The State of the Debt

Martin McQuillan

When we first set out to make a film about the crisis in Greece, the idea of a radical government in the form of the Syriza election victory of 2015 was still a distant prospect. It was not until the film had been completed and screened at the Moscow International Film Festival and the London Film Festival that the administration of Alexis Tsipras was formed. The worldwide phenomenon of the Syriza government and its subsequent encounter with the so-called Troika of Greece's creditors (the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the European Commission) has now given the film and this book a certain currency, but it was never part of our original motivation. Rather, the film is about the debts that global culture owes Greece and what we might learn about the nature of money from Greece yesterday and today. Philosophy ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), economy ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) and cinema ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) are all part of that same Hellenic inheritance.

The situation in Greece is at once unique to that country and of the greatest significance to what we now call the 'global economy'. On the one hand, the Greek crisis is a symptom of a wider global conjunction that began with the subprime mortgage crisis in the United States (which has its origins in the Clinton years) and runs to the threat to the continuation of the Euro currency zone today. On the other hand, it is a singular concentration of all of the questions that arise from that conjunction, demonstrating in a precise way the failings and challenges of our present world system of capital. It is also, as every economic crisis is, a story of intense personal difficulty for individuals and families. As Émile Durkheim observed in his seminal sociological work, rates of suicide always grow during times of economic downturn. The only growth that Greece has seen in the last few years is that of rates of self-harm, mental health issues and mortality among the population. The Greek economic crisis is also a humanitarian crisis and not just because of the cuts to health services in Greece as a result of the regime of austerity. Austerity has human consequences and this is what makes it the proper subject of film and literature alongside economics. Perhaps, film and literature is better placed than economics to highlight the effects of austerity. Economists are, in the words of the Medea of Euripides, 'novices in grief'. It takes an artist to capture the wounds of a society, and as W. H. Auden put it, 'about suffering they were never wrong, the old masters'.

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In 2000, Greece was accepted as the twelfth member of the European monetary union. The coun