Deadly Yet Insightful Analogies

When I played chess for the first time in my life I was very excited and I was very young. Excited about the unknown, about the many possibilities and about the prospect of victory and defeat. At that time, my perception of the chess-board was that it constituted a wide platform of 64 squares available to move my 16 pieces around and make it look crowded. By analogy, it was probably something close to what Mr. Tsipras and the SYRIZA Government must have thought about Europe and its political and financial institutions at the dawn of January 26, 2015. I started playing the game without really understanding the particular value of each square, without understanding the instrumental value of each piece in the game, and without being familiar with any concept of tactics and strategy. By analogy, it was probably something close to what Mr. Tsipras and the SYRIZA Government must have felt prior to the commencement of the negotiation process with our lenders.

The first time I played I was doomed to lose. I played my pieces in random order, I placed them on the board in a fashion that looked nice to the eye and of course I was completely unaware of the fact that my opponent did exactly the opposite. At the time, I was even naive enough to think that this game is a game of chance and not a game of craft. I was unsuspecting of the threats that a careful combination of pieces may pose, as I was unsuspecting of the lethal and detrimental effects originating from the omission to keep all 64 squares in sight throughout the game. And of course, I remember the few moments, where I thought I had identified an upcoming situation of threat and I repositioned my pieces only to end-up being chased all over the board for a few moments before I was defeated. Only much later, I realised that Chess is a game that can be studied. It took me years to get myself to a level of decent playing and even then I only marginally improved my odds of continuous victory. I soon concluded that my brain capacity would never justify my ambition to "win them all". I had to come to terms with my limitations.

The funny thing is that the more skilled I became the earlier I was able to identify upcoming threats. And this was a first good sign of improvement. At least I had developed an "early warning system" which provided for sufficient time and space for defence. This was the moment when I started to learn about the "sacrifice" of pieces. In today's world one would compare that moment to the awakening of "Game Theory" concepts inside my brain. And yet, I continued losing most of the games because I could not tame my appetite for quick victory and fell victim to the crafty sacrifices of pieces by my opponents. A sacrifice in chess, for those not familiar with the game, is the sacrifice of one piece in favour of a greater return down the game. And sometimes, a sacrifice takes on the form of an "easy" mistake, which makes things worse. There are no "easy mistakes" in chess like there are no "easy mistakes" in diplomacy. The lesson I learnt while playing chess is probably the same lesson Mr. Tsipras and the SYRIZA Government is learning these days the hard and most humiliating way.

And of course, in politics just like in chess there are occasional situations of random victories. Victories that come unexpected and unjustified by the level of your game up to that snappy moment where the universe conspires in your favour. Those moments where logic is defeated and everyone is caught by surprised, incapable of explaining what just happened. But by now, you and I, we both know that random victories every now and then do not render us skilful players and at no moment can we rely and rest on these few odd moments of fate. Because our fate is cast in stone only if we are able to demonstrate our ability to produce continuous victories. Don't you agree Mr. Tsipras?