The former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis (also a former colleague) has compared Greece’s situation to “fiscal waterboarding” at the hands of its creditors. Thomas Piketty has accused Germany of forgetting its own post-World War II experience with debt relief. When I read some of the appeals to Germany and the European Union on Greece’s debt situation, I thought as an act of strategic framing that Greece/Syriza (and to a lesser extent those of its supporters like Piketty) might be going about it wrong.
As I wrote about in my first book Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, in the late 1990s, the Jubilee 2000 campaign galvanized a global movement to write-off the debts of the world’s poorest countries. That movement succeeded in persuading key creditors, including Germany, as well as the World Bank and IMF to embrace (or at least grudgingly implement) debt relief.
Now, the stakes in the current situation are very different. Then, Germany was only owed about $6 billion by developing countries, and unlike Greece with the common currency, Germany’s own economic situation was scarcely implicated in the economies of the developing world. That said, there are some parallels here that I think are potentially relevant, the traditional reluctance by the German finance ministry and elites, particularly among Christian Democrats, to write-off debt being among them.
The Jubilee 2000 campaign succeeded in putting moral pressure on creditor governments and international organizations. By framing their campaign in terms of the Christian notion of a Jubilee year, the campaign was able to mobilize religiously minded supporters at the grassroots and elite levels in many countries. While that appeal did not resonate everywhere (I talked about the case of Japan in my book), the campaign was particularly successful in identifying a frame that had far-reaching appeal in many countries, generating international support and pressure for action.
Events like the 1999 Cologne G-7 summit created par
ticular moments where campaigners were able to turn the world’s gaze on Germany to be more forthcoming on debt relief. Indeed, the cover of my book shows the human ring of 40,000 campaigners who encircled the summit and the Cologne cathedral. While the Germany case ended up on the cutting room floor for my book, my dissertation goes into more detail. There I describe the stakes for the new left-leaning government headed by the recently elected Gerhard Schroeder:
By being host to the G-7 summit, the Germans wanted to have a successful meeting. National prestige and reputational concerns become significant motivating forces for the hosts of such summits. Advocacy efforts created what was perceived as a political success, a new agreement on debt. This put the onus on the hosts to lead….
As Peter Lanzet of the Protestant relief service EED argued, “As for the SDP, I don’t think without mass mobilization Wieczorek-Zeul would have had the ear of Schroeder to that extent.” In this regard, Misereor’s George Stoll saw the contribution of the churches as especially important for mass mobilization. You can “have expert groups that do brilliant research,” he argued, “but if you want to have a chain of 40,000 people at the G-8 Summit, you need 40,000 people to come from all over Germany.” If you want the issue to be covered by the press, he suggested, you also needed this mass of people to turn out. How was the campaign able to mobilize people? As Jurgen Kaiser argued, the campaign was able to mobilize people because the message transcended the political system. Even though the core support for the campaign came from the “ecumenical left,” Jubilee rang into the CDU stronghold with a former CDU Minister for Social Affairs, Norbert Blum, taking part in the human chain.
Jubilee campaigners did try to evoke Germany’s own post World War II past with respect to debt relief (for a recent effort with respect to Greece, see here), with British campaigners sending thousands of postcards to the government of Helmut Kohl with pictures of the signing of the 1953 London agreement. Tom Callaghy and Ronald Kassimir described the campaign:
As I write in my dissertation, I’m not sure that effort was all that successful, as it raised objections from the German government who said their situation was very different at the end of World War II compared to developing countries, similar to objections Kindred raised on this blog about comparing Germany and Greece today:
Believe me, those statements and others like them were noted in Berlin and Frankfurt. This is the context of the last 6 months of negotiations, which surely is relevant. In Syriza’s words the reduction of Greece’s debt is explicitly linked to continued German genuflection over the War. In addition to being unbelievably offensive, this does not seem to have the desired effect on Germans or the rest of Europe, which was as damaged by World War II as Greece was, so doubling-down on this strategy is unlikely to have any positive impression on anyone.
More broadly, what I think the Greeks have failed to do, unlike the Jubilee 2000 campaigners, is create a reservoir of good will and support in Germany, the rest of Europe, and the world for their cause. Jubilee campaigners tied the shackles of heavy external debts to human suffering, death, hunger, and lack of access to health and education. While that has been in the statements of Varoufakis and the Greek government, it’s not clear to me that has been the main message.
Polls suggest the German public remains firmly on the side of the Merkel government in taking a hard line. What messages, if any, would convince them to take a different view? Rationalists would likely say if Germany saw its own self-interest at stake in the outcome, then this could potentially move both elites and the mass public. Joseph Stiglitz made just such the case on Twitter:
Stiglitz: Preventing Grexit will take Angela Merkel to say “we don’t want to be blamed for destroying Europe for the 3rd time in 101 years.”
— Joseph Stiglitz (@stiglitzian) May 17, 2015
That may be in this case what’s necessary to convince the public that the costs are worth bearing. What about non-material arguments, moral arguments, ideational or emotional appeals? My own work suggests moral arguments can play a role up to a point, but this becomes more difficult the costlier the associated action and certainly Germany and European support for Greece is costly action (though it may be relatively more cost effective to support Greece now than face the consequences of Grexit later).
Let’s say that moral argumentation has some role to play in convincing Germans and Europeans to care about Greece. Framing continued or enhanced financial austerity as akin to torture may be too antagonistic, leading the Germans and Europeans to reject the concerns out of hand. The literature on framing from Acharya and others suggests the need to identify locally resonant messages that will appeal to target audiences. From my reading on the negotiations over Greece’s debt, Syriza hasn’t done nearly enough to appeal to the hearts and minds of the international public generally and the German public specifically to create more support for what is arguably both morally and pragmatically right. At the moment, if Germany ultimately commits to more debt relief to Greece, it will be with a headwind rather than with a neutral or supportive public.
* If you accept Mark Blyth’s recent piece in Foreign Affairs, this whole situation is not really about Greece but about bailing out big European banks in France and Germany in particular. From this perspective, strategic framing and messaging might be totally irrelevant, but there you go…
Great post.
I think another thing worth noting is that the nature of the interaction is pretty different. Jubilee 2000 was pitched as a one-shot game and the important actors could act unilaterally. The EZ debt crisis is a 19-player game (at least) with an infinitely-long shadow of the future. Thus, consensus is harder to reach, and players cannot focus solely on short run outcomes unless they are willing to risk being horribly burned in the future.
It’s probably also worth noting that, as practical matter, Jubilee 2000 wasn’t a huge success. Turns out indebted countries had problems other than being indebted. I think this describes the mentality towards Greece today as well. But that opens up a number of other incentive-based policies: if Greece pays down X% of the principal then the Troika will forgive the same %, or push out maturities, or lower interest payments, or whatever. That kind of program would not constitute outright forgiveness, but it would have a similar economic effect whilst being more politically feasible.
Kindred, thanks for your comment. The idea of paying Greece for results sounds a bit like Nancy Birdsall’s ideas for results-based development finance. What I’ve always wondered if is it costs something to implement policies, how do broke governments reform when reform is costly and you don’t get paid until you do the things donors want done. The Jubilee 2000 campaign was promised as a fresh start after a series of salami slicing deals with the Paris Club that rolled over old debts with fresh ones. On that score, there may be more similarities between Greece and LDCs pre Jubilee. On the other hand, as I understand it, the structure of Greece’s debt, unlike LDCs, was such that it faced a big repayment burden this year and not a lot for several years. So, if it could get through this year, it might have had a breather for a bit to grow and get its house in order. I’m not sure if that’s quite an accurate reading of the situation.
On the Jubilee 2000 campaign, it was a political success but whether or not it was a policy success is an open or at least different question. Countries took on new debts from new creditors like China and may not have used the fresh start for the most productive purposes (as critics said many would). I think some folks at CGD attempted to analyze on balance if Jubilee was a positive force or not.
I’ve really enjoyed your previous work, and have circulated it (e.g.
“China Tries to Come to Grips with Pollution” Duck 2014-11-05) to friends. Here, I fear you’ve omitted a number of key variables that complicate the case and move it well beyond a simple argument about framing. Just today, a German friend reminded me that German banks and industry, not workers, are key beneficiaries of the Eurozone structure, and agreeing that most of the payout is not “support for Greece” but a bailout of improvident German and French banks. He noted that the Merkel government has been “framing” the issue on its own for several years, through Boulevard – Median gegenuber die angeblich faulen Griechen, “tabloid press attacking the so-called lazy Greeks.” Another German friend has stopped reading Frankfurter Allgemeine out of disgust with its anti-Greek attitude.
Tsipras, while taking several steps toward meeting the Eurozone’s goals (even more today), has “framed” his arguments in a way that have won the attention of a far wider audience, if not the man in the German street. Others, like Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman a year ago (to the Bank for International Settlements) have raised the parallel of the 1953 debt forgiveness, though like your correspondent “Kindred” many bankers in the audience found this “outrageous” (see Gillian Tett’s coverage in Financial Times). But to many others, it has made sense. (Friedman also calls attention to the Calvinist moralizing of Germans on this issue.)
One consequence of the actions of the German government over the past six months has been to alert the world to the generosity Germany itself received in the past. We are also more aware that Germany appears to be a redoubt of anti-Keynesianism, an attitude that brings its own problems. Finally, many more students of the situation are now discussing the abandonment of the 1992 goals of “convergence” and “economic integration” and recognizing how things are tilted toward the divergence favoring rich northern exporting countries. The term ausplundern den Nachbarn, “Beggar-Thy-Neighbor,” is increasingly being used. Eurozone imbalance — a word recently used by the European Commission itself — threatens to do long-term harm to the EU.
You don’t pay much attention to the tensions within Germany, especially after 1989, that have made the German population susceptible to the government’s “framing.”
One problem with your post is that it treats “framing” as an isolate, without consideration of a complex historical and political context. Another is that it ignores the earlier counter-framing that Wolfgang Schäuble and others have been carrying on. (How often, for instance, have they told the German public that banks are the prime beneficiaries of German funding? Can it really be that Mark Blyth’s article comes as a surprise?) Perhaps most telling is that you treat the German public as the main target of a framing exercise: folks might well ask, “Isn’t Germany just one member of a multi-state Eurozone?” Suddenly, German is running the entire show, and international relations experts treat that as a completely natural occurrence. Others may scratch their heads.
Another head-scratcher is your use of “genuflexion.” I think you simply mean “guilt.”)
So, I think this post lacks the richness and subtlety of your previous posts. Possibly because “framing” is often treated in so simple a way. Given the European hostility to Syriza from the get-go (only 10 days after it came to office, the ECB cut its credit to Greek banks), it’s hard to deny that German framing has been relentless. People around the world, now far more aware of how the Eurozone is run, may be unable to alter German decisions, but they will certainly regard Germany more guardedly.
Daniel,
Thanks much for your thoughtful reply. I think you raise an important point about counter-framing and why Germany rather than Europe is treated as the target actor as if that was natural rather than a product of the outcome of previous political machinations of years before. I agree on some level that is the problem of the wider framing literature is that is often one-sided. Chong and Druckman have a paper on counter-framing effects that is probably germane here.
https://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8820724&fileId=S0022381612000837
Obviously, the Greek government’s ability to effect public opinion in Germany and the wider EU is contingent upon what others are saying, including the German government, elites, media, etc. On that score, one could say based on recent public opinion that I cited in the WSJ is that the narrative of framing the Greeks as profligate and irresponsible has successfully convinced many in Germany to believe that, even if Greece has engaged in serious reforms in tax policy, pensions, etc.
I think for the purposes of the blog post, I was trying to do a hot take on what the framing literature might say about Syriza’s efforts to generate traction in Germany and beyond for its cause. But that’s what blog posts are for, to begin a conversation and thought process.
I think the issue of guilt/WWI responsibility is an important one in that it raises the question of whether or not countries will do costly things one others try to shame them by tapping into past guilt or recent hypocrisy. Kelly Greenhill and I have a new piece in an edited volume on this question, which comes down to how do weak actors exercise influence over stronger ones when there is a gap between their words and their deeds. We conclude that weak actors need to leverage more costly punishment mechanisms and that mere exposure alone won’t do it. Greece probably tried that with the referendum but Germany and Europe aren’t quite clear if Grexit is more or less expensive than keeping Greece in the Euro zone.
BTW – “genuflection” is Kindred’s word in the text from his blog post that I quoted…
Probably meant guilt but you’d have to ask him!
My mistake on “genuflection.” I apologize. Thanks for this very informative message. “How weak actors influence strong” is a terrific topic and I look forward to reading that piece, and I’ll dig out the Chong and Druckman essay. Gratefully,
Dan
The Germans will/would never have been convinced. Syriza’s tactics, however, play well with the French, Italians, and other key players- including large segments of the left in other ‘hostile’-governmental states.
Learn more about European politics ‘on the ground’ before writing nonsense.
John, thanks for your post and comments. I have written about European debt relief politics and transatlantic relations before including field work in the UK, Germany, France, and Belgium. I’m not writing this from a place of ignorance…
Americans writing about Europe… as hilarious as the American tourists in Paris.