It is a disingenuous letter. Tsipras doesn’t really think Germany gave Greece too much money; he thinks Germany and its fellow-creditors lent Greece too much, and didn’t give it enough. A form of bankruptcy has always been open to Greece – quitting the Eurozone and defaulting. But Tsipras doesn’t want that. He wants to stay in the Eurozone, and for Athens to be able effectively to print euros, to be allowed to break out of its austerity straitjacket and embark on a Keynesian programme of expansion.

I have sympathy for Germans clutching their heads at this. Why, they might ask, should we let the Greeks dilute our currency? To which the Greeks might answer that it is their currency too, and sometimes, when a currency becomes sluggish, a bit of dilution is what it needs. And Tsipras’s demand is not as presumptuous as it sounds. There is a sense in which the bailout was a bailout of Greece’s creditors – big financial institutions – rather than the country. Really what Tsipras seems to be seeking for Greece is something like the Chapter 11 bankruptcy rules that exist in America, where a company can file for protection from creditors, continue to operate, and still borrow money to rebuild.

But Tsipras is issuing a much deeper challenge than that to the existing European dispensation. He is demanding that the rich parts of the Eurozone take the same direct responsibility for the less successful, or unluckier, areas as the richer parts of Germany or France do for the poorer regions within their own countries. He is seeking the mutualisation of giving a damn from the Arctic to the Aegean.

This idea has always existed in the abstract, but Syriza’s victory has given it flesh. And although it might seem Greece has no leverage, the European Central Bank’s launch of quantitative easing (money-printing) is a move in Tsipras’s direction. Who knows what influence a strong showing by Syriza’s Spanish counterpart, Podemos, in December might have on Portugal, Ireland and Italy, and what the consequences in France might be? The European Union may yet fragment into something looser. But should it move in the opposite direction, it may not be on Angela Merkel’s terms.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/01/26/james-meek/syrizas-victory/