What is happening to Greece now is profoundly wrong. It is wrong because the economics will not work. It is wrong because it is wholly undemocratic.
Taking first the issue of democracy. The European Union is an enterprise founded to preserve democracy, yet it has allowed its institutions to fragment in such a way that it has become little better than a bureaucratic autocracy. This is not how its members see themselves but it is how the Greek people are now coming to regard it. Within the fragmentation was the floored notion of monetary union without fiscal union. This cannot work. Within that failure, was the permissive attitude to the rules which did exist, which allowed Greece to join the euro in the first place on a completely false prospectus. The Greeks then made hay. The sun stopped shining. Greece is utterly bust.
Rather than face that reality and work out some programme where Greece can default and devalue in order to make a fresh start and grow its economy, which is the only realistic option, the euro members, led by Germany, with the support of France, are condemning Greece to an unending period of deep depression. They are doing this because of the losses they would themselves sustain in their own banking systems if Greece were allowed to take the only proper route out of the crisis into which it has, through its own profligacy, put itself.
When the previous Greek prime minister decided it was proper to put an earlier set of terms to the Greek people in a referendum there was uproar and he was forced from office. This now adds up to a kind of economic occupation against the will of the people on the pattern of a military conquest. This is not what the EU is supposed to be nor is it what it is supposed to do.
Nothing whatever has been solved by the vote in the Greek parliament last night, to back the latest austerity demands. It is doubtful they can be enforced and if they are Greece will not have the revenues to fund even its reduced financial commitments. The argument by the EU members was that without their medicine the future, not just of the euro but of the EU was at risk. Let their be no illusions. Grinding into poverty and depression one of its members not only threatens the future of the EU but also throws up doubts about its benefits and its purposes.
This is now a crisis not of the euro but of the whole European Union.