The European debt crisis is one of those times when economists are better understood as novelists than scientists, says Dalrymple at the Library of Law and Liberty, because the crisis is a story of social and political problems best portrayed by reference to history, psychology and sociology.
I hope I will offend none of my Greek friends when I say that their country is not one in which an Irish-type response to the crisis could happen. The Greeks are a talented people, but organizing a functioning modern state is not one of their talents. Mistrust between various parties is so great that none of them believes that there is such a thing as the national interest, or if there were such a thing that anyone could or would put it ahead of his own individual or sectional interests. Corruption is so general that it has destroyed faith in even the possibility of honesty. By contrast the Irish, though they hold their political class in almost as deep contempt as do the Greeks, believing them to be a pack of thieving or at least of self-interested scoundrels, retain a sense of national unity and purpose, no doubt a legacy of the long struggle for independence (and it helps that it is so small a country that no one is more than a couple of phone calls away from the highest powers in the land). An appeal to the national interest in Ireland in time of obvious crisis will not therefore be regarded cynically, as just another ruse of one tiny section of the population to deprive everyone else of what is rightfully his. A constructive attitude in one country is not automatically reproducible in another, and depends upon history and mass psychology.