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far niente (“the sweetness of doing nothing”) and Spaniards are for their aimless after-
dark paseo wanderings. A nation of workaholics or a nation of less aggressive workers
can function just fine, provided everyone's on the same page. But when hardworking folk
begin to feel that they're propping up their “lazy” compatriots in other countries, things
get testy.
Things reached a head during the economic crisis of the early 2010s, when Europe
paid the price—in the form of expensive bailouts and painful cutbacks—for what had been
taken-for-granted services. It's no coincidence that the European countries that have re-
ceived the most development aid (the so-called “PIIGS” countries—Portugal, Italy, Ire-
land, Greece, and Spain) are the ones who are the most debt-ridden and at risk of failing.
Even with that aid, their productivity has lagged far behind the stronger economies. And,
even though their workforce doesn't produce as much per capita as German workers, they
still have a mighty currency that's tied to Germany. By earning wages and getting aid in
euros, these nations enjoyed a false prosperity that they may not have merited—and the
bursting real-estate bubble made it worse. Before unity, if a nation didn't produce much
and slid into crippling debt, it could simply devalue its currency (and by doing so, de-
crease society-wide what laborers were paid in real terms). But the euro makes that im-
possible.
In 2012, a feisty political debate erupted between two nations with diametrically op-
posed fiscal philosophies. Greece grabbed headlines for the severity of its troubles and its
apparent inability to resolve them. For a while, it seemed the Greek crisis may undo the
euro currency, and possibly the entire EU; leaders discovered that it's much easier to get
into the Eurozone than it is to get out. Germany—which generates more than a quarter of
the EU's total GDP, and is its biggest net contributor—felt it should have some say in the
union it had been bankrolling for all these years. Chancellor Angela Merkel was willing
to help bail out Greece, but her offer had strings attached: The Greeks must learn to live
within their means, to be enforced by strict fiscal benchmarks.
Greeks on the street chafed at the suggestion that they should give up promised vaca-
tions and retirements, and be forced to adopt a Germanic nose-to-the-grindstone attitude.
But eventually the Greeks accepted the bailout, with those strings; as of this writing, the
country's economy has stabilized and the euro is safe. When I asked my German friends
what they thought of the billions of German-earned euros going south to bail out Greece,
the consensus seemed to be, “We've made plenty of money off of them in the past, and
after propping them up through this crisis, we'll continue to make money off of them in
the future.”
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