Tantalisingly, after all those talks the gap up to the evening of Friday 26 June was not especially large. However, with the subsequent breakdown in negotiations, even with a deal almost in reach, one thing has become clear.
Whereas a little while ago it seemed as if outsiders were sat watching a Greek tragedy, with unavoidable calamity thrust upon the protagonists by the forces of ineluctable fate and their own failings, now it seems we have actually been witness to something far worse. For this is surely the Theatre of the Absurd.
The ECB, EU and IMF creditors on the one hand, and the Greek government on the other, have been engaged in nothing less than a conversation of the deaf. The language that both sides have used, the intellectual justification for their arguments, even the “facts” on which they have been based, have all been so different, the one side from the other, that no true dialogue has been possible.
Right is left and left is right, and perhaps the two together, depending on which side one has stood. Alice is not just through the looking glass. She is upside down, inside out and the wrong way around, all at the same time.
There was, and perhaps still is, a sneaking suspicion that since their January elections, the Greek negotiating position – always the more antagonistic of the two – had been informed by some Machiavellian form of game theory, a branch of economics in which the Greek Finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis, excels. Today, however, that sneaking suspicion is giving way to a nagging doubt that Greece has played a bad hand… with stunning incompetence.
