North and South

It is, I know, difficult for the cold, Protestant north of Europe to understand the warm Catholic and Orthodox south. Here, you say to the electrician ‘I really need this done by the weekend’ and he says ‘I will be there tomorrow’. But both he and you (if you are experienced) know that he won’t be there. Your insistence that it be done by the weekend is merely a statement that the matter is important to you. His statement that he will be there tomorrow is an acknowledgement of your feelings: he doesn’t want to be rude. His non appearance the next day is a statement that he is his own man.

Things are different in the South.

I wonder how many of the Greek MPs had their fingers mentally crossed when they voted for the austerity measures. To understand the effect of implementation of the measures they only had to look out of the window to see their constituents fighting the police in Syntagma Square. It must have made them wonder if they had the necessary courage. They haven’t. ‘Let’s just vote for what the Germans want’ they might have said: the political equivalent of ‘I’ll be there tomorrow’.

I think it is in the same light that we must see the Italian budget cuts, proposed by Giulio Tremonti, of €47 billion. You don’t have to delve too far into the small print to see that the cuts are for €1.8bn this year, .€5.5bn next year and a fantastic €20bn in each of 2013 and 2014. Perceptive readers will note that there are elections in 2012 and one of the candidates for the top job is likely to be one G.Tremonti.

In the words of St. Augustine, a man of the Mediterranean himself, ‘Grant me chastity and continence, only not yet’