The ‘Sarajevo Moment’ for the Euro: The End of the Europe Project

Posted on Posted in Aggregated No Comments

While everyone is talking about an “inevitable” Greek exit from the Eurozone, some intelligence analysts are saying that it is rather the beginning of the end of the euro. Most dramatic was the comment by columnist Larry Elliot in Britain’s Guardian, under the headline: “Greece Crisis Could Be a Sarajevo Moment for the Eurozone.”

“A hundred and one years ago on Sunday, gun shots rang out in a city in southern Europe. Few at the time paid much heed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife as they drove through the streets of Sarajevo. Within six weeks, however, Europe was at war.

“Make no mistake, the decision by Alexis Tsipras to hold a referendum on the bailout terms being demanded of his country has the potential to be a Sarajevo moment…. It is not just about whether the creditors overplayed their hand in the negotiations, although they did. It is about the future of the euro itself.

“If Greece leaves, the idea that the euro is irrevocable is broken,” Elliot writes, and saying that the other countries will take the option of leaving the Eurozone. He then warns, “Just as importantly, the financial markets will know that, and will pile pressure on countries that look vulnerable. That’s why Greece represents an existential crisis for the Eurozone.

“It will be said in response that Greece is a small, insignificant country and that the single currency has much better defenses than it had at the last moment of acute trouble in the Summer of 2012. Diplomats in Europe’s capitals took very much the same view in late June 1914.”

Sputnik reports an article in today’s Der Spiegel by Henrik Müller under the headline, “Merkel’s European Strategy Didn’t Just Fail, It Failed Spectacularly.” Henrik puts the blame squarely on the German government and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in particular. And, writes Sputnik in different dispatch, the policy is now paving the way not just for a Grexit, but “for a Brexit, Frexit and Fixit,” referring to growing anti-euro sentiments in Britain (which isn’t part of the euro), France, and Finland.

“There is a real threat of Europe collapsing and Germany … is letting it happen,” Müller wrote.

An editorial in the London Daily Telegraph slammed the European Union, writing that

“the humiliation now being heaped upon a proud and ancient country is a salutary lesson to all member states — that without the power to make their own decisions they are always at the mercy of the unelected bureaucrats and financiers who run the institutions. The democracy that was born in Greece more than two millennia ago, no longer applies when control over the currency and economic policy is handed to a supranational body. The question of whether the price is any longer worth paying is not one for the Greeks alone to answer.”

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.