I hear people saying over the EU powers’s firmness in Greek debt negotiations, “it’s like they’re trying to bring about a Golden Dawn government”.

Well ok, what if they are? What if the rich nations have decided that no Greek government will be able to deliver a satisfactory deal, the only chance of seeing the restitution their banking and political systems depend on will require the direct, possibly violent seizure of Greek assets and government institutions, but the only way to legitimate this to their populaces will be by appeal to the postwar antifascist consensus?

It’s not without precedent. Yugoslavia spent the Cold War as socialist but managed to maintain substantial autonomy from the Soviets with an independent base of power, which means when the USSR fell they didn’t immediately feel obligated to tear everything down and install neoliberalism, so Western institutions cranked up pressure, blocked the good escape routes, supported ethnonationalist movements to weaken it and split it into pieces, then used the existence of ethnonationalist movements as pretext to go to war with, occupy, and generally bring to heel the pieces, with the result that there’s nothing left in that corner of the Balkans uppity enough to talk back to the powers that be.