Greek Debt Crisis Raises Doubts About the European Union

The question being raised with increasing urgency is whether the European Union can fashion a mechanism to speed decision-making before irreversible damage is done and the euro itself slips into history.

The delays are inevitable, most experts say, stemming from the nature of the European Union and its own institutional voids: no single government, no single treasury, no effective fiscal coordination, no mechanism for crisis management.

Every major decision on the euro must be negotiated among member states and European institutions, a torturous process that also plays up political fissures both within and among member countries. That breeds uncertainty and even panic among investors, who already doubt that the Greek deal that the European leaders finally sealed on Friday night will forestall an eventual restructuring of Athens’ crippling debt.

“The European Union is running behind events,” said Anne-Marie Le Gloannec, a political scientist at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris. While, for example, the United States could “shock and awe” the markets early in the global financial crisis with the TARP bailout money and a huge stimulus program to restart the economy, there is no single European institution that can do the same. By contrast, every decision about Greece has been a painful, time-consuming bargain among the different national governments, with their own political requirements and concerns, and their own views of economic virtue.

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