Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil episode 2 review: Shedding light on the Greek debt crisis

Making Brexit look like a crisis about as serious as an A level politics essay on sovereignty

(BBC/European Council Newsroom)

Part two of the three part series Inside Europe: Ten Years of Turmoil (BBC2) has the temerity to look beyond Brexit altogether, focusing on a crisis that very nearly did what Brexit spectacularly failed to do: bring down the European Union altogether.

That’s the Greek debt crisis, which begins in 2010 and threatens to engulf first the euro, then the European Union, then the world. The pro-Brexit viewer will doubtless find much vindication in a gripping and pretty terrifying hour. It makes clear how problem made by Greece came to threaten both the economic and political stability of a dozen or more nations.

There is an edgy standoffs between German and Greek politicians, one set of countries imposing salary hikes and tax cuts on another. As it spreads to other countries, Nicolas Sarkozy appears to explain how he told Silvio Berlusconi it was time for him to resign. A week later, he does so. For Britain’s small but determined “sovereignty” lobby, all this will prove them right. It’s proof for sceptics that the grand European project, designed to make the economies of Europe interdependent on one another so as to prevent war breaking out between them, ultimately went far too far.

But it also sheds light on the sheer infantilism of the current Brexit crisis. In this episode, when Europe’s leaders, Sarkozy, Tusk and others – talk about the Greek debt crisis as opposed to Brexit, which they discussed in last week’s episode, there is no disguising the change in tone. That crisis scared the hell out of them. Brexit, by contrast, provokes only confusion and pity.

This hour also sheds light on the decisions taken and positions held by the new wave of Greek politicians, including Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis, under the most intense pressure, when the fate of their people was held in the balance. Brexit is made to look like a crisis about as serious as an A level politics essay on sovereignty, inflicted on its country by a small cadre of decadent politicians insulated from the consequences of their decisions.

There is a lesson, too, right at the end. Tsipras seeks to heap pressure on the EU by holding a referendum in his own country over the austerity measures enforced on Greece by the EU. He wins the referendum, 62 to 38 per cent. Then, staring in the face the appalling consequences of being thrown out of the bloc, he ignores the result. “Step back from the desirable and reach for the feasible,” is how he puts it at the time.

He ignored the will of the people, and in the middle of civil unrest that was real, rather than threatened or imagined. Six months later, his people, having stared into the abyss, acknowledge he made the right decision by re-electing him.