You and FLT-bird are saying two different things
FLT-bird is saying they can work on their own and they are kept on a leash by some amorphous EU (forgetting that they themselves ARE the eu)
You are saying that they are spoilt and control the eu
What I’m saying is that being given a stable currency like the Euro was a poisoned chalice. Initially it allowed them to borrow far more than they would have been able to in their own right. It would be kind of like giving a drug addict a bigger budget to buy more drugs. Of course they did borrow far more and then came the inevitable crash.
Unlike in the past when they could simply devalue their currency to effectively drive down the value of the freebies the government had given away and make their goods cheaper on world markets thus boosting exports, they cannot do that any longer since they do not control their own currency. So they have to actually pay off the debts they incurred.
You can say it was their own fault for incurring those debts in the first place and that is true but....it was entirely foreseeable that this is exactly what they would do. Now that they’re in a debt trap, they’re going through an enormous amount of pain in the form of austerity and massive unemployment. They would be far better off to leave the Eurozone at least if not the EU entirely, re-adopt their old national currencies and devalue that currency to effectively reduce their debt burden and to put their people - most especially their young people - back to work.
What the Euro has amounted to is Germany extending credit to the Southern periphery, and getting them stuck in a debt trap.....effectively exporting unemployment. If they still had the old Deutschmark, its exchange rate would have risen, making German goods more expensive and increasing German unemployment.
On the one hand the Germans have a point when they say that countries like Greece should have more discipline and cut back on their social benefits schemes....push the retirement age at least up to German levels before asking German taxpayers for a bailout....but on the other hand if those countries were to give the Germans the middle finger and leave the eurozone (and devalue their currencies forcing the Germans to take a big haircut on the sovereign debts they hold from those countries), their goods would suddenly be MUCH more competitive with German goods on price.