In mid-November of 2014, my friend and colleague Georgios Papanicolaou and I participated in a unique meeting of radicals, academics, police executives, and police union leaders in Athens, Greece. The three-day workshop was organized by the Nicos Poulantzas Institute and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and funded by Transform Europe!: a pan-European network set up by the coalition of the radical left in the EU parliament. The theme of the workshop was “Democratizing the Police in Europe with a Particular Emphasis on Greece.” This was also the title of the policy paper Georgios and I had written and it served as the focal point of discussion for the gathering. The Nicos Poulantzas Institute was by now well recognized by the European Left as the think-tank and policy laboratory of Greece's emerging Syriza party. A political party that a few months later would ride its anti-austerity platform, its strong grass-roots mobilization of the working class, and its outright rejection of the established oligarchical parties of the Centre-Right New Democracy (ND) and the Centre-Left Pan-Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), to a historic victory in the 2015 election that January. But already in November the prospects for a Syriza government were looking promising. Polls were indicating that the Greek electorate was fed up with widespread government corruption and a never-ending national debt and recession. Voters were also angry that their own politicians had almost bankrupted the country, stole hundreds of millions of Euros, and turned over the future of the nation to the “Troika” (European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund, and European Commission) of Eurocrats and banksters.

There was now a palpable energy on the streets of Athens. It felt to all like we were on the cusp of a historic change to both Greek and European politics, and perhaps even to the nature of the EU itself. Yet despite all of this hope a dark cloud still loomed ominously on the political horizon. It was a familiar cloud that workshop attendees, from war-weary communists to old-guard police, were all too familiar with. It was, in fact, Greece's new Finance Minister Yiannis Varoufakis who would later more aptly describe this gathering cloud as the coalescing of Greece's “dark forces.”