Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Denise RQ
It's a great pleasure to be with you. It's a great honor.
I take off my jacket because I can't teach in a jacket,
and I am a teacher.
"Daskalos," is that right?
"Daskalos," I'm a teacher.
(Applause)
Peter and George have done a wonderful job
conjuring up, on the one hand,
a very, very powerful and exciting vision of the future,
though I was slightly frightened to discover that in 10 years
my computer will be smarter than I am.
I thought it was already smarter than I am.
(Laughter)
And George recalled us to the centrality of values.
So many of the words that we use
to encapsulate our values in the English language,
started their lives here in Greece.
And so it was very touching to me to see those words on the screen
and see them evoked by one of your powerful thinkers.
I'm going to be a great disappointment
because I'm going to tell you something you already know.
Everything I'm going to tell you, you know already
and you know better than I do.
But sometimes a stranger who comes to the village,
tells the village a story,
and the village rediscovers something about itself.
So I'm the stranger who comes to the Greek village
and tries to tell you something that you know,
but may not have seen it the way a stranger sees it.
I'm going to talk to you about this crazy title,
"If I were 25 and Greek."
I'm not 25, I'm not Greek,
but I teach 25-year-olds for a living
at the University of Toronto and at Harvard.
I teach masters in Public Policy and masters in Public Administration
and I know one thing,
which is that a country that doesn't give 25-year-olds a pass to the future,
is a country that has no future.
That's why I'm talking about the Greek crisis,
as if I was what I am now, most manifestly not,
25 and Greek.
Let me begin with a chart that you know only too well.
European youth unemployment.
The light blue is Greek youth unemployment between 18 and 25.
55% of your young people are unemployed.
You know that.
Look at the green, the dark green at the bottom.
That is German youth unemployment.
Look at the way it's declined throughout the crisis.
You will say German youth unemployment has been low and falling
because they're rich.
I would tell you that it is because youth unemployment is low
that they are rich.
I reverse the causation.
Germany for 50 years,
has built a tramway align between education and employment.
They put employers, trade unions, the public sector
together with apprenticeships, employment training.
They have set out as a national project,
to make sure that every 18-year-old who's 18
gets qualified and trained
in technical, artisanal, manufacturing skills
and is channeled into a job.
If you ask one single reason
why Germany has been successful,
it's because they invested as a national project,
not merely in the education of their children,
but in their transmission into the labor market.
So there's some negative message in that horrible chart for you,
but there's also a positive message.
I know it's Germany, but hey,
we can learn from people we have trouble with.
(Laughter)
If I was 25 and Greek, all these things would be true.
I would be angry.
I'd be angry at Greek politicians. Ι'd be angry at the financial elite.
I'd be angry at European leaders who arrived this week,
and begun to shout at your Minister of Finance in a disrespectful way.
So that the Minister of Finance had to shout back and say:
"Do you understand the pressure we're under?"
I would be angry most of all
at a thing that I don't think it's been discussed enough,
in which I can speak of as an outsider,
the man who comes to the village.
They're saying terrible things about you overseas,
and this adds to the weight of depression and melancholy.
George spoke of melancholy.
There is melancholy because they accuse you of being lazy,
they accuse you of being tribalist,
they accuse you of being clientelistic,
they accuse you of being the worst complainers in Europe,
and you bear in addition to all your other problems
the weight of European disappropriation,
the weight of European condescension,
and they say things that are simply not true about Greece.
They say you're lazy.
You look up the numbers
and in fact you work harder than most other European societies.
That is not the good news you think it is.
It means you're working too hard and not sufficiently productively.
I'd like a Greece in which you work less,
but you are the most productive economy in Europe.
But don't let them tell you [that] you don't work hard.
It's just not true.
But that adds to the burden of melancholy and oppression
which you want to throw off.
So if I'm 25, I want to escape.
When I was talking to the young people,
these wonderful people in the red shirts,
I was asking every one of them,
"What are you going to do after you graduate?"
So many of them are going back to the States,
going to Germany, going to Switzerland.
You'd go anywhere you get your job, anywhere that can get you a qualification.
But worst of all, anywhere that can allow you to forget
that you were ever Greek.
This is in its root, psychologically,
a crisis of humiliation and shame and there's nothing worse for a country.
You are a great people, a proud people,
and no one likes humiliation and shame.
And if you can escape it by going to another country,
that's what you try and do.
And you're leaving in very large numbers; again, you know these figures.
This is just going to Germany, but Greeks are going to France,
they're going to England, they're going to America,
they're going to my country Canada, and hey, it's wonderful,
it's wonderful for us, not so good for you.
And one of the models that you are being talked about,
or one of the examples that you're being asked to emulate,
is a little country called Latvia.
Latvia went through a brutal internal devaluation.
20% compression of its economy.
Brutal compression of the public service.
Does that sound familiar?
You're being put through the same medicine,
and now they're telling you
Latvia came through the medicine and the patient survived.
What they don't tell you,
is that Latvia lost 10% of its population.
This is why thinking about the crisis through the eyes of someone 25
is so important.
We want to get you through the crisis, and you want to get through the crisis,
with your population, your best and your brightest,
here, in Greece, and not in Canada, not in the United States, not in Germany.
Or get them to come home.
If you can't get out, you feel trapped.
You can't afford to go, you can't afford to stay.
You're living with your mom and dad.
Your mom and dad find it difficult to take the pressure.
And again, the weight of shame and humiliation,
living in a society where you feel trapped.
You have also, in this country, pretty obviously, a crisis of trust.
You can't trust anybody.
You can't trust the authorities,
and when you can't trust the authorities,
the social cohesion of a society begins to tear away.
I make the point about trust
because you start to think, and this society starts to think,
the only solutions available to me are individual solutions.
Solutions that begin with the word 'I,' not the word 'we.'
That's the price you pay for collapse of social trust.
And the studies do confirm here
that there is less social and civic trust in Greece than in other societies.
And that's a problem.
Ιt's a problem you've got to solve and only you can solve.
Find a way to trust the 'we.'
The other thing I noticed when I talk to Greeks,
and Greeks are absolutely fantastic,
you are fantastic at describing your problem.
I've been here 96 hours, and I've had the most sophisticated analysis
of your problems I've ever heard in my life.
I've heard 56 things that are wrong with Greece
or 34 things that are wrong with Greece.
The most focused of you give me 26 reasons, right?
This is what John Maynard Keynes said is very useful.
What John Maynard Keynes said in the pit of the Depression was,
there're 26 things that are wrong with a car,
but there's one thing that keeps it from starting,
and that's the magneto, the alternator.
Fix the alternator
and we can fix the other things that are wrong with the car later.
You don't have to solve all the problems at once,
but you do have to decide what's your magneto, right?
That's what Keynes is telling us, that's what he learned in the Depression.
Keynes answer on the Depression was it's a failure of effective demand.
Greek society has to define what's its magneto problem.
I've given you one thing, that I think is very important,
which is improve the linkage
between education, training, and employment and do it now.
It means breaking open your universities,
getting your employers together
with your trade unions together with the public sector,
and saying: How do we save this generation, how do we start now?"
That's a magneto problem.
But let me give you another idea.
An even more basic idea of the magneto problem as I see it.
You got to have...
- and I think this is a universal lesson, that every society has learnt,
and if you think I'm being superior here, you're wrong.
Canada has faced this problem.
Every serious country has to learn the rules of democratic sovereignty.
What is it that countries have to do in order to maintain
democratic sovereignty in a global market.
The rules are:
don't pay yourself more than you earn,
don't borrow more than you can repay,
pay your damn taxes and don't lie to yourself.
Four rules that if the political system adopts and accepts,
and there's acceptance across the political spectrum
about those four rules,
there isn't much you can do.
And every society only learns it, learns those rules,
when it breaks them.
My country broke them in the 70s, 80s and 90s,
and we almost went off the cliff.
And we learned those were the rules.
And if you break those rules, you lose democratic sovereignty
and this is a proud democratic country
and it must retain its freedom.
And the way to retain its freedom is live within those rules.
There are other things,
- and this day, this wonderful day,
will summon up all the sources of inspiration.
But some of the sources of inspiration come from adversity.
Every time I talk to Greeks, they talk about survival and endurance.
This is an enormous resource for a society.
You all have grandparents and great grandparents,
and great-great grandparents who know what it was to survive
occupation, Civil War,
the destruction of 30% of your economy between 1941 and 1948.
You've been here, you survived, you will survive,
because you have the strength of historical learning
that comes from that experience.
And you also know:
"If it isn't us, who's it going to be?
Why did I come here from Canada,
to be here, simply to be in this room with you,
to share your faith and your love of your country?"
Patriotism is a cashable asset.
Countries that don't believe in themselves are not countries that succeed,
and you are in this room
because you feel that passion for your country
and you know that if you don't do it, no one will.
You've got lots to build on.
A diaspora where Greeks succeed everywhere.
I can't walk into a great university without meeting a Greek
here, here, here and there.
Why am I in this room?
Because my teaching assistant at Harvard was a Greek, Fotini Christia.
Fotini Christia is now an assistant professor at MIT.
She said to me: "Ignatieff, you got to go to Athens."
I said, "Fotini, I'm there." (Laughter)
That's how your diaspora works. It's wonderful, it's inspiring.
You've always been in a great part of the world.
You're the hub of the Balkans,
you're the hub of the eastern Mediterranean,
and despite all the problems with your education system,
you're the best-educated generation in Greek history.
And that's incredibly important. It makes it possible.
The work has been done on you.
You're now in a position to exploit the opportunities
that Peter has shown us in his first presentation.
And you know this stuff. I don't need to tell you.
You need a four-season tourist industry, not a one-season tourist industry.
You need to move out of low skills into the high skills and into software.
You need to move from low value to high-value export,
which means that Greek wine from Santorini
- like I was drinking on Saturday night -
and cheese and feta and all the wonderful products of Greece
are on the best shelves, in the best supermarkets
in the best markets in the world.
That's where you belong.
You've got the products, you have to do that and you can do that.
Shipping and services. The world travels by boat.
The natural advantage,
the historical advantages of Greece in this area
are to be seized and exploited.
You don't want the South Koreans running the global shipping industry.
You want Greeks running the global shipping industry,
and you can do it.
Natural resources and mining are important.
The Canadian ambassador tells me "El Dorado Mining,"
a Canadian mining firm,
wants to open up a mine in Northwest Greece,
to mine gold in Greece, hey, that sounds good to me.
But you've got to get the permissions through the municipality, so get it done.
You've got investors who want to invest billions of dollars in your economy.
You got to clear away the obstacles.
Finally, two points, because I'm an old professor and a teacher.
You have the best, single brand in the world
for Philosophy and Humanities learning.
Aristotle, Plato, Socrates.
That means that Athens can become the world center for Humanities teaching,
for every single undergraduate and postgraduate student in the world,
and you need to do that and you can do that.
That reputation is pure gold,
but you have to liberate your universities to seize that opportunity.
It's the same thing with theater.
You cannot stand, as a tourist as I did, when I was 20 years old,
stand in the Epidaurus theater without understanding
that the entire theatrical tradition of the world started there.
That means that you must be the world center for theatrical education.
Don't let London steal that.
That belongs to Epidaurus.
Those ways of seeing your future are crucial.
That kind of ambition is crucial to your future.
Coming back to where I started, Europe's disappointed you.
You've got to rethink your identity,
come to a fierce conviction that you can do this,
that you are Greeks first, if necessary, and European second,
that the future is in your hands and nobody else's.
And one of the things that's terribly important,
is you can run a political system,
as a blame game system.
And that's the worst thing you can do.
That's not what a political system is for.
A political system is not there to apportion blame.
A political system is there to find solutions.
It's not the Greeks', it's not the Germans' fault,
it's not the Europeans' fault, it's not the politicians' fault,
it's not the financial sector's fault.
The blame doesn't create a single job.
Blame doesn't create a single opportunity.
And this is one of the moments finally to end.
The pronouns matter. The pronouns matter.
I'm here, and you're in this room,
because you sense that Greek needs a 'we,' a new 'we.'
A 'we' of conviction and patriotism
that understands that there are no individual solutions left,
and the old collective solutions don't work,
and there has to be a new 'we, '
and that's why I've come [from] Canada,
to be part of that new 'we,'
to learn from you and offer any help that I can in the future.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)