Discussions of the Greek debacle commonly assume that it's a disaster made in Greece that now requires the rest of Europe to step in and sort it out. Wrong: this is a crisis of the eurozone, in which Athens is not a leading actor but merely a stage set, writes The Guardian in its editorial. Excerpts: The catastrophe that has been unfolding in Greece over the past year is merely the starkest incidence of long-running flaws within the eurozone. The disaster that European and IMF officials are currently struggling with in Athens naturally has particularly Greek idiosyncrasies – a tax system leakier than a sieve, for one. Still, were this strictly a Greek problem, afflicting an economy worth around only three percent of the eurozone's GDP, it could be contained with some adept statecraft (admittedly a quality rather lacking among the current crop of European ministers). But this meltdown goes wider, as a glance at Dublin, Lisbon or even Madrid will confirm: it is the inevitable product of the design faults of European monetary union. Unless those flaws are fixed, the single currency will remain under existential threat. The eurozone governments from Dublin to Tallinn have one monetary policy alongside 17 different fiscal policies and 17 different banking systems. This was always a nonsense, although it took a financial crisis to expose it as such. As governments have been forced to prop up their banks, broke European states like Greece have had to rely on the ECB and other institutions to keep their financial systems afloat. That transfer of cash from “core” Europe to the periphery is a baby step towards a common fiscal policy. There is also the European stability mechanism, which will allow eurozone states to bail out a stricken neighbor much more easily – again a small move towards a common European treasury. The details of these policies barely get reported, let alone debated – and they smack of a new economic order being built brick by brick without consulting the electorates who will ultimately have to stump up for it. But if the euro is to survive with all 17 members, and as a rival to the dollar, ministers will have to think up more such policies, such as issuing a common eurobond. __
