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Vol. 34 No. 11 · 7 June 2012
page 13 | 1285 words
Slavoj Žižek is the
international director
of the Birkbeck
Institute for the
Humanities, University
of London. His most
recent book is Less
than Nothing: Hegel
and the Shadow of
Dialectical
Materialism.
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Save us from the saviours
Slavoj Žižek on Europe and the Greeks
Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future.
Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for
immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a
fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted
vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying neo-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which
won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said,
of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up
all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe
is defended in the spring of 2012.
The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that
the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of
Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years
ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find
themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity
end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The
secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular
things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-
democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy
if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of
another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for
the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to
legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical
defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up
sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of
secularism they hate.
But Greece’s anti-immigrant defenders aren’t the principal danger: they are just a by-
product of the true threat, the politics of austerity that have caused Greece’s
predicament. The next round of Greek elections will be held on 17 June. The European
establishment warns us that these elections are crucial: not only the fate of Greece, but
maybe the fate of the whole of Europe is in the balance. One outcome – the right one,
they argue – would allow the painful but necessary process of recovery through
austerity to continue. The alternative – if the ‘extreme leftist’ Syriza party wins –
would be a vote for chaos, the end of the (European) world as we know it.
The prophets of doom are right, but not in the way they intend. Critics of our current
democratic arrangements complain that elections don’t offer a true choice: what we get
instead is the choice between a centre-right and a centre-left party whose programmes
are almost indistinguishable. On 17 June, there will be a real choice: the establishment
(New Democracy and Pasok) on one side, Syriza on the other. And, as is usually the
case when a real choice is on offer, the establishment is in a panic: chaos, poverty and
violence will follow, they say, if the wrong choice is made. The mere possibility of a
Syriza victory is said to have sent ripples of fear through global markets. Ideological
prosopopoeia has its day: markets talk as if they were persons, expressing their ‘worry’
at what will happen if the elections fail to produce a government with a mandate to
persist with the EU-IMF programme of fiscal austerity and structural reform. The
citizens of Greece have no time to worry about these prospects: they have enough to
worry about in their everyday lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen
in Europe for decades.
Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very
eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope
that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the
vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels’s technocracy and anti-immigrant
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There’s always shopping populism. This is why Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, made clear in a recent interview
to be done that his first priority, should Syriza win, will be to counteract panic: ‘People will
conquer fear. They will not succumb; they will not be blackmailed.’ Syriza have an
6 NOVEMBER 1986 almost impossible task. Theirs is not the voice of extreme left ‘madness’, but of reason
Peter Clarke speaking out against the madness of market ideology. In their readiness to take over,
Starting up they have banished the left’s fear of taking power; they have the courage to clear up the
mess created by others. They will need to exercise a formidable combination of
4 SEPTEMBER 1986
principle and pragmatism, of democratic commitment and a readiness to act quickly
Peter Pulzer and decisively where needed. If they are to have even a minimal chance of success,
Forty-Eighters they will need an all-European display of solidarity: not only decent treatment on the
1 NOVEMBER 1984 part of every other European country, but also more creative ideas, like the promotion
David Blackbourn of solidarity tourism this summer.
Nazi Votes In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture, T.S. Eliot remarked that there are
moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief – i.e., when the only
RELATED CATEGORIES way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split. This is the position in
Europe today. Only a new ‘heresy’ – represented at this moment by Syriza – can save
Politics and economics,
what is worth saving of the European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian
Economic theory,
Political theory, 2000- solidarity etc. The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a ‘Europe
present, 2011-2012, with Asian values’ – which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do
Europe, Southern with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.
Europe, Greece, Western
Here is the paradox that sustains the ‘free vote’ in democratic societies: one is free to
Europe, Germany,
Recession choose on condition that one makes the right choice. This is why, when the wrong
choice is made (as it was when Ireland rejected the EU constitution), the choice is
treated as a mistake, and the establishment immediately demands that the ‘democratic’
process be repeated in order that the mistake may be corrected. When George
Papandreou, then Greek prime minister, proposed a referendum on the eurozone
bailout deal at the end of last year, the referendum itself was rejected as a false choice.
There are two main stories about the Greek crisis in the media: the German-European
story (the Greeks are irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging etc, and have to
be brought under control and taught financial discipline) and the Greek story (our
national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy imposed by Brussels).
When it became impossible to ignore the plight of the Greek people, a third story
emerged: the Greeks are now presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if a
war or natural catastrophe had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the
third is arguably the most disgusting. The Greeks are not passive victims: they are at
war with the European economic establishment, and what they need is solidarity in
their struggle, because it is our struggle too.
Greece is not an exception. It is one of the main testing grounds for a new socio-
economic model of potentially unlimited application: a depoliticised technocracy in
which bankers and other experts are allowed to demolish democracy. By saving Greece
from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself.
25 May

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