In terms of the great implosion of the global economy which began on
Wall Street in late 2008, the Greek financial collapse is a storm in
a retsina glass. The sums concerned are trivial by the standards of
modern multitrillion-dollar high finance, or indeed by the standards
of the Bundesbank. But the rights and wrongs are not the immediate
point (even if no one can claim that successive Greek governments
have managed public finances with any excess of scrupulosity: at one
point they turned to the experts, in the form of Goldman Sachs, for
lessons in creative accounting) so much as what the crisis has said
about Europe.
[...]
Since the fifteenth century, the world has been dominated by Europe
and taught by Europe and exploited by Europe and made by Europe.
After the calamitous experiences of the first half of the twentieth
century, Europe had had enough, not least of itself and its own
recent history.
<http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=23220>Link
