Yanis Varoufakis on China

[Music] you hello and welcome to PS on air we're writers from Project Syndicate meet the newspapers that publish them I'm Anatole Colette ski and today we have with us Yanis varoufakis the finance minister of greece during the crucial period Wendt was negotiating with the European Union and the IMF and the co-founder of the diem25 movement we also have from the press David Allen dated the managing editor of Elle Pease and Torsten Rika international correspondent of handles Blatt China's played an increasing role in Greek Affairs I think in the last couple of years at the recent Silk Road summit in Beijing Xi Jinping said China and Greece should expand cooperation and telecoms energy infrastructure and Greece assigned a three billion EUR a deal to cooperate in green energy projects which you mentioned an upgrade power plants in Greece David I think you wanted to ask something about the relationship of China with Greece and southern Europe the Chinese investment in southern Europe is making the leaders nervous it's something that they don't talk about but when you get like out of the spotlight I mean it raises concerns most of all because leaders political leaders business leaders don't know where what the nature of their investment is and what the commitment with the economy so I wanted to get your take I know they're like conversations going on between like major Greece technology companies and Chinese companies very recent so so what is the quality of this commitment in my experience with with the Chinese and I negotiated with them a deal that was monograph but never in the end signed which would have been absolutely astonishingly good for Greece tells me that they are immensely self-serving as they would but at the same time they have a quality that we need in southern Europe actually I think everybody needs to have for a foreign direct investment by patient investors their patient investors they don't come in to grab an asset for speculative purposes they come in in order to create a base on which to build and build and build and their horizon is 20 30 year horizon do you think this means that we're getting to the point where China is seen in a country like Greece as a more reliable investment partner than the EU itself or than Germany because of this patient capital on the one hand and the experience of 2010 to 12 on the herb and when it came to the port of Piraeus remember when we were elected and unfortunately my party was against Costco and against the Chinese presence in the port not only did they want to cancel further privatization but they wanted to cancel previous privatization and I the first thing I did was I had a meeting with the Chinese ambassador and I said that this Finance Minister there's not agree with his government of this and I will sway them and add its way the the cabinet and we ended up going all the way towards an agreement that not only would privatize the rest of the port but under terms very different to the master troika wanted us to have and what I mean by that minimum investment of 180 million euros within a year which is a very large amount of investment for one year in a small airport secondly labor relations that were not precarious and which which were not haphazard with collective bargaining agreements to satisfy the trade unions on top of that an agreement that the local coastal shipping routes would be handled by the municipality of Piraeus and other municipalities and they would be profit sharing fantastic deal so they are very keen to get seriously down to business with you if you are also keen to do this now the açaí to this is that this didn't go through because Berlin intervened and send a message to Beijing don't deal with the Greece do the gigs until they sign our MOU but this is now and definitely I totally agree that the green should actually get the money from the Chinese or wherever they can get the money from that's not a question of money the same thing we needed a technology as well this is not just money you throw money at least Europe has been throwing my money at this for many years what Europe has not done with Greece is to do what the Chinese were prepared to do to come there with their workers with their engineers and actually do some serious work I mean to make a fair comparison between China and Europe on the other side on a political level you have to say that the patience of the Europeans with the difficulties of Greek it's not very short-sighted so there's long we have many many years have patience with this week and there's a sense this kind of solidarity which is there despite of all the problems which comes from from Europe and you can't you don't see this on the Chinese level you don't have China is not going to commit billions of dollars to bail out the Greek state when you talk about patience with the Greeks you adopt a paternalistic language which is inimical to the sense of solidarity amongst Europeans the sense that the Greeks are the spoilt brats who have been overspending and who are lazy I know lots of Greeks were like that but I know lots of Germans as well you know all the bank is in Frankfurt should have been imprisoned as a result of what they've been doing against your own nation do you want us to start talking about our patience with the Frankfurt bankers we can but this is toxic discussion it's about time Europe and Europeans start we turn a page and we address our problems as common problems not as problems that when one nation has with another nation in Spain we seem to have a perpetuity of the right in the government like it doesn't matter how many elections we have more or less they end up winning and they end up forming a government and you would think after the crisis and after how the crisis hit Spain very hard to like still very high unemployment I wanted your your opinion on why is the right still governing in Spain and why a sister party of syriza has not been able to actually appeal to a wider majority I'm referring to podemos the answer to the question as to why podemos has reached the ceiling is twofold one is Europe and the other is Greece the very close brotherly or sisterly link between podemos in syriza after the crashing of syriza in 2015 was a natural downer for them but Europe is also a problem I think it's a bigger problem to put it very bluntly I think that the average Spaniard who might be interested in voting for podemos once Pablo Iglesias and his comrades to answer the question so what are you going to do in the Eurogroup once you're elected and I don't think that for them I said we've been paid sufficient attention to think about this question which is exactly the opposite of what we at the m25 are doing which is constantly this question what should happen at the European level in the interest of Justice the spying is at gigs of the Germans but Europeans going to the question about the right this is very similar to Greece as you're as you said traditional social democracy so itself as the arbiter between industrial capital and labour their job was to sit around the table the bargain negotiations table between trade unions and employers and find some accommodation facilitate the freedom of the manager while at the same time safeguarding workers for the rights and at the same time taking a chunk of profits of surplus value as we economist a and use it to fund the welfare state this is what social democracy was all about but with financialization from the beginning of the 1980s the role of industrial capital has shrunk and the role of financial capital has increased and it was happening at the time of deregulation suddenly there was this cacophony of money-making in the financial sector and Social Democratic leaders were lured by this cacophony and they made a Faustian bargain with finances and it was very simple we would turn a blind eye let you do whatever you want and you'll find us as meant fund the welfare state further political parties our own personal campaigns so when the financial pyramids that were built as a result of this crashed in 2008-2009 those Social Democrats no longer had either the intended analytical capacity or the moral backbone to pick up the phone and say to the bankers you know you're finished we're going to save your bank but we're not going to save you and instead then they started rolling backwards all protections to the working class and carrying out austerity on behalf of this cynical transfer from the books of the banks to the books of the Torah okay and therefore they lost all legitimacy and the right was left without contest yeah I think the left has a more fundamental problem entry so if you look at Britain for example the breakfast world you had a lot of labour voters who actually voted for brexit and concert with the road because they had lost their trust in the elite of London the elite of government and it wasn't actually a Tory government at that time so it was not this classic clash between left and right in this case same thing in the u.s. you had a kind of a liberal leader with with Barack Obama and then you had a lot of blue-collar voters who actually voted right-wing voted for Donald Trump so I think that there's a more fundamental question for the European left why most of the reporters or a lot of those supporters actually turned right and not left in the time of need well let's make a sharp distinction between the populist right that brick city is voted for and Americans voted for in in the case of Trump from right-wing governments like the one of the popular party which is establishment party in Spain they are not the same thing yeah so passion has returned to politics on the what I call the militant parochial nativist nationalist international yeah who are not the Christian Democrats in Germany who are not the popular part in in in in Spain I know a lot of American our American friends who actually voted for Trump and I couldn't believe it that they would vote for Trump and they would say to me things like well we just ask ourselves a simple question how can we annoy the establishment through the ballot box similarly in Britain familiar in Britain I do not believe that people who really cares about the European Union so much now but the next election that's coming up is the one in Germany is that going to turn out to be an exception to this populist tide that we've seen sweeping across Europe because we looks like the conventional parties are the ones that are going to do well in Germany in one way or another they'll form a coalition so is this perhaps the end of a process rather than the beginning of a process it's neither the end nor the beginning a it's a very natural repercussion of two things firstly the massive surpluses that are overflowing in Germany you've got a government in surplus small surplus but surplus nevertheless you have corporations that save more than they spend and you have households that save more than they spend or than we know with net savings increasing and that creates a semblance of stability and I say assemblance because the foundation of stability is not there while at the same time I think that the political establishment in Germany has a Emmanuel macron to thank for because it was his victory that allows Angela Merkel to continue to breathe politically I think it started before with France as you just mentioned because the the victory of McCraw is was actually the end of this populist wave in Europe so far I sing and when it comes to Germany you're right I mean the country feels quite well at the moment there is no mood for change and there is no personal alternative to Merkel people are quite I wouldn't say happy but they are fine and if they look around if they look to breakfast it up to Greek Greece or if they look to the u.s. they say okay we have compared to that we have we good so but the problem is that macro who you're right was was the the five break that stopped this is now collapsing in the polls and he's losing all his popularity but you know macron is a very interesting case celebrating microns victory is not sensible at the moment why not because we didn't want him to win but you know he got twenty four percent of the vote in the first round the lowest percentage of any president in living memory secondly 12 million people didn't vote in the second round and 4.6 million people who spoiled their ballots now to say that the and thirty percent voted for lapel for god sakes we should all be mourning but do you think that micron given what he's done which has been to implement some very conservative policies very very regressive distributive policies do you think he's actually a dead duck I mean is he working the wrong way I really hope not but I fear that he has their own idea about the big game the big game from Akron is not the labor market mmm he does not believe that the French economy is going to be substantially improved through these labor market reforms they are too late so what's the big his his game is to say to to come to an agreement with Angela Merkel the agreement that Manuel wants with angular is really very simple I will German eyes two things the German French budget and the French labor market and I'll do it as a as a Soviet will first and you will give me Federation light which is turning the eurozone into a in a kind of you know miniscule minimalist Federation with a common budget 1% of your area GDP some unemployment insurance a little bit of an FDIC and thrown in there you know Federal Deposit Insurance for banks and that's his game and you very much fear that firstly Merkel is not going to give him what he wants but if he did get what he wants that that actually still quite limited deal of concessions from Germany would that actually help the French economy very much will that make much difference yeah yeah it would have helped it would have been fantastic if we had that in 2000 yeah yeah at the beginning of the year alone because it would have created checks and balances and macroeconomic stabilizers with him but now it's too little too late it will be macro economically insignificant I just wanted to go briefly back into politics to ask you about a fear that is looming in southern Europe to our right-wing populist movement coming up in Greece or in Spain Italy Portugal we've been safe so far maybe because of sorry but so far yes and right now we we are seeing you know owing to the Catalan push for independence and like austerity we are seeing parts of the country you know looking back to those dark years of like Spanish nationalism so do you think this is really a threat in some solutely absolutely in my country the third largest party is the Nazi Party not a neo-nazi party there's nothing new about it it's a Nazi Party they have Hitler and they dissolute music hi you know that it's it's sickening but that's not the worst the worst is that these nationalists ultra-nationalism Oh phobic racist glomer Asians take lepen for instance lepen didn't have to win the presidency to have her agenda partly adopted by mainstream parties you have a final question yes um I disagree on you with on the French labor market reforms I think they are still important that we can we can turn the clock back so we can't go back to 2000 say what we should have done at that time I think they are still important they are still worse through pursuing and I think most importantly and and this might be a lesson for the or for the right-wing parties in Germany that Europe was back on the agenda in a positive way and that helped this has a lot to do with bhisma and that help I'll get America to hold this of the alternative if it all went down to below 10% I would be happy to see the F there below 10% and macron we have it we all have McCord to thank for for stopping lepen there's no doubt about it but let me say this McCarran has lifted expectations of ending the popular surge on the basis of promises about a kind of federalization of Europe which is not going to take place because Michael does not have a mandate within the German polity to give him what he needs in order to fulfill his his promises and that is a great danger not for the long term but for the medium-term that's all we have time for Yanis varoufakis toast Enrica david al dente thank you very much for coming to London for this event and thank you for watching PS on air

Channel: Project Syndicate

Views: 214,402

Rating: 4.7678814 out of 5

Keywords: greece, financial crisis, project syndicate, yanis varoufakis, learn, interview, explain, european union, fiscal policy, finance, news, economics, politics, european union integration, german elections, angela merkel, populism

Id: afhQtQCi0XI

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Mynameis__--__]

Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis under the Syriza government talks to Project Syndicate about China's growing influence in Greece and South Europe. He warns how a destabilized and fractured Europe can make room for China to exploit these fractures.

[u/fucknogoodnames]

Can someone fill me in on why Greece turned away from Europe? In my mind if EU/US and China both offered economic deals of the same quality to Greece, or even slightly worse deal on the EU/US part, its leaders would absolutely not prefer China. Since EU/US and Greece are both culturally, ideologically more similar and geopolitically more aligned than China and Greece. What makes the Chinese deal better or what makes the EU/US deal worse?