As E.U. leaders wrestled in the fall of 2011 with how to bail out those state governments that had been amassing relatively large semi-sovereign debt loads, residents in relatively solvent states such as Germany were frustrated with what they perceived as profligate over-spending in Greece. It is possible that even the Germans did not realize how engrained the excessive politically-based Greek bureaucracy had become. I suspect that for many Greeks, news of their living beyond their means was met more with denial and utter disbelief than an attitude-adjustment. In other words, a vast disparity in perspective exists on the ground as the E.U. struggled to come to grips with the debt crisis. The “ever closer union” necessary for the E.U. to rise to the occasion has as its foremost obstacle the disparate perceptions existing within the union (and enforceable by state governments).
The full essay is at Essays on the E.U. Political Economy: Federalism and the Debt Crisis, available at Amazon.