91Èȱ¬

Some commentators think that Greece's financial crisis is a sign that the entire EU project - including the single currency - is in deep trouble.

wrote in the Financial Times: "For all its upheavals, there used to be something reassuringly ineluctable about the European Union. Now the enterprise is beginning to unravel."

His fellow commentator writes in the same paper today: "The experiment of a monetary union without political union has failed. The EU is thus about to confront a historic choice between integration and disintegration."

And the 91Èȱ¬'s Europe editor Gavin Hewitt wrote after the bail-out plan was agreed: "This is a day of humiliation. It was never envisaged that a eurozone country would need bailing out. Today the EU had to launch one of the biggest financial rescues ever attempted. What the plan does do is to buy time and to shelter Greece from the fierce winds of the markets. What it doesn't do is to answer the questions of whether economies so fundamentally different as Greece and say Germany can be part of the same monetary union."

So let's try to look at the arguments on both sides. Here's how I imagine the European Commission would put it:

-- Yes, it's been a difficult time, but the very fact that a deal has been done shows that the EU mechanisms and structures are still functioning.

-- Everyone accepts that the single currency - and the EU itself - is a work in progress. With each crisis that it survives, it learns lessons and grows stronger.

-- It has always been acknowledged that there will be stresses between national political pressures and common European priorities. It is the task of EU political leaders to deal with those stresses and persuade their sometimes unconvinced electorates that what is good for the EU as a whole is good for them too.

-- And besides, surely the positives outweigh the negatives. Look at the benefits of border-less trade between the 27 EU members; look at the costs saved in currency conversions between the 16 members of the eurozone; and look at the benefits of a labour market that enables workers to go to where the work is rather than stay at home and depend on state benefits.

And here are some of the opposite arguments:

-- The Euro was always based on a false premise ... that you could unite hugely different economies with a single currency, even without a single tax system or a single political entity pulling the levers.

-- The Germans, who have built the strongest economy in Europe, were promised that they would never have to hand over money they pay in taxes to bail out poorer, less efficient countries. That promise has been broken.

-- Voters right across the EU were promised that opening up to poorer countries in central and eastern Europe would not result in millions of workers crossing borders to take jobs in the more prosperous countries of the north and west. That promise has been broken too, resulting in a sharp rise in anti-migrant sentiment and growing support for xenophobic parties of the far right.

-- EU leaders have totally failed to carry their electorates with them as they built the EU into what it now is.

So those are some of the arguments. You be the judge: what's your verdict?

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