Yes, our choice is to overhaul Europe without repeating the mistakes of the past.
In the early years of the eurozone, we made many mistakes, sometimes based on lies. Here, we need to say that too with humility and determination. Sometimes we have lied to the people, suggesting that life in Athens could be like that in Berlin without reform, and that was not true. But who paid for that? The political leaders who lied? No, the people who believed those lies.
It was the Greek people who paid, after all these years, when the crisis broke out – the financial crisis that became a sovereign debt crisis. The Greek people, after years during which we sought to correct all those mistakes through policies which, born of distrust, created, in one fell swoop, it has to be said, injustices and incomprehension. We lost the zest for social cohesion, which held us together. We lost it because we lost ourselves in a civil war, within Europe, between powers that had lost confidence in one another.
That is the history of the decade that is coming to an end: a form of internal civil war where we have sought out our differences, our little betrayals, and where we have somehow forgotten the world in which we live. A civil war where we have preferred to correct these little differences and betrayals, forgetting that, opposite, there are radically different powers and that the only relevant question was how to make the eurozone an economic power that could stand up to China and the United States. How to make our Europe a diplomatic and military power capable of defending our values and interests in the face of authoritarian regimes that emerge from deep crises that can shake our societies. That is our only challenge, not another.
