May–June 2015
Article
Foreign Policy

Dead Weight: How Greece Wound up Trapped in the European Union

Format:Print

Abstract

In the early 1990s, Greece fell far afield of the economic criteria laid out by the Maastricht Treaty, the EU's founding document. In 1999, when the European monetary union was launched, Greece failed to meet the criteria again, but managed to squeeze into the body two years later. A decade on, when the financial crisis hit, Greece was running double-digit fiscal deficits and had accumulated debts worth nearly 130 percent of the country's GDP. To understand why Greece's entry into the EU was so problematic and yet so preordained, one must go back to the political dream, hatched in the immediate post-World War II period, of a continent free, at last, of war. Originally, the EU was seen not as a seamless financial market or even a free trade zone, but as a space for political and social cooperation. Adapted from the source document.