[...] his theory that the ‘overgenerous’ European social model was no
longer sustainable and had to be ditched. Comparing the costs to Europe of
maintaining welfare states with the situation in places like India and China,
where no social safety net exists at all, he argued that Europe was losing
competitiveness and would stagnate unless social benefits were curtailed en
masse. It was as if he was telling me that a start had to be made somewhere and
that that somewhere might as well be Greece.

My rejoinder was that the obvious solution was the globalization of welfare
benefits and living wages, rather than the globalization of insecure working
poverty. In response, he reminisced at length about a secret mission he had
undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s, to liaise with the East German authorities
on behalf of his Christian Democrat party. ‘The DDR people were not bad,’ he
told me. ‘They had good intentions for a social welfare system that was not
economically possible.’ The insinuation was perfectly clear.