Evangelos Venizelos goes through everything that happened at the government level, during the PASOK government with George Papandreou as prime minister, 2009-2011, the cooperation government under Mr. Loukas Papademos and the PSI, the formation of the governments of 2012-2015, as well as the difficult and dramatic negotiations with the Europeans
His book Evangelos Venizelos “Versions of war 2009-2022” is presented next Tuesday, July 26, in the garden of the Byzantine Museum. The main body of the book is its complete and systematic narrative of the events of the financial crisis period, the decade of the memos, 2009-2019.
Evangelos Venizelos goes through everything that happened at the government level, during the PASOK government with George Papandreou as prime minister, 2009-2011, the cooperation government under Mr. Loukas Papademos and the PSI, the formation of the governments of 2012-2015, as well as the difficult and dramatic negotiations with the European actors and protagonists of those days to cut the public debt and avoid Grexit. The period of government of Alexis Tsipras together with ANEL until the last speech of Mr. Venizelos in the Parliament in June 2019 is commented on.
The book has two innovations. The first, how it is not a classic narrative text. These are two long interviews with the journalist, Giorgos Kouvaras, where the former president of PASOK, vice-president and finance minister narrates the events, as he experienced them from the positions he had every time. The second is the reflection and the lessons learned by Evangelos Venizelos about the challenges and the future of the country, in the light of Postcolonialism and thus his presentation is symbolically linked to the anniversary of the restoration of the Republic.
It also recommends something else important. It is the testimony of one of the protagonists of this decade, a fact that rarely happens with public figures speaking while still acting in the public sphere. This will be of great help to future historians when they do the historical assessment of events.
Evangelos Venizelos’ account of the events will surprise many and overturn many stereotypes.
Mr. Venizelos answering his questions George Kouvaras presents the events, the background, the persons and his interpretation of the situations experienced by the country, within the international and European contexts of the time. All this correlates with the sequence of crises, with the transition from the economic crisis to the pandemic and from the pandemic to the Russian military invasion and the war in Ukraine.
As he writes in the preface, “The decade 2009-2019, the so-called decade of the financial crisis and the memoranda, is not over. It has the peculiarity of ushering in the period that follows, which has never signaled a return to normality, as crisis in its multiple forms has now become a component of normality. A postmodern and archaic regularity at the same time. A new reality that looks like Janus to the future but also to the past.
» This transition from crisis to crisis, the sequence and interconnection of crises, the constant topicality of the economic crisis, or rather the structural issues linked to the economic crisis, was the essential reason why I accepted the persistent and well-documented proposal of Giorgos Kouvaras to organize this long and comprehensive discussion. What I say in response to his questions constitutes my testimony for the critical period 2009-2019.
» The book tries to place difficult political choices made under suffocating pressure and under conditions of existential national crisis in their European and international contexts and on the horizon of long historical time which is already colored by the pandemic and the war, the Lernaean Hydra of History.
» I had characterized the economic crisis as the “war of our generation”. Immediately after, the pandemic appeared and is evolving as a health and scientific “war” with an asymmetric opponent, the coronavirus. After two wars in the metaphorical sense of the term, the war in Ukraine appears in its most archaic and brutal form. A literal war, with dimensions that have not yet become apparent in their entirety.
» These are therefore “versions of war”, metaphorical and real, covering the period 2009-2022″.
RES-EMP
View the news feed and get the latest news.
