Germany has not changed its position recently, if at all throughout the four year crisis. For Germany the euro is a simple national interest weapon. It allows it to dominate Europe and global trade by artificially suppressing its real exchange rate. For it to sustain that position it cannot allow peripheral nations to successfully drop out of the currency. They’d flood out and the more that left the higher the euro would rise as the German weighting in the currency increased. Anyone staying must adhere to German rules and anyone leaving must be destroyed to deter others from doing do. The euro and Europe are irrelevant to German real politik. They are in it for the Germans.
Yanis appears to have assumed that he could grasp the European light on the hill and persuade with elegant reason all of Europe to embrace enlightened super-national consciousness. He’s been genteelly sipping lattes at a gunfight and by doing so has played right into realist German hands by destroying his country’s economy as an example to all other European ‘dead beats’.
There is nothing new here. Yanis has simply been outplayed.
Translation: Yanis assumed he was dealing with rational actors that were not thugs. He was wrong and he should have known better based on past performance. Bottom line. Neoliberalism is based on thuggery. Anyone assuming otherwise is a mark and like to become a patsy. It's dealing with psychopaths and sociopaths as if they were sane people. Naked Capitalism
Greece Brought a Latte to a Gunfight David Llewellyn-Smith, founding publisher and former editor-in-chief of The Diplomat