History repeats itself in Greek debt crisis
Austere-looking Europeans dictating economic policy are nothing new for Greece which went bankrupt over a century ago and had to accept an international commission of control over its finances.
The year was 1898. A much smaller Greek state had just lost a disastrous war against the Ottoman Empire and was forced to pay reparations when the government had officially declared insolvency five years earlier.
Determined to collect past loans, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Italy sent officials to monitor state receipts, taxes and customs duties that would repay Greece's obligations.
"The Greek state was born in debt," notes Stavros Thomadakis, a professor of business economics and finance at Athens University. "In a way, debt is Greece's original sin," he told AFP.
Fiscal profligacy caught up with Athens again last year when greater investor scrutiny of sovereign debt cast a spotlight on its parlous finances.
The incoming Socialist government of George Papandreou had just revealed that the size of Greece's deficit had been misreported and pledged to set the record straight, but the confidence scare that followed caused Greek loans to dry up.
With insolvency looming, Athens was forced to appeal, on April 23 2010, to its European Union peers and the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan of 110 billion euros ($159 billion) in return for a sweeping overhaul of its economy.
The unpopular quarterly audits by EU and IMF officials that followed echo a situation described in "The Control", a long-lost play by George Isaias that satirised the country's woes some 110 years ago.
Revived this year by an Athenian troupe, the 1900 play chronicles the arrival of two foreign loan officers, the stiff German Von Gdare (Von Flayer) and the skirt-chasing Frenchman De Fagan (De Glutton), and the efforts of their Greek hosts to mollify them.
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