risks outweighs the benefits.
Lets (just for example, I am not saying it happened), during that meeting, the German/French Finance minister said: 'I don't care about the Greek people, we can't let German/French banks fall, so do what you must if you ever want the ECB to lend you money'. Wouldn't the greek people deserve to know and make up their mind about their part in the EU project?
(again, I am not saying this happened, but I can see similar backdoor deals being put forward)
Lets not forget that any opposition to the EU project by the citizens is seen as misinformed or misleded people. It is never the EU's fault [1]
[1] - https://torrentfreak.com/eu-commission-portrays-article-13-o... (Sorry, no time to search for other source, but the comments were also published in my local newspapers)
EG, imagine a hypothetical scenario where Greece gets into debt trouble again, but now the other finance ministers don't trust that their meetings will be kept private. The German and French finance ministers meet privately, and decide to screw over Greece and come up with a cover story about how they can't do anything else. A better outcome would be if they had private meetings with Greece and at least had the opportunity to reach a compromise. The best possible outcome might be having the same meeting with full transparency so that the public is fully informed, but that's not what would happen.
I can understand that Greek people would be angry to be "sacrified"... and that's why that kind of meeting is secret! Because to govern is not only to be elected but sometimes to have to take bad choices, when only other choices are worst
That's what democracy should mean - we don't elect representatives so that they can take decisions we don't want but that they think are good for us. We elect representatives because direct democracy doesn't scale.
At best, both would be same: elected people would explain to the people what is best for them and convince them, then people would want what is best for them in the long run.
But sadly, nobody like to be sacrified now for the long term better good of all. And politicians need to be reelected. So politicians have to hide and manipulate to some extend (for what they think is the greater good of most of the population)...
"Crowd wisdom" is nice for really specific matters... but not really for managing a population with diversities in the long run.
Quite often, especially with difficult issues, people have to take risks or make painful compromises or at least suggest them, even if the final result is nothing like them. Sometime people bluff, lie and distort in order to improve their position. There is give and take.
If everything is made public then you will essentially get discussions that are no better than discussions amongst the public, which everyone would agree is suboptimal.
This is the crux of it: All involved (except Varoufakis) apparently thought their words would remain secret forever. This is bad for democracy, because it nurtures conspiracy theories. Prompt publication is likewise bad, because it hardens negotiating positions at a distance far apart, and makes participants fearful of speaking uncomfortable truths.
The US Federal Reserve publishes its minutes, but only some time well after the participants go home. Live-tweets on their hourly progress -- say, from Mar-a-Lago -- are not a concern.
The idea that closed door deliberations must be made public after some moratorium period strikes me as a good compromise, as in the moment it allows politicians to have those private discussions that might allow compromise to occur, while not totally sacrificing transparency in the long-term.
And this isn't without precedent. The US declassification system essentially works this way (though it functions over the course of decades, which is probably too long).
The eurogroup president is already tasked with the responsibility of address the press and report on the group's deliberation.
That's not true. Greed which benefited Greeks at the time destroyed the Greek economy.
Nothing of that have happened. The public debt problem has not being solved and the Greek economy is a disaster. So who is responsible for those mistakes? They failed in their predictions and their failed in their goal (if what they say in public about their goal is the truth, of course).
It seems to me that if we leave all those politicians that decide to be "hard" on the Greeks without punishment we will have a clear case of moral hazard.
Your assertion is absurd. No measure was ever taken to "keep the Greek man down". Greek governments spent years running up a monstrous debt and cooking their books to try to falsify the actual state of the country's economy and the state's finances, going to the extent of hiring private consultancy firms to help them commit accounting fraud, and once that time bombs blew in their faces there was no other alternative than to pick up the pieces and sort out the mess. The ECB/IMF/EC gang's role was to simply provide emergency financing to buy Greek government's some time to actually sort their state's mess. It might be politically convenient to fabricate an evil foreign boogieman to distract people from the true causes but the facts speak for themselves, and there is no way around it.
The responsibility for Greece's situation must stay with Greece, unless they forgo the freedom to make their own decisions (about lending money). Nothing else works or makes sense logically. Freedom and taking responsibility are two sides of the same coin.
To be clear then, any 'bailout' of Greece is truly a bailout not of Greece, but their creditors.
Of course the reason Greece agreed is that the attendant inability to borrow after the default would be much worse for Greece than the lenders. That really goes to the heart of the situation Greece had got itself into: default would not save them.
Reality and the facts contrast heavily with this rhetoric. The eurogroup/IMF/european commission only stepped into the picture way after Greece bankrupted itself and digged a deep economic and social hole. Complaining about the organizations that mitigated Greece's pending collapse is like complaining about the cast and crutches you had to use after breaking your leg just because your leg hurts.
Much like the 'quantitive easing' ideas, they all had a theoretical basis that were vastly proven wrong. These countries only recovered when stimulous measures were applied.
Lagard herself admited that austerity was a mistake but never apologised for the suffering and deaths that it precipitated.
I remind you that elderly unable to afford medication and hospitals struggling to keep stock was a reality in Greece during this period.
Your personal assertion is flat out wrong. Although hindsight shows that the outcome was not optimal, the overall outcome of all bailout processes were highly successful. Although all states that requested bailouts were bankrupt by 2011, it took only a few years to get them back to eco omic growth and reducing their sovereign debt. Look for example at Portugal, who was arguably in the same situation as Greece but for about half a dozen years now it got back to economic growth,residual unemployment, a deficit close to zero, and lowering its sovereign debt. This turn of events coincides exactly with the last year of it's bailout process.
Who in their right mind speaks of failures when all states who underwent bailout processes and actually tried to follow the program ended up recovering from bankruptcies in record time?
The trouble with the EU model of governance is that it's quite a bit too overreaching. Germany has 80M citizens and Greece has 11M. The ods against Greece are 8 to 1. If N. Macedonia would join the EU those ods would be more like 40 to 1. Greece along with Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria should at least make a group like the Visegrad V4 and stick tougether, but sadly it's hard to imagine Greece and N. Macedonia in the same group.
You described an authoritarian system, not a democratic one. The public has the right to know what our elected servants are doing or saying. That's what dictatorships do, they tell the public the decisions without any insight into the process.
> That's not to say this isn't without peril. Behind closed doors, corruption might happen as easily as compromise. I'm just not convinced the risks outweighs the benefits.
Well if you aren't sure, then it's usually safe to err on the side of principles rather than justifications.
A black box might work IF it can be ensured that all data considered will be bundled with the decision. But how can such a thing ever be ensured?
We'll soon have source-included but secret-compiler software as a technical possibility, by means of zero-knowledge computational proofs.
It seems a bit much to ask politics to follow that state-of-the-art, which means that closed-doors talks* should be outlawed if the EU wants to have leg to stand on v. rising anti-EU sentiments.
*. indefinitely-closed-doors talks. A mandatory post-mortem including release of the talks themselves after a set period of time would go a long way.
That’s the whole premise of representative democracy: that direct democracy (through e.g. having referendums on everything) doesn’t work, because people don’t have time to be good at whatever personally makes them a living and also politics; and so we pay some people to do politics for a living, so that they will have the time and invested practice to make nuanced decisions.
Anything that subjects political representatives to constraints under which they have to vote according to exactly the public’s will, forfeits the benefits of representative democracy and replaces them with an implicit direct democracy.
To give an extreme example, a personally peace-loving representative is supposed to declare war on another country if their constituency wants war to happen. However, if their constituency wants an end to hunger and some are noting that the neighbours have more food, the representative should do whatever they can to end hunger, avoiding war if they know that is unlikely to help.
To be clear, we agree on this.
My point was that, in a direct democracy, it's not just the public's ends that are paramount, but also the public's preferences on means.
One good example of what I'm talking about is Ancient Greece, which was a direct democracy, despite having so-called representatives. In the Ancient Greek system, people were chosen for the civic duty of governing the country like they continue to be chosen today for jury duty: they were drafted by lottery. They weren't afraid of politicians betraying the public will, because any politician that did anything the public didn't like, would be killed.
And to be clear, "anything the public didn't like" included, for example, being friendly to foreign diplomats, or accepting gifts, even if these things would have had no later bearing on their political decision-making, i.e., on their practice of their profession.
In such a context, a politician is forced to not only act toward the will of the people, but also to "perform politics" in a way that avoids upsetting their citizen-base, and so to avoid using some of the most effective political tools because the public finds them uncouth. Also, such performances often require the use of ineffective or downright counterproductive political tools, simply to satisfy the public.
A clear modern example of the effect of direct democracy is when a municipal elected official, e.g. a county sherriff, feels pressure to put a suspect behind bars for a crime there's not yet sufficient evidence they committed, simply because the public demands that someone be punished for the crime.
The entire point of representative democracy, is that the public is often irrational in ways that makes their proximate demands an ineffective way of achieving their own stated will. In this example, the public nominally wants to see justice done—but in the implementation of it, directly demands injustice. A representative is supposed to listen to the will of the public, certainly, but to ignore the direct demands; or translate the direct demands into the will they stand for.
Patients know their symptoms but not the causes. Users know when there's a bug but not the correct fix. Well, voters know when there's a problem, too; but they're not any better at figuring out what to do about it than patients or users are.
People don't have enough money to get by? Fixing that is certainly "the will of the people", and a politician that hears that complaint but doesn't do anything about it is certainly not being a representative. But the decision between fixing it via welfare, jobs programs, minimum wage, UBI, etc? That's statesmanship. And letting the public decide which of those policies is better is just abdicating the responsibility to practice the job of politics; just like a doctor just giving someone pills for whatever disease they think they have would be an abdication of responsibility for the practice of the job of medicine.
could you elaborate on this?
In the analogy, the specification is the information provided to government officials and binary code is planned governmental actions.
If both are known and the specification process for governmental action is proven it doesn't matter what biases the officials exhibit in the decision process - then the governmental action is proven-good according to the specs (e.g. system of laws) and the information provided (in which it would be relatively easy for citizens to have a say, e.g. "you MAY NOT ignore facts X, Y and Z").
In public, yes. That's the point.
One could hope that in private, there's more sanity and less theater. I fear that it's just the same in private as in public, but one can hope.
Making a private conversation public is an extreme measure, but it also seems very appropriate in extreme circumstances.
The decisions, yes. But not recordings of every brainfart of every participant.
>means there is probably something there are is damning to someone
Probably. At least something that can be spun to be damning. However, I do not subscribe to the view that the end justifies the means. We live in times where every bad joke by a member of the elites is twisted into an outrage, and not too much good comes off this.
I completely disagree. We should expect these meetings to be held in a manner where participants should not be pressured away from doing the right thing due to concerns on how what they might say behind closed doors could be used as a political weapon to attack them. This asshole move from Varoufakis is a clear example, because this leak is designed to attack any political opponent that didn't simply rolled over to meet his personal demands.
This whole stunt is even more egregious if we consider that this boils down to a self-promotion stunt from someone desperately grabbing at their spotlight to manage to get some attention.
His personal account of what he decides to claim and express, particularly the part where he chose to portray himself as both the Savior and the sole victim of everything, including his political party, is not exactly an accurate view of historical events.
His own account of his role on Greece's referendum is enough to understand his personal motivation to come up with his personal story.
As an analogy: would you want your spouse (and vice versa) to hear recording of every conversation you have, including those with close friends/therapists/rabbis etc?
It's not completely absurd to say yes to that question. But it's notable that such a relationship would be a departure from established norms, and that most people feel even healthy and strong relationships profit from the ability to occasionally seek advice or blow of steam in confidentiality.
But even so, yeah, I would like to know if my spouse is talking with her friends/therapists/whatever about stealing all my money and screwing my best friend while they hire an hitman to off me. Exaggeration? Yes, but Greece got royally fucked with the Troika 'medicine', so yes, the people should know what led them to that place, and who fought for and against them.
He made lots of bold claims but in the end, nothing really got accomplished.
EDIT: Regarding the fact that the public deserves to know, I disagree. The public can act completely irrationally against its own interests under FUD (I guess we have some recent examples from the UK and the US), and in a lot of cases, they are better off not knowing. That's why you elect representatives (that will get into all the details of the problem) and place your trust in them. If you do not trust you representatives - do not elect them.
[1] https://www.cityam.com/greece-s-golden-boy-and-his-tragic-fa...
FUD comes exactly out of not knowing. The more obscure the workings and negotiation of power are, the more mystique they hold and the more chances for spin they have.
Democracy is not and must not be limited to choosing your representative once every four years - it should be a living system of dialogue, where you constantly offer feedback and hear back from your representative (not saying it has to be personal). This is the only way to build trust and have a responsive system.
Can you please clarify if I misunderstood you: You argue that people shouldn't know the truth, because when someone lies to them they act against their own interests?
Depends on the perspective I guess. I believe he accomplished a lot, as he raised the awareness on how the EU is run indirectly by an unaccountable group of politicians serving specific interests. It's no small feat.
They are deciding about life and death of people of a country (or many). They're not discussing about what's your favourite food and which sex position you like the most.
Those conversation MUST be open and public, so people can judge the work of their delegates and decide to vote them again or not.
If you don't want to be heard, don't present yourself as a candidate. There are plenty of roles in companies that are private enough to speak privately.
Eurogroup, Ecofin, European Commission, European Central Bank, ESM are secrets just to subtract power from citizens, so to reduce democracy.
Imagine negotiating with an employer, except your inner monologue is always spoken aloud.
One unintended (?) consequence of extreme transparency for governments, is that it makes government ineffective and easily subverted or outmaneuvered by opaque organizations, like corporations and less liberal state actors.
By the way, this goes hand in hand with the encroachment on ordinary citizens' rights (often with exceptions being carved out specifically for parliamentarians).
Obviously you want your elected representatives to do what's best, not what gets you trending in the polls. In this particular case we should expect the EU to step up and help out member-states in need in spite of the political abuse and exploitation by populist parties of problems such as the sovereign debt crisis.
I agree, but an advantage over whom exactly? In this case it's simply an advantage of the ruling political and economic elite over European citizens (Greeks especially).
There are few instances when things really should be kept secret e.g. during wars, but this was not one of them.
What, Varoufakis is a world-renown professor of game theory. You don’t think he has an agenda? Is it impossible that this agenda clashes against the Good of Greek People?
Not quite, the problem are extremist and populist political parties who abuse any crisis to force their way into relevance without playing any constructive role in any part of the problem. There's a long list of examples in European history of how extremistm exploits economic and financial crisis for their own self-interest and in the process causing a long steam of suffering and misery. It happened often enough to enable us to learn from that mistake.
Not necessarily. If there is secrecy within the organization, any leader of a subbranch can abuse his power along the line of the movie Dr. Strangelove.
States create and enforce the laws, they can do whatever they want. Their only limit is the people willingness expressed via elections.
Corporations can never be above a State if they play in a game where the State decides the rules.
It's 2012-2015, Greece is about to default on that very debt, and asks responsible countries to guarantee Greek debt... and they want the Eurogroup to guarantee it because they want to issue more debt! Issue more debt! A country that is unable to repay it's current debt!
Varoufakis, playing with people's lives and futures...
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/greece-debt-res...
We're not talking about private individuals discussing private matters informally here.
These are people with great power arguing over the fate of millions.
They shouldn't be saying things that they wouldn't want exposed and there is no reason to keep this secret.
What about watergate was that unfair too?
Sure if he was leaking offhand sexual preferences of people recorded he would be crossing a line, but somehow I doubt that's what will be leaked.
If a reporter received these same recordings in the mail, they would quite likely publish them. If they received a recording of a random person discussing their medical concerns, publishing that would be an outrageous breach of ethics.
(Hence the Gawker/Thiel debacle also. When Ted Haggard was caught having gay extramarital affairs, it was considered fit for publication because he was an evangelical preacher fighting against gay marriage. When a random private individual is outed, its not a public interest matter and can be libelous even when accurate. Thiel fell somewhere in between under both legal and journalistic rules, so we got a debate.)
I'm pretty baffled to see the parent comment imply that private discussions between politicians should inherently be kept secret. We could discuss specific news stories, reporters who violate attribution rules, and whether Varoufakis was bound by privacy laws or Eurogroup confidentiality rules. We could even argue the publication is in the public interest, and yet makes Varoufakis unfit to serve by destroying his ability to function with trust.
But just as you say, treating "that's a private discussion" as the end of matter would excuse Watergate also.
2) If pols do not fear things like this, they absolutely will abuse the public trust. It always happens. You cannot have meaningful representative government without meaningful information on their actions.
3) In general, support for smokey-back-room politics tends to be related to support for the outcomes of those decisions. It suddenly becomes a collusive outrage when the "wrong" ox is gored.
Is it then legitimate to call them out?
Remember these weren't 'at the bar talking rubbish' kind of conversations, these were extremely serious negotiations in a professional capacity where you would expect people to weigh words carefully.
Nicholson makes the point that the text of agreements should be known when they are made. The discussions that arrive at them, not necessarily.
If you want open talks, they need to be done so with everyone on board.
In all aspects, Greece was in much better shape before the 2008 crisis than Lithuania. Now Lithuania has a higher GDP per capita than Greece. How did that happen?
But never once, anyone in public considered on "asking on forgiving on our debts". It really makes me wonder the audacity of the people that claim it's the Eurogroups fault that they have lent money to Greece.
It really makes a difference, when people own up to their future.
You know what the creditors did? They forgave Germany's debts.
So the question is, when Greece made the same argument to Germany, that it can't grow their economy under austerity, why did the Germans refuse to forgive its debts?
You blame the Greek people but it was the German and French banks that lent Greece the money. Why didn't the banks do their du-diligence and refuse to give the loans?
So when Greece got the bailout money, that money went straight back into the German and French banks and left the Greek people holding the bag.
Shouldn't this actually make you wonder whether the Greek austerity was a good idea?
> It really makes a difference, when people own up to their future.
Why do you think it makes sense to hold millions accountable directly for the corrupt dealings of a few members of a country's elite (and of a few foreign bankers, politicians etc.)?
That's how democracy works. If you are not happy with your current government, elect the one you are happy with.
Over time, I've found that the elected government really does represent the general population.
They are also often deliberately kept in the dark about the decisions being made. Even if they had the necessary information available, it would be almost impossible to keep up with everything since people have other more important things to do to e.g. work.
> Over time, I've found that the elected government really does represent the general population.
I don't know where this happens, but if/when it does it's more of a fortunate accident than the default outcome.
This is a sovereign nation though, it should be expected to operate with sound fiscal policies and banks shouldn't base lending on political programs. Lest we let banks regulate policy through their willingness to lend money. That's the situation we did get in the end though, with austerity through blackmail. Greeks are now furious at the German government for protecting their financial institutions from collapse. While it might be more apt to be furious at those whom voted for policies not fiscally sound.
So what is the way forward? Certainly not what the IMF suggested at the time, as they as much have admitted to. But is Varoufakis pointlessly relegislating that decision or is he trying to sell a book?
On the low end of the scale someone could have used undiplomatic language that with the right media framing could anger a lot of people, without beeing that damning from an objective angle.
On the other end however you get things that we might want to know about, e.g. when someone in a high office defends a genocide, or says something so clearly evil that the potential damage of not publishing the recording outweighs every individual right.
I am not a fan of Varoufakis, but I could imagine him not taking this decision lightly (otherwise he would have published it way earlier). This points to something closer to the latter category.