First, one shouldn’t underestimate the popularity of the euro in the southern-periphery countries—Greece, Spain, Portugal—for whom joining the eu meant accessing political and economic modernity. For Greece, in particular, it meant being part of the West in a different way to that of the us-imposed post-civil war regime. It seemed a guarantee of the new democratic course: after all, it’s only since 1974 that Greece has known a political regime similar to other Western countries, after decades of authoritarianism, military dictatorship and civil war. The European Community also offered the promise of combining prosperity with a social dimension, supposedly inherent to the project, which sealed the political compact that emerged after the fall of the Junta. Joining the euro seemed the logical conclusion of that process. Having the same currency as the most advanced countries has a tremendous power over people’s imagination—carrying in your pocket the same currency as Germans or Dutch, even if you are a low-paid Greek worker or pensioner—which those of us who’d been in favour of exiting the euro since the start of the crisis tended to underestimate.

Even now, after five years of some of the hardest shock therapy ever imposed—and the first imposed on a Western European country—public opinion is still split on the issue of the euro, although now with a much narrower majority in favour of staying in. This frame of mind also reveals a very strong subaltern mentality in Greek society, which probably goes back to the formation of the state in the 1830s—an ideology that emanates from the Greek elites, who always felt inferior to their European counterparts and had to demonstrate how faithful they were; they always thought they owed something to the Western powers. And indeed, each time their power was threatened, Western intervention played a decisive role in securing the existing social order, more particularly in the 1940s and the period leading to the 1967 military coup.

Second, in contrast to the position of Sweden, Denmark or the uk, for Greece quitting the euro would be extremely conflictual, because it would mean breaking with the neoliberal policies of the Memoranda. If you are serious about this, you have to be prepared for a confrontation. From 2012, when Syriza emerged as the largest opposition party, poised for government, it was clear that Tsipras didn’t want that fight, which is why he switched to a stance of staying in the Eurozone. Syriza’s original position was summed up by two slogans: ‘No sacrifice for the euro’ and ‘The euro is not a fetish’, which left open the question of how far to go in confronting the Eurogroup and the Troika. But this line was shelved soon after the June 2012 elections.

In the summer of 2015 it was Tsipras who used the argument of fear—that exiting the euro would mean chaos. In early June, after the Eurogroup rejected the Greek terms, which had already been intended as a capitulation, the Syriza Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos was asked by Paul Mason what would happen if Greece left the euro. He replied that it would be a return to the 1930s—the rise of Nazism! Tsipras himself used the image of collective suicide. What such statements reveal is that, for the Syriza leadership, exit was unthinkable—a black hole. It was outside their cognitive mapping, alien to their strategy which had already ruled out the possibility of an all-out confrontation. I think that’s the only thing that was clear in their minds. The main point of the ‘turn to realism’ taken by the leadership after losing the June 2012 elections by a narrow margin was to show that the option of exit had been definitively abandoned. Earlier, there had been an ambiguity about going in that direction, and therefore a certain openness. But really it was dropped after the elections of June 2012, the implicit justification being that we shouldn’t scare the more moderate voters whose support was needed to win the next election.

Well, first, we don’t have enough information about what exactly happened, what the terms of Schäuble’s offer were and to what extent it represented the position of the German government as a whole. What we do know is that Schäuble said there were two possibilities—either swallow the Third Memorandum, or exit the euro, with which we will even offer some assistance—but it’s hard to believe that this was not to be accompanied by conditionalities.

Absolutely. That is exactly what we in the Left Platform said at the time.footnote¹ In fact, one of the main arguments Tsipras used against us was that we were siding with Schäuble—they played on that hysterically during the entire summer of 2015. But it should have been explored. In fact, Panagiotis Lafazanis and others argued in the Cabinet in May that the government should send a representative to have informal talks with Schäuble, but Tsipras turned them down. He categorically refused to discuss the possibility.

Politically, there is no linear continuity between Eurocommunism and Syriza. The majority of Synaspismos members, who formed the bulk of Syriza, came from the orthodox Communist Party. Tsipras; Yannis Dragasakis; Synaspismos’s first leader, Maria Damanaki; the secretary until recently, Dimitris Vitsas—all these people came from the kke, which they left in 1991. The Syriza coalition, formed in 2004, included many other components—Trotskyist groups, Maoists, altermondialistes and so on—as well as the remnant Eurocommunists, the akoa. But the intellectual culture which permeated Synaspismos was dominated by traditional intellectuals from Eurocommunist backgrounds, and this had an impact. Indeed, the party’s theoretical institute is named after Nicos Poulantzas.