ABSTRACT
Germany is providing the largest European part, which has caused an uproar inside the country, as Chancellor Angela Merkel has been alternately praised as the “Iron Chancellor” for not giving Greece the loans, and as a weak leader for finally giving in. As the situation stands now, finance ministers from the sixteen European countries that use the euro agreed Sunday to save Greece with $146.1 billion in loans over three years to keep it from defaulting. Despite the union’s 1957 Treaty of Rome, calling for “ever-closer union” and “concerted action” to bring the very different nations together, there is no common fiscal policy, no Europe-wide constitution, no effective European Central Bank. Irony of ironies, it is big, industrial, tax-paying Germany—the country whose larger depredations in the war formed precisely that postwar generation of Europeans—that the union would like to leave with the bill.
