Patakis Versions of War, 2009-2022

The decade 2009-2019, the so-called decade of financial crisis and memoranda, is not over. It has the peculiarity of ushering in the period that follows, which has never signaled a return to normality, as crisis in its multiple forms has now become a component of normality. A postmodern and archaic regularity at the same time. A new reality that looks like Janus to the future but also to the past.
This transition from crisis to crisis, the sequence and interconnection of crises, the constant relevance of the economic crisis or rather the structural issues linked to the economic crisis was the essential reason why I accepted the persistent and well-documented proposal of Giorgos Kouvaras to organize this long and comprehensive discussion. What I say in response to his questions constitutes my testimony for the critical period 2009-2019.
The book tries to place difficult political choices made under suffocating pressure and under conditions of existential national crisis in their European and international contexts and on the horizon of long historical time which is already colored by the pandemic and the war, the Lernaean Hydra of History.

I had characterized the economic crisis as the "war of our generation". Immediately after, the pandemic appeared and is evolving as a health and scientific "war" with an asymmetric opponent, the coronavirus. After two wars in the metaphorical sense of the term, the war in Ukraine appears in its most archaic and brutal form. A literal war, with dimensions that have not yet become apparent in their entirety. These are therefore "versions of war", metaphorical and real, covering the period 2009-2022". Evangelos Venizelos