PAST EFFORTS AT JOINDER

THE EUROPEAN UNION

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The events described heretofore signal much institutional change on the Continent, fueled by evergrowing similarities among it people: changes in politics, social structure, customs, and beliefs about values and goals.  However, some of the old disparitiesof economic structure and habit may not as yet have substantially diminished, as evidenced by recent circumstances. 

GREECE

In Greece, the worldwide economic downturn was particularly damaging to shipping and tourism, two of that country's primary sources of income.  The government spent heavily in an effort to bolster the national economy.  But by 2010, and again in 2011, Greece was compelled to seek loans of 45 billion, 110 billion, and 130 billion Euros from the European Union, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund.  The resultant austerity measures, which the lenders required as a condition of their loans, caused widespread protest, and some rioting among the Greek populace, who had become accustomed to a relatively mild tax structure, high public salaries, and very early retirements on very generous pensions. 

Necessary tax increases wreaked havoc upon the private commercial sector.  Industrial output decreased by twenty eight percent in 2011.  111,000 companies filed bankruptcy; and unemployment rose to almost twenty percent.  Public debt became 143 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2010.

Greece considered resort to a cessation of use of the Euro as its currency, and a return to the Drachma in its place--a move which might have produced economic calamity throughout the E.U. and the world in general, as well as possible disaster within the Greek nation itself.

To avoid this, another "bailout" in the amount of 130 billion Euros was extended to Greece, again on condition that further austerity measures be initiated and observed.  This, together with the election of a center-right government by a narrow majority in June of 2012, will hopefully enable Greece to remain in the "Euro-zone," and eventually recover economic health.