Greek-US bilateral relations don’t tend to attract much global attention. Yet witnessing Barack Obama sitting in the hall of the Greek National Opera this week, anyone would get the impression it’s a very special relationship indeed. And they would be right.
“Thank you Barack, we will never forget what you did for us,” Andreas Dracopoulos, co-president of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, tells him. Their conversation is taking place at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC), a state of the art complex in Southern Athens, equipped with a modern library, exhibitions, sleek water features and a vast rooftop garden.
Everything about the location denotes affluence. Yet Dracopoulos is referring to a much harder time in the country’s recent history. Thanking Obama, he says that during the “terrible years Greece went through following the crash, many of our friends and partners went missing, but you stood by Greece and its people like no-one else.”
Greeks present clearly share this sentiment. Hundreds have come to hear him speak. Seats filled up so quickly that many of us are watching him on a huge screen outside of the opera hall.
Yet the gratitude seems to cut both ways – even on a purely financial level.
This is the second time that Obama has visited the cultural centre. He delivered a rousing speech on democracy from the exact same spot in 2016 during his last world trip as leader. “Its good to be back here,” says the grinning 44th president of the United States, who, aside from his visibly greyer set of hair, looks barely a day older than when he left office.
While it might seem like a coup for the centre to have secured such a high profile speaker twice in recent years, the SNF – founded by Greek billionaire shipping tycoon, Stavros Spyrou Niarchos – has generously funded Obama’s own foundation. In fact, it is all thanks to SNF funding that Obama is building “a democracy hub” at the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. He urges locals to come visit, though perhaps not in mid-winter: “I’m not sure Greek blood could handle that much cold”.”
That said, the former president is keen to stress that financial ties aren’t the only thing that draws him to the city. Rather, it’s what it represents: as the birthplace of democracy.
“There’s a reason I gave my last official speech in Athens. The idea began here that ordinary people should have a say in how they are governed – and how their communities are built.”
Obama has been in Greece for several days. According to local media, he’s managed to fit in a trip to Antiparos island with his pal Tom Hanks while he spent summer solstice on a private tour of the Acropolis. The Daily Mail’s coverage of the latter trip chose to focus on the lurid positioning of the former president’s hands during the outing (resting – gasp – on his wife’s bottom). Yet Obama has some slightly more profound takeaways from the tour.
Looking at the ancient ruins of a civilisation once burned to the ground was a powerful reminder, that : “Yes, things get destroyed but they are rebuilt. And that’s what democracy allows us to do.”
Much like last time, the importance of democracy is the key theme running through his speech at the SNFCC. Though much has changed since he was last sitting here in 2016.
Obama acknowledges the fresh challenges to such a form of governance: the invasion of Ukraine, elections in illiberal democracies and further rollbacks of freedoms in many parts of the world.
He is keen too to reflect on the impact of globalisation. While globalisation has many merits – “if you have talent, you have a global market” – it has also “increased wealth inequality.”
In what some US economists have coined “the winner takes all economy’, we’re seeing that “a lot more workers are taking a smaller share of the pie than ever before,” he adds.
He decides to draw on a personal anecdote. “Michelle’s father was a working class man. And he wasn’t resentful of people who were wealthy. But what he did want to make sure was that if he worked hard, he could support his family.”
Today, Obama argues, we live in a world where it’s more difficult for many to work hard and have that same guarantee.
Though he adds that there are countries that seem to be closer to getting the balance right. Obama mentions Amsterdam – which he recently visited. “The average person there has enough and they feel as if they count, as if they haven’t been left behind. And as a consequence, there is greater social trust.”
Obama’s plea for us to “attend to those left behind by globalisation,” doesn’t just mean those left behind within a country. It is understandable too, he adds, that “people search for better lives abroad.”
“But that puts strains on our social systems and they become an easy target for people’s fears and frustrations.”
The plight of migrants is a timely point. It’s barely a week since Greece witnessed one of the largest migrant tragedies ever, after a fishing trawler thought to be carrying over 700 people, including 100 children, capsized off the coast. Up to 500 are still missing, with the number of survivors so far at just over 100. Protests have also erupted in Athens over the allegedly slow rescue response of the Greek authorities.
“A tragedy in a submarine is getting minute to minute coverage around the world but the fact that it has gotten so much more attention than the hundreds who sank, that’s an untenable situation,” says Obama.
The point seems to resonate with many in the crowd. He is forced to stop speaking while loud clapping erupts.
Wealth inequality aside, there are other divides, Obama says, which threaten democracy – many of which are being perpetuated by technology. The digital age, he notes, rose in parallel with his presidency. Yet he laments the way in which it seems to have increased our suspicion of others. “We are stuck in our little silos, receiving information which reinforces our prejudices as well as active misinformation.”
We must, he adds, “find a way to use social media to increase understanding, not to increase fear.”
This leads him nicely onto the extremely topical point of the dangers of artificial intelligence. The former president decides to use a historical analogy to express the sheer power – and significance – of AI: “It’s like introducing electricity into our society.”
“Usually tech executives are very cocky,” he jokes. The fact that the people actually designing these models are even expressing concern – “so much so that some have said ‘please regulate us!’” – that doesn’t happen very often with tech companies. It’s significant – arresting, even.
While AI will enhance some people’s capacity to do their work, it will also eliminate a lot of jobs, Obama warns, even ones only recently created. “We used to say to people, if you want to get a job go into coding. Except AI codes. The code codes better than most coders!”.
We also, he insists, must apply democratic principles to AI. “This technology must help to make everyone’s lives better. And everyone should have a seat at the table in deciding how it is deployed.”
But additionally, people need to be mindful of how the technology itself could threaten democracy, through generating mass disinformation. “Before the problem was mainly in text. Now it’s coming in digital form.”
As the first digital US president, Obama notes he’s no stranger to AI experiments with deep fakes – “They all seemed to start with me, dancing on a rooftop or saying a dirty joke.”
When he started seeing examples of them around five years ago, he was disturbed by how close to being life like they were. But now, “they’re practically indistinguishable.”
Dancing on a rooftop is a fairly benign example but it’s not hard to imagine the more sinister ways in which deep fakes could be deployed. “We’ll have people watching fake videos and saying things like ‘Oh I didn’t realise their leader endorsed hitler’.”
With these myriad challenges- and the flawed nature of many existing democracies – it’s perhaps unsurprising, Obama reflects, “that some countries in the global south are saying ‘why don’t we just adopt the China model. It’s more efficient.’”
And yes, he adds, “we have to admit, there are times when authoritarian governments can get things done faster. Democracy is a hard form of government. When everyone has a voice it can be frustrating, it can be slow.”
“But over the long term, it is a more promising path for humanity.”
Of course, this does also mean strengthening existing democracies, and we are, Obama acknowledges, seeing democracy weakened in many places across the world “by parties who will do anything to win, manipulate voting rules and not observe traditions.”
Much of what the former president has to say resonates with a piece published only yesterday in Reaction by by Steve Taylor. Ancient Greece, Taylor argues, was in many ways “a brutal society”. And yet, its sophisticated political systems “were more genuinely democratic than the present day UK or US.”
The ancient Greeks practised direct democracy. It literally was “people power”. Political decisions, such as whether to go to war, the election of military leaders or the nomination of magistrates, were made at massive assemblies, where thousands of citizens would gather.
What’s more, they had practices in place – such as sortition – to guard against narcissistic individuals coming to dominate politics. Of course, not all of these Ancient Greek practices would directly work in today’s world. But still, writes Taylor, modern politicians could learn a thing or two from the Athenians.
And indeed, this rather reinforces one of Obama’s opening points. What better place to reflect on the importance of democracy than in the city “where so many of the fundamental notions of democracy were born.”
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