The Snowflake That Started an Avalanche

“Greece is in a free fall.”

That’s the first thing Yanis Varoufakis says to me as we sit down for an interview at his apartment in Athens, and it sets the tone of the half-hour conversation that follows.

As a professor of economics at Athens University, Varoufakis has been on the front lines, literally, of Greece’s economic turmoil. His own salary has been slashed nearly in half. He mentions that he just came back from a corner shop where he was photocopying exam papers for his students. The departments own machine broke a while back, he tells me, and there’s no money to fix it, let alone buy paper or toner for it.

Like many journalists, I’ve interviewed Varoufakis about the crisis a couple of times before. But those chats were on the phone or via Skype. This is the first time I’ve met him in person. I come in on the heels of a television crew who has been filming in the apartment. Twenty minutes later a Swedish radio journalist is waiting for me to finish up.

“It’s been a revolving door for months now,” Varoufakis laughs. Still, he makes coffee for me and my fixer.

I semi-joke that it must be interesting teaching economics right now in Greece, considering that the situation provides an amazing case study in how badly things can go wrong.

“Yeah,” he tells me, “It’s like studying vulcanology and being so close to the volcano that you get badly burned by the lava.”

The night before our interview, Varoufakis tells me, he attended a farewell party for a newly minted department Ph.D who managed to get a job … in Britain, not Greece. Varoufakis says he’s urging all his students to look outside of the country for employment right now. “This is the human cost of the crisis,” he tells me. “That Ph.D student was a product of the Greek government, the Greek government spent a lot of money to educate that person. And now that person’s skills are gone, possibly forever.”

But, he notes, that student’s departure will be seen as a plus in the accountant’s books – the state won’t have to pay the student a teacher’s assistant salary any more.

And then Varoufakis admits that he too is thinking about leaving Greece. In the past, he’s taught in Britain, Belgium and Australia.

When I’ve talked to him before, he seemed to retain a bit of optimism about Greece’s future, a thread of hope that somehow the country can avoid default and possibly even keep using the euro.

But now, I can definitely sense that most of that optimism is gone.

“Greece reminds me of an airplane where you walk into the cockpit and there’s no one there, and even if start pulling the levers nothing happens. We don’t have monetary policy levers, fiscal policy, tax policy. Greece doesn’t exist any more as a functioning state. It’s all being done by fiat, in faxes and emails that are being sent from Frankfurt and from Brussels.”

And it’s not just Greece, he says. European leaders seem to be too scared to do what needs to be done to ensure that Greece’s economic problems don’t spread to Italy, Spain and beyond.

“Let’s remember that Europe is quite skilled at bringing the whole planet down. It’s done it twice in the last 100 years, and it’s about to do it for a third time.”

That’s when Varoufakis notes another historical irony, this time a Greek one.

“Twice in the last 70 years or so, Greece has played the role of the snowflake that started an avalanche. It’s not responsible for the avalanche, but it was the snowflake that started it.”

“The Cold War,” he says, “was the first avalanche. It started here, not in Berlin. It started in Athens in December 1944 with the beginnings of the Greek Civil War. ” That war pitted the military branch of the Greek Communist Party, backed by Soviets, against the Greek Army, backed by the United States and Britain.

“And now here we are again, at the center of the beginning of a new Great Depression. The irony of history.”

I ask whether Greece should try to stay in the eurozone, or opt out and go back the Drachma.

“Some great big default is looming, an implosion of the economy, which may or may not help Greece turn the page and start afresh, after a lot of suffering. Hopefully it will.”

Staying in the eurozone, Varoufakis says, would require a fundamental restructuring of the way the entire single currency system works. Going back to the Drachma, he notes, would require a very difficult currency devaluation that could see a huge percentage of Greece’s GDP slashed in a single stroke.

Either way, Varoufakis is tired of waiting. “It’s the worst of the worst,” he tells me.

Politicians both inside and outside of Greece need to make their decisions, he says, so that the Greeks can get on with trying to put their economy and their country back together.