I once knew a senior European Union official – an Austrian – who argued to me that Greece had no place in the European Union. “Greece is not really culturally European, it’s part of the Middle East,” he insisted. “Just listen to their music.”
To this the Greeks might legitimately reply: “Plato, Aristotle and (on the musical issue), Demis Roussos.” But my Austrian friend’s views, while eccentric, touched on a real and sensitive issue within the Union: the fear that it is economically and politically divided between a northern hard core and a flaky southern fringe.
This division became temporarily less important when the EU expanded to let in the countries of the former Soviet bloc – which then became the objects of the condescension formerly reserved for the likes of Greece and Portugal. But the EU’s north-south divide is now being brought back into focus by the global economic crisis.
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