The price of Greek failure is EU rule

It’s maybe hard for Greeks who don’t live in Europe to appreciate, but, among those countries in the eurozone – and even among those in the EU and waiting to adopt the euro – there exists an almost irreversible trend to forge closer economic union, and that rather than the current crisis deflecting them from this goal, all it has served to do is convince them to accelerate the process.

This is why all this talk about Greece abandoning the EU and the euro and taking up the drachma again, is just pie in the sky. It’s not going to happen. What is going to happen is, in fact, the opposite, which is deeper economic integration and more supervision and oversight of national economies. Of course, having Brussels or Frankfurt telling Athens (and Rome, Madrid and so on) how to run its economy represents a massive surrender of national sovereignty; but, the truth is, that this is the price Greece is going to have to pay for its abject failure to reform its economy and society by itself.