EUROZONE: A Continental Divide

THE EUROZONE CRISIS &

A CONTINENTAL DIVIDE

Supposedly, if one ventures far enough to accept Germanic manifestations of the past 20 years, the project "euro" was designed to bring to the glum and until then irrelevant continent everlasting peace and wealth at home, and unprecedented greatness and potency outside. However, ten years after the introduction of the common currency, the ageing continent is rocked by huge tectonic rifts. The continent is profoundly divided by the gap between North and South, the rich and the have-not, between creditors and debtors.

Increasingly the EU evolves into a catalyst for deeply rooted conflicts, political skirmish, stupor and further economical inequalities that threaten to plunge the region into even armed conflict. Greece and Portugal appear to provide the fuse that might spark the fiery implosion of the eurozone: German and EU flags are already being burned in Athens and other Greek cities, foreign-owned or affiliated banks and enterprises looted and set ablaze. From hereupon, even graver attacks on foreigners and tourists are entirely thinkable; in fact it seems only a matter of time when foreigners become victims of violence which the EU architects can only blame themselves for.

For the EU commission, in its mad rush to jostle for world dominance 15 years ago, when it publicly declared its scheme to become the world's Number One economic powerhouse - escorted by a 150,000 men army designed to represent the EU interests globally - made cardinal mistakes from the start over the objections of warning voices from abroad.

In the case of Greece, but far from only there, the EU commission invited (for a moderated word of 'pushed') Greece to join the eurozone, despite well documented misgivings from individual governments (for instance, Switzerland decided to scrap plans for a EU referendum and eventual ascension to the EU for good, after its objections on economic grounds against the watered-down criteria adopted by the EU). Flawed and manipulated data from Athens were readily accepted, and Greece declared fit for membership, to gloss over already disastrous state of finances back in 1998. There has been a deliberate plan in Brussels to welcome ostensibly unfit nations into the eurozone, linked with the vague hope that viable, albeit clandestine, economic concoctions could be put in place that would subsequently make new members at least on the surface appear qualified. Based on fraud and extortion, the EU exposed Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland to a perverted carrot-and-stick treatment, a policy of offering a combination of rewards and punishment to induce behavior according to its own intentions and purposes.

The "stick" part was the introduction of the Maastricht criteria, the "carrot" part its lack of enforcement. With each passing fiscal year, the situation in the southern tier nations of the eurozone became more and more desperate, and the path to financial ruin irreversible. Who sounded the alarm eventually? Credit agencies, based in the US, were the first to raise concern to investors that their purchases of government bonds from the region have become an untenable enterprise, a losing proposition. Their plots uncovered, the EU singles out nowadays the credit agencies as the "anti-European enemy that destroys our markets." Yet, as the global markets prove to be a formidable foe that cannot be defeated by the means at its disposal, the EU and its tentacles pushed the panic button and embarked on a crusade against the countries it had courted until the credit agencies confronted Brussels with the reality check.

After years of encouragement to accumulate an ever burgeoning pile of suffocating debt, the EU has started to pull the rug under the biggest debtor nations. Germany, bolstered by robust growth and a limited sense of moral restraint, is the vanguard of vicious measures now taken against Greece, that will throw citizens into a state of disrepair and despair for years to come. The eurozone and its chief forces are responsible today for the humiliation and the dire consequences of default. Morally, the EU and the eurozone owe it to Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy to rescue, bring back from the brink and bail out these countries, at whatever cost it may take, especially if it means the termination of the eurozone as we know it.

Otherwise, the continent will be dragged into battles of nationalism and sectarian provincialism once again.