A Greek tank takes part in an independence day military parade in Athens in March. Photograph: Corbis
John Hooper in Athens
Athens has been in no hurry to put military spending on the table, but then neither have its creditors, including its main European arms supplier - Germany
Among the measures Alexis Tsipras’s government has used to swell the package it tabled in Brussels on Monday is a €200m (£142m) cut in next year’s defence budget. Estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (Sipri) for 2014 suggest that would equate to a reduction of around 5% in Greece’s military spending. The proposal raises an intriguing question: why did Tsipras’s Syriza party not offer more swingeing cuts in defence spending at an earlier stage in its tortuous negotiations with Greece’s creditors?
It would seem the obvious course of action for a leftwing – arguably far left – movement. It might also have obviated the need to inflict yet more pain on Greece’s long-suffering consumers and workers in the form of the higher VAT and increased social security contributions that also form part of the package. Until now, however, the Tsipras government’s only move in the direction of more modest defence spending has been to put the brakes on a €500m programme for the modernisation of naval support jets.
The case for deeper cuts in the defence budget would seem to be all the more persuasive given that Greece’s military expenditure is high. Ironically, the EU’s most leftwing government spends proportionately more on defence than any other. Greece’s military spending amounted to 2.2% of GDP last year, according to Sipri. Among Nato countries, only the US spent more in proportion to the size of its economy.
Thanos Dokos, a defence analyst and director general of the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy, noted that the latest figures nevertheless reflected a sharp drop since the start of the Greek crisis. “The defence budget has come down by around 40% in the last four years,” he said.
If it is still high, that is because of “a consensus in the country that there is a threat from Turkey and that we need to be able to defend ourselves against it. This is not Belgium or Portugal,” Dokos said.
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Deeper cuts than those outlined in the Tsipras plan might also be difficult to implement for both political and practical reasons. Tsipras’s government is a left-right coalition. Its parliamentary majority depends on support from the rightwing ANEL nationalist party whose leader, Panos Kammenos, holds the defence portfolio.
With no new procurement initiative on the horizon, future defence budgets will consist largely of the cost of earlier arms purchases, military pay and pensions and the armed forces’ operating expenses. Only the last can be reduced. Which is where a rich irony enters the picture, because Greece’s biggest European arms supplier over the years has been Germany. According to Sipri, more than a quarter of Greece’s weapons imports between 2000 and 2011 were from the country that has become its main creditor.
There is also strong evidence to indicate that some of the contracts under which the arms were supplied were obtained by bribery, a practice for which Greece has been widely criticised in creditor nations.
The Tsipras government may not have been in a hurry to put military spending cuts onto the table in its talks with its creditors, but then nor has the other side. Greece’s plentiful defence budget has proved a nice little earner for its eurozone partners over the years.
“No one put a gun to our head and made us buy those weapons,” said Dokos. “But, although I cannot prove it, I don’t think [other European countries] were too keen to make it an issue. I don’t think they were too displeased with Greecebuying their weapons.”http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/23/why-has-greece-only-now-included-defence-cuts-in-its-brussels-proposals?CMP=share_btn_fb
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