Greece and the Decline of Europe

Abstract

The sovereign debt crisis and economic collapse of Greece is not a national exception. The eurozone and the entire EU are now the epicenter of the world capitalist crisis that exploded in 2007. Greece is the weakest link of the European chain that is threatened to break apart with enormous consequences for the world economy. All the interventions by the EU led by Germany, by the European Central Bank and the IMF were socially disastrous and economically totally inefficient. The second bailout of Greece in February 2012 has been met with a powerful resistance by the Greek popular masses and has no more chances to succeed than the previous one. No EU financial mechanism or ‘firewall’ is capable of preventing the contagion, which involves now not only small peripheral countries like Portugal or Ireland but the third and fourth biggest European economies, Italy and Spain, and starts to hit the ‘hard core’ of the EU. The crisis manifests the historical decline of capitalism in its birthplace, the European Continent, as well as the decline of bourgeois democracy. A new era of historical social confrontations has opened where the question of political power and of the future of Europe has been explicitly posed.