In rejecting austerity, Greek voters force Germany's hand

So much for hirudotherapy. That's bloodletting with leeches to you and me.

The practice goes back centuries; even Hippocrates, the ancient Greek father of medicine, was believed to have used leeches. The goal was to "balance the humours" blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile by draining excess blood, and so make the patient whole again.

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The modern version of hirudotherapy is financial. The good doctors of the International Monetary Fund and the European Union have been applying their leeches to Greece and other "unbalanced" European nations like Spain, Portugal and Ireland for several years. The bloodletting is called austerity.

A sober look at the Greek bankbook after the No party

9 years ago

Duration 5:07

Greece's finance minister quits at the urging of his PM, and Germany's Merkel is left with some hard choices

Now, its financial veins almost empty, the Greek patient has ripped off the segmented worms and said No!

Many economists will undoubtedly applaud this referendum verdict. They've watched the Greek economy contract by more than 25 per cent over the past five years, despite the IMF's complacent prediction that bloodletting would result in a return to vigorous economic health after just a short bout of fever.

But in revolting against its "doctors," Greece may end up doing serious damage to its economic health, indeed to its membership in the European currency, the euro.

German, French leaders to meet

In this case, the chief doctor is German leader Angela Merkel, and she will be spending this evening in Paris with her associate in humour therapy, French President Franois Hollande.

On the table will be this crisis they allowed to fester and explode, a crisis that may do dreadful damage to their reputations and to the euro itself.

Another Frenchman might not have been surprised. He was Jean Monnet, the unofficial founder of modern-day Europe. In 1950, as a senior French civil servant, he convinced the French foreign minister to call for the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community.

In practice this meant pooling French and German coal and steel resources under one supranational agency, which Monnet would lead, just five years after the end of the Second World War

Half a dozen years later, six European leaders signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the European Community.

Decades earlier, Monnet had begun his adult life selling cognac around the world for the family firm, even living in Winnipeg to investigate the liquor market there as a young man. Two bloody conflicts in Europe made him a convinced European, but not a blinkered one.

"I always thought," he said, "that Europe would be formed in the midst of crises, and that she would be the sum of the solutions we offered to resolve these crises."

This Greek mess fits Monnet's definition of a crisis.

But unlike Monnet, who liked to meet this kind of challenge head-on, suggesting solutions until one worked, Merkel is a doctor of a different type. She likes to wait, and wait, offering soothing words but little else until a last-minute compromise can be cobbled together.

Rolling the dice amid economic despair

It's a strategy that has worked well for her in Germany for a decade.

But for the last six months, she, and the rest of Europe, have been dealing with a radically different opponent a determined left-wing government, fuelled by anger and a people's despair, and willing to risk its political life and the country's place in Europe with a referendum roll of the dice.

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(It was also a referendum that ripped up established practice in that the proposing government asked its people to vote "No" and not "Yes" to its question. The crushing "No" victory might incite other referendum-minded governments to rethink their future approach to such questions.)

Having waited, or perhaps dithered is the better word, for months, Merkel now must act, and act decisively. But having dithered, she is now caught between the triumphalism of the Greek Syriza government and the fury of her own senior ministers.

The German vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, accused the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras of "tearing down the last bridges of compromise," with its referendum gambit, and Germany's powerful finance minister, Wolfgang Schuble, has made no secret that he wants Greece out of the euro.

Historical driving forces of European engine

But Merkel, along with Hollande, is conscious of history and its verdict. She doesn't want to be seen as the leader presiding over the crack-up of the euro and possibly of Europe itself. And so she "along with Hollande" have called for an emergency European summit just two days after the referendum.

"Along with Hollande" the words are significant.

In the 1950s, Frenchmen like Monnet and Schuman laid the foundations of modern Europe, while French presidents from De Gaulle to Mitterand in the 1980s drove the European engine.

Now it is "along with Hollande" almost an afterthought. In fact, Hollande and his government, which had also jettisoned the French version of austerity last year, were desperate for a last-minute deal with Greece before the referendum.

Their voice and their position were all but ignored by the Germans and the European Commission in Brussels.

In the end it will come down to Merkel and the Germans. There is personal animosity with the Greek leaders to be overcome. There is also the German fixation with balancing the books, which is what led to the bloodletting and the bloody nose administered by the Greek voters.

Jean Monnet once said, "the only defeats are those you accept." If the German leadership looks on the referendum as a defeat for itself and for Europe, then the continent's humours will be unbalanced for a good long while yet.