Sir, – A Leavy (April 8th) says that I use the word filoitimia to describe the "Greek attitude to the EU". That is not what I wrote. Filotimia is how the Greeks would describe the essence of Greekness. How they describe the EU is mostly unprintable in a family newspaper. – Yours, etc,
RICHARD PINE,
Corfu.
Sir, – To read Anthony Leavy’s letter, you’d be forgiven for thinking Greece is entirely to blame for the current mess in the euro zone.
It is true that the Greek people elected various governments over the years and should take responsibility for the consequences of those governments’ policies but the cost of running the reduced Greek state is less than the amount raised in tax revenue, so it’s not clear what else the Greeks are expected to do. People like Mr Leavy want the state reduced even further, and for what? So Greek taxpayers can pay the interest on the debt they were forced to take on to cover the losses made by German and French banks.
The historical perspective is that it was not in fact Greece that was the first country to break the rules of the 1998 stability and growth pact, which if adhered to could have prevented the euro zone crisis. That honour falls to Germany, then France and then to Portugal. Germany colluded with France to prevent the European Commission holding them to account and then they forced a weakening of the rules in 2005. It was those rule changes that allowed Greece to get away with providing false data on its economy and it was also those rule changes that prevented the European Commission from holding Greece to account because any effort to do so was again blocked by Germany, as it suited Germany when Greek customers bought German goods and it wasn’t in Germany’s interest to stop the flow of credit to Greece.
In fact the only countries not to break the terms of the pact were Finland, Sweden, Luxembourg and Denmark; it’s worth pointing that, of those, only Luxembourg hasn’t had a severe banking crisis at some point over the last 20 years, yet they were all allowed to let banks go bust and to transfer the burden for a failed banking system to the banking system, not the taxpayer. – Yours, etc,
DESMOND FitzGERALD,
Canary Wharf, London.
Sir, – The fallacy that continues to be propagated that the European Commission did not know of the gaping hole in the finances of Greece in advance of its admission to the third stage of economic and monetary union (the adoption of the euro) does nothing to enhance the debate around this subject. Enough commentators, including former European Commission staff, have debunked this myth over the last five years. Indeed, we now know that not only Greece but even larger states did not meet the qualification criteria. – Yours, etc,
GILES FOX,
Kilmacud, Co Dublin.