Filibuster CartoonsTitle: It's-a me! Mario Monti! (click to view)
Date: November 14, 2011
A couple weeks ago, Greek prime minister Georgios Papandreou
made headlines when he abruptly decided to sack his nation's top military brass and replace them with soldiers deemed more politically favorable. Foreign observers reacted nervously. After all, Greece's last military junta only stepped down in 1974, and the country's rapidly-unraveling political scene seemed like the perfect breeding ground for a fresh coup d'etat. The Greeks themselves were eager to downplay the incident, however. Generals get fired for political reasons all the time, they said, assuring the world that Greece's era of coups and forcibly installed undemocratic regimes was long over.
But that era did return, in a way, this week. Still reeling from the huge backlash against his controversial plan to hold an "austerity referendum," Papandreou finally agreed to step down on Friday. But no politician took his place. Instead of the deputy prime minister or some high-ranking cabinet official, the figurehead president of Greece agreed to install a non-politician "technocrat" to run the country. Prime Minister Loukas Papadimos is not a member of the Greek legislature nor a member of any political party. He hasn't been elected to anything, ever, in fact. His background is in banking, where he most famously served as governor of the Greek central bank from 1994 to 2002 and then deputy governor of the EU one from 2002 to 2010.
A few days leader, a near-identical series of events unfolded in nearby Italy. With fears mounting that the irresponsibly governed, debt-plagued nation was on the brink of becoming the "next Greece," demands that prime minister Silvio Berlusconi step down (which are never quiet at the best of times) began to get louder and louder. Conceding that a debt crisis was the one scandal he couldn't joke his way out of, Berlusconi formally resigned on Saturday. In his place Mario Monti was installed, another unelected financial bureaucrat. Dubbed "Super Mario" by the press on account of the press being lazy and uncreative, Monti previously served over a decade as one of the EU's top fiscal bureaucrats, but like Mr. Papadimos in Greece, holds no seat in the parliament and is a member of no party. Both prime ministers are expected to fill their cabinets will men and women of similar profile.
Now, the logic of appointing these two non-politicians to govern two of Europe's most infamous economic basketcases is obviously fairly clear. Both men are prided for their economic degrees and fiscal know-how, as well as lengthy experience in dealing with EU institutions and the continental banking regime. As non-politicians, they were likewise celebrated for their non-partisan, non-ideological approach to problem-solving, and neutral indifference to winning re-election and other political distractions.
At the same time, however, It's hard to overstate how bizarre this turn of events looks to North American eyes, and how dramatically it represents a deviation from the sort of democratic norms that have traditionally been thought to unite the western world.
In Canada, while I'm never a fan of prime ministers like Paul Martin or Kim Campbell, who ascend to power through the backdoor of party appointment following a predecessor's resignation, at the very least such leaders are still elected parliamentarians from the ruling party that won the last federal election. And the American order of succession specifically places two elected officers (the House speaker and Senate president pro tem) ahead of the unelected cabinet in order to ensure the presidency retains some veneer of democratic legitimacy even in a time of crisis. The North American equivalent of what happened in Greece or Italy would literally be like President Obama resigning and being replaced by Alan Greenspan, or Harper quitting and getting succeeded by a former NAFTA commissioner — and no one in either party in either country having much of a problem with it.
What's equally creepy is the significant backroom role played by Germany, France, and the EU establishment in forcing the ouster of Berlusconi and Papandreou. Writing in the British
Spectator, Fraser Nelson authored
a very interesting piece in which he described the sacking of the Greek and Italian governments as a major strategic victory for the so-called "Frankfurt Group" comprising the continent's richest nations and their senior Eurocrat allies, who have been expressing increasing (and open) disdain for domestic sovereignty throughout the Eurodebt crisis. From such a perspective, if the economic future of the entire continent is at stake, then surely we can afford to topple a couple of lesser governments if that helps ensure a brighter tomorrow for the rest. After all, when all European economies are integrated, and the strength and worth of the Euro currency can be severely affected by domestic decisions in far-off capitals, then it's not unreasonable to argue that the decision of who gets to be Greek prime minister is indeed Mrs. Merkel's business.
These recent developments, coupled with the unfaltering refrain from the major players that the EU and Euro "must be preserved" seems to indicate that the "dissolve or centralize" solution struggle is shifting decisively to the latter. We now have a pretty solid precedent for imposing a sort of "managed democracy," or perhaps "EU receivership," style government in the Union's peripheries. If it works well in Italy and Greece, who's to say installing unelected "technocrat" regimes won't become the new normal in any nation that the Euro-elites deem insufficiently qualified to honor their fiscal obligations to the larger continent?
I'm not in denial that such regimes may indeed go a long way in addressing some of the systemic governance problems in erratic countries that possess a chronically irresponsible, immature political class. But we should be very clear that this sort of rhetoric has a long history when it comes to justifying regime change, and once the anti-democratic genie has been let out of the bottle, the long-term consequences for freedom are not always pretty.
CKA Uber 
