IT is not difficult to empathise with the protesters who have of late been crowding Syntagma Square in Athens, who have been attempting to circumvent the Greek government's compliance with demands from the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Notwithstanding the demonstrations of popular displeasure — which, despite being generally peaceful, were tear-gassed to such an extent that the police response has been described as chemical warfare — the Greek parliament last week passed the 'austerity measures' prescribed as a precondition for obtaining the billions of euros necessary to avoid defaulting on its debts.

Greece cannot afford to pay back what it has borrowed, so further loans must be thrown its way — provided it drastically reduces public spending, including through sharp cuts in the salaries of state employees (an unusually high proportion of the population, by European standards, falls in that category) and includes prized state assets in the inventory for an everything-must-go sale that is expected to eventually yield 50bn euros.

The EU agreed last year to a 110bn euro bailout — terminology that suggests philanthropic financial assistance but in fact refers to high-interest loans — under stringent conditions, which helps to explain why release of the final tranche entailed a spot of drama. Another 120bn euros is to follow.

There is talk of restructuring Greece's debt, which is effectively tantamount to postponing its tryst with destiny by permitting the loans to be paid back later.

Leading ratings agency Standard & Poor's (S&P) has warned, however, that such moves would effectively be considered a default. Back in April, the Greek prime minister, George Papandreou, condemned such agencies for “seeking to shape our destiny and determine the future of our children”. Last month, Nobel prize-winning economist Amartya Sen decried the tendency of allowing “international financial institutions and ratings agencies the unilateral power to command democratically elected governments”.

“It is worth remembering,” he went on to say, “that the record of ratings agencies in certifying financial and business institutions preceding the 2008 economic crisis was so abysmal that the US Congress seriously debated whether they should be prosecuted.”

The reminder is fair enough, given that some of the chief culprits in the subprime debacle enjoyed triple-A ratings just before the bottom fell out. But, taken to its logical conclusion, the critique goes to the heart of globalised capitalism. Not many economists, Sen included, tend to go that far. When things go seriously wrong, economic mismanagement — either by nation-states or supranational economic institutions — is generally held to be the culprit. Far too often, the prescribed remedy is a stronger dose of neoliberalism.

In the case of Greece, even Jean-Claude Juncker, the chairman of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, has admitted that “the sovereignty of Greece will be massively limited” as it swallows the medicine intended to subdue the symptoms of its sovereign debt ailment.

One of the legally fraught options that has been aired is Greece's exit — or at least a leave of absence — from the eurozone, which would enable it to combat the crisis by devaluing its currency. Another possibility being bandied about is a twin-zone EU that would allow the euro to be supplemented by a lower-grade currency for nations that are not up to the (Deutsche) mark.

The latter argument serves as a reminder that Greece isn't an isolated case: there are several troubled economies in Europe, notably those of Ireland, Portugal and Spain, with Italy not all that far behind. Portugal and Spain, too, have witnessed protests of the sort typified by Syntagma Square. The prospect of spending cuts has also stirred up the British populace. There is no talk of a European spring along the Arab pattern, but the prospect of a long, hot summer cannot be discounted.

It could be argued that the Arabs are better off than the Europeans in the restricted sense that they can at least envisage viable alternatives to the status quo they have been rebelling against. The ostensible choices available to European voters are increasingly meaningless, given that there are only marginal differences of opinion (or action) between political parties that function under social-democratic and conservative nomenclatures.

It is worth considering, meanwhile, whether it is merely a coincidence that some of the most troubled European states are those that put up with fascist dictatorships until the mid-1970s — condoned in the case of Greece by the US, which was inclined in the Cold War context to lend its imprimatur to even the most vicious regimes as long as they were demonstrably anti-communist. The New York Times

The US, taking over from the British empire, had also intervened in Greece in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the communists constituted a powerful force following their leading role in resisting the Nazi occupation. But Winston Churchill made a deal with Josef Stalin, who thereafter offered no encouragement to potential Soviet allies in Greece. The nation, Columbia University professor of history Mark Mazower commented in , suddenly “stood for a very different Europe — one … whose only path out of the destitution of the mid-1940s was as a junior partner with Washington. As the dollars poured in, American advisers sat in Athens telling Greek policymakers what to do and American napalm scorched the Greek mountains as the communists were put to flight.”

This time around, there will be no dollars pouring in to stave off destitution. Apart from everything else, the US itself is hardly economically robust. The Greek situation has been described as Europe's “Lehman Brothers moment”. The future of the European integration project hangs in the balance, but perhaps the bigger warning sign for Greece is the reported tendency of increasing proportions of its population to hanker for a strongman rather than to demand more meaningful democracy.

There are, thus, many elements of farce in the unfolding Greek tragedy.

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