Greece's Clientalist Model

David Patrikarakos of The Daily Beast reports that Stathis Kalyvas, professor of political science at Yale.

Identified a recurrent pattern in modern Greek history: namely, the country’s ability to engage in vastly ambitious projects that are beyond its capacity, that receive international attention out of proportion to its actual size, and that invariably fail.

Kalyvas' pattern looked fine until we reached the third part about failure. If you would understand the underlying Greek problem, know first that Communism/Socialism was popular in Greece at the end of World War II. Their anti-German resistance had been supported by Soviet agents.

President Truman stepped in with Marshall Plan money and military assistance to ensure the Reds didn't win control of Greece. This left a lot of leftists unhappy. Patrikarakos explains how the government dealt with this unhappiness.

(It) began in 1974 when Greeks rose up to overthrow the governing military junta that had been in power since 1967. The transition to democracy was peaceful but the price was the establishment of a clientalist political model, specifically the establishment of a welfare state designed to compensate those on the left who had lost under the 1946-49 civil war between the Greek army and communist forces, and then suffered under the junta.

“The civil service expanded and unions became hugely powerful,” says Dimitar Bechev, visiting fellow at the European Institute and the London School of Economics. “The other side of the bargain was that those who voted for the center right in Greece, the bourgeoisie and professionals, benefitted from a lax governmental approach to collecting taxes.”

Wow! Clients on both the left and the right, how can they lose? Answer: a chronic lack of tax receipts means they cannot afford to keep paying civil servants and other recipients of government largess, the Greek dilemma in a nutshell.

Your basic Greek is happy with the government giving stuff to people as long as he or she doesn't have to pay the taxes to support it. As Margaret Thatcher said of socialists,

They always run out of other people's money. It's quite a characteristic of them.