[Osem]

@ Damien

Aside from imposing an economic straightjacket on countries which could not survive it, isn't this the reason the Euro could never work as intended by its archtiects? To suppose that when times got tough (as they inevitably would), there'd be no surfacing of national rivalries, no blame game (whether rational or not), no breakdown of trust, no hatred, no anger, no retaliation, no extremism etc. on the part of the suffering populations is either naive in the extreme or something the Eurocrats were willing to gamble on avoiding to get their way.

What we're seeing here is basic human nature in action and I dare say the Eurocrats believed they could even control that, along with the shape of our bananas...

The Germans should know better than most what can happen when there's simmering resentment amongst a population. It only takes a few charismatic extremists to come out from under their stones and suddenly there's a tinderbox of hatred. Whether that hatred is rational or not, justified or not, doesn't matter and if it's further fuelled by historic grievances, so much the worse.