The EU is ill, the recent crisis in Greece was nothing but a symptom of the affliction that corrodes it from within and will lead to inevitable serious problems in the future. These afflictions are the result of problematic reasoning on the early stages of its creation, worsened by populist intervention of some of its leading figures.
To emphasise the problems, after the first signs of complications appeared, these were hushed and covered by an immense flow of cash, after all, if there is cash everybody is happy isn't it? But problems don't go away nor vanish into thin air, problems can only grow if left unattended and that is exactly what happened.
Europe (like any continent or region) can only benefit from treaties that facilitate the growth of the economy, the movement of people and goods with lesser taxation and bureaucracy, so far so good. The problem begins when you connect different economies to each other and try to disregard the huge differences between them.
Furthermore, let's say you want to help your European brother to revive his failing economy. You can lend him money if necessary as long as you behave like a responsible grown-up and set a plan, control the flow of that money and what is it used for, make a strict return schedule with penalties in case of failing to meet the timetable. This is exactly what did not happen from the very beginning.
To make matters worse, green light was given to banks all over Europe to Finance or serve as guarantee to loans related to this insane flow of money putting the whole banking system at risk, not only to crash themselves but to do it causing a domino effect. So now, even if you want to consider kicking a member out of the block because it repeatedly misbehaved, you need to consider how this will affect you, if their banks all crash.
Greece was always a poor economy, those of you readers that visited Greece before the EU era surely remember them as a nice humble country with living standards closer to a 3rd world country than to a modern European one, with an economy based mainly on agriculture and tourism. Life there was not easy but they got by and they lived according to their means.
The EU had some pretensions to standardise the living level for all European countries and the preferred tactics was giving loans with very little control over the money, if any. Many countries that otherwise would have had difficulties recruiting loans suddenly found themselves with huge amount of available funds. You may ask now: what they did with this money?
What do you think it will do with these huge amounts of money it received? There are 2 possible options: the first will be to invest the money in reviving the economy, renewing and developing the infrastructure and investing in education and upgrading the level of local working force. The second option is to give it to the people to consume; reducing taxes, inflating services provided by the nation, funding the employment of ridiculous amounts of employees in civil service, all paid with very good salaries and conditions that they could only dream about before.
So what option of the 2 did our politician chose? Well, if it was the first one I wouldn't be writing this article and probably you would not be talking about Greece or any other of the messy countries. But as always, the party reached its end and someone has to pay the bills. The only problem is that we all might find ourselves paying for the sins of those that supposedly represent us.
