Anyone can participate in the EU, and NOT be part of the Euro. Look around....several European countries have simply said no thanks, for their own reasons (Denmark is a good example).
Countries that desire the Euro badly....typically have bankers, businessmen, and industry leaders who see common currency as an advantage. Greece felt that way twenty years ago as this idea finally started take off, and so did many of the European countries.
As for ‘imperialism’? No military force is being utilized. The Greek government had five years after the last loan deal to revitalize their revenue spending and put some ‘bite’ into tax collection. Accomplishments over five years could be written on a 3x5 inch card....that really tells the whole bulk of this story of why Greece political figures aren’t respected anymore, and why governments are completely changed out every year or two.
You could go and launch into some episode to force Germany to pay back the 1940 bank-loan (11-billion Euro, without interest), and even grant half of the 340-billion Euro loan as a gift and not payable back to the EU. Within ten to fifteen years....they’d be back at the EU table and asking for more assistance because they’ve rebuilt the whole debt thing from scratch again.
Go pick up James Angelos new book, The Full Catastrophe. It centers on the trail of Greece’s problems....is fairly up to date....and lays out the Nazi issues of 1940 quiet well. He lays out a number of conversations with regular Greeks who readily admit the Greek people are ‘screwed’, and every election brings a new fresh prospective to being screwed. They are more than capable of firing politicians....it’s just the problem that the replacement crowd aren’t marginally any better.
Sadly, I’ve been there several times over the past twenty years and think it’s a place with lots of character and historic charm. The Greek are among the nicest people you’d ever want to associate with. Yet you turn a corner, note some tax avoidance behavior and just start to noticing how corruption layers itself into their culture. In France, you’d eventually get dragged into tax court and shoved into some jail. In Greece, folks admire you and note your tax avoidance accomplishments. Few ever get sent to jail. All of this just makes you grin and ask how stupid was the EU when the discussion started up originally (the Greeks have been doing type of thing for well over 2,000 years).
Imperialism does not always necessitate military force. Even former Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso called the an “empire” in 2007. From its beginnings, the EU construed all of its machinations in the spirit of “the charter of the United Nations”, which is a clone of the 1936 USSR “Stalin constitution”.
And James Angelos, from the WSJ? The “there shall be open borders” crowd?
I can’t believe you’re justifying increasing taxation of any kind, especially at draconian levels. There is no corresponding private-sector investment being encouraged in Greece of any kind whatsoever; it seems that the EU is shutting that out.