by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos (*)
There are two fundamental aspects of the Greek bail-out program that are usually overlooked, as most people consider it to be just a harsh neoliberal economic program.
But the Greek bail-out program is much more than that. It is first and foremost a regime-change program, experimenting in a EU country with the abolition of the bourgeois democratic regime such as we have known it in Europe since 1945, if not since the English and French revolutions. If it succeeds in Greece, it will be repeated elsewhere in the continent.
By essentially denying the principle of popular sovereignty, it is also denying the principle of national sovereignty, the (relatively) independent character of the Greek state. Greece occupies a strategic place in the Eastern Mediterranean, on the route connecting Russia with the Mediterranean and Western Europe with the Middle East. Its independence was never completely tolerated by the British and then the American empires. Greeks were also suspected of leaning towards Russians, or at least this was the argument justifying the innumerable Western interventions in this country.
The abolition of the Greek state is a strategic transformation of enormous geopolitical consequences. This is even truer for the Republic of Cyprus, located as it is in an even more strategic location in the Eastern Mediterranean and also inhabited by Greeks (82% of the population).

Both the US administration and the EU leadership now seem to be in an extraordinary hurry to secure an immediate solution to the Cyprus problem, a problem dating from 1974. They seek, if possible, to find a solution during 2016 or at the beginning of 2017.