And even if there is not immediate contagion as a result of Greece’s now likely exit from the euro, something profound will have fundamentally changed. The euro will forever cease to be a currency whose membership is beyond doubt; instead it is morphing into an exchange rate mechanism, where the market, vulture-like, will constantly be on the lookout for the next shoe to drop, be it Italy, France, or Spain.

The unsatisfactory and not entirely translatable notion of “solidarity” that theoretically underpins the whole project is being banished from any serious person’s thinking, shown to have been a fraud. The Grexit crisis proves beyond doubt that no one in Europe – least of all dominant Germany – is prepared to make serious sacrifices for the union when times get rough. As such, Europe is nothing more than a paper tiger.

Which leads us back to Hemingway and interconnectedness, for no one comes out of this calamity looking good. Yes, the Greeks lied about their numbers to get into the Eurozone in the first place; but the creditor states didn’t much care. Yes, Athens should not have borrowed money like a drunken sailor, but German and French banks were more than happy to lend it to them. Yes, Greeks should not get to retire in their 50s with German-sized pensions (and without German productivity), but Greek economic fecklessness is hardly a new phenomenon Brussels was unaware of.

Finally, yes, Tsipras and his even more overrated finance minister Yanis Varoufakis are pathetically hiding behind their people in proposing a plebiscite on the creditor’s terms, rather than leading as statesmen ought to do. But the long commented-upon democratic deficit in EU institutions means such a cowardly strategy actually has some merit.

The bell is tolling for Tspiras and his Syriza party, who will surely squander the benefits of the upcoming devaluation of the new drachma relative to the euro in a series of Marxist fantasy policies, when what they ought to be doing is collecting taxes and launching structural reforms (which they will never do). Greece will become just another poor Balkan country; and that is a tragedy.

But the bell is not just tolling for the Marxist schoolboys in Athens. By failing to master a crisis that ought to have been dealt with ages ago (debt relief for structural reforms, anyone?), Europe has destroyed any claim it might have had to be the future; frankly, it now becomes an open question as to whether Europe has a future, as it surely has proven it simply cannot take effective decisions in a crisis.

So yes, Tsipras is on to something. Europe thinks the bell is tolling for Greece; but it tolls for thee.

David Fuller's view

I would reword the penultimate paragraph above: the EU, not Europe, has proved that it cannot take effective decisions in a crisis. 

The EU is an undemocratic, unwieldly, expensive, Socialist experiment which seldom succeeded in generating real wealth and rising living standards for anyone other than its bureaucratic officials.  The EU’s only clear successes came as a consequence of throwing money at poor regions of newly recruited member states, albeit at considerable cost to the region as a whole.  

The idea that countries could only join the EU, but never leave, is ridiculous.  Other EU countries will variously consider whether they wish to remain in the single currency.  Eastern European candidates for joining the EU, not least to escape Russia’s menace, will ponder whether or not they should also convert to the single currency.  Most importantly, the UK’s referendum on EU membership, scheduled before the end of 2017, could be far closer than either European officials or Prime Minister David Cameron currently expects.   

The EU aside, I am convinced that Europe has a very bright future as a free trade region for independent nations.  Europe’s high educational standards and cultural sophistication are key building blocks of success, which only need to be combined with strong democracies and intelligent economic policies.    

(See Also: Jean-Claude Juncker: “I feel betrayed”)