In ancient Greece, politics and the market were not decoupled.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Greece is not an easy country to do business in.
Greece has been, in many ways, a partially dysfunctional society. For example, the wealthy barely pay taxes... to an extent, that's true elsewhere, including the United States, but it's been pretty extreme in Greece.
Without Greece, it is not possible to preserve the integrity of the European phenomenon.
If Greece had gone through a very normal political life, I may have not been in politics. But just the fact that I lived through huge upheavals and very difficult struggles and polarization and the barbarism of dictatorships - that made me feel that we had to change this country.
Those who have a lot of money in Greece invest in housing abroad. It's all immoral. The Greek crisis is structural, but also political.
The Greek city-states politicised citizen and subject, creating institutions that were way ahead of anything in China or India. The politicians of antiquity exercised a political and military, if not economic, hegemony on the culture as a whole. The idea of democracy was first born and practised here.
Let me say again that the relationship is asymmetrical: there's no democracy without a market economy, but you can have a market economy without democracy.
As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.
When the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free and was never free again.
A society is not a market. It is a political community.