Isn't Greece Different Than Iceland? aka Farewell, Europe?

And here I was thinking it would be immigration that would tear apart the European Union. Three years ago, the EU's existential debate was about whether Turkey, which at the time was angling to join the bloc, was European enough to join. That raised the questions of whether the continent's physical boundaries extended as far east as Iraq and its cultural boundaries could accept a Muslim country with a fledgling democracy. For all its projections of liberalism and acceptance, Europe has struggled with its 21st-century patterns of immigration, whether it's disaffected North Africans in suburban Paris' public housing or Eastern Europeans heading to England for working-class jobs (which most recently popped up in Gordon Brown's campaign gaffe).

Actually, it's the economy. The EU and IMF finally decided over the weekend to address the continent's debt crisis, by creating a mechanism to raise as much as nearly $1 trillion in cumulative debt to bail out whichever country is struggling to pay its sovereign debt this week. (These days one can choose among Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland and, perhaps soon, Italy and England.) But the continent's reluctance, particularly that of Germany, to help Greece over the past few months as it became the sickest sovereign patient has shown the core of the European Union is much smaller than originally thought and the core's members might be willing to drop the peripheral ones so they can hang around.

That Romania and Hungary had to seek the IMF's help to survive the global financial crisis isn't surprising. They're practically supposed to do it, no? But isn't Greece, as the world's oldest democracy (even if its current form is as nascent as Turkey's) and one of its most cherished cultural icons, supposed to be different than Iceland, which, like Romania and Hungary, has been left at the IMF's door to figure out its financial crisis? Maybe Greece and Iceland share more in common these days than they care to admit: Both are tourist-reliant economies and cultural oddities with overly burdensome social compacts that don't interest the rest of Europe. Dismissing them like this requires lots of cynicism, but that's what appears to run through the streets and halls of government these days.

If Greece isn't part of the EU's core, that probably means the only countries who comprise it are England, France and Germany. Sorry, Austria, Holland, Spain, etc, but you're not large enough economically, politically, culturally or demographically to truly matter when push comes to shove. If for some reason you've yet to have any doubts about the state of social contracts in the early 21st century, here's another one for you.

Update: Speaking of social contracts, David Leonhardt wrote in his column this week the U.S. might be the next Greece, at least in terms of having to balance its social expenditures with its taxes. On the other hand, Josef Joffe, in his review of Tony Judt's new book, writes that the need to shrink the state isn't such a bad idea. The state, Joffe writes, "makes its own pitch for power; it creates privileges, franchises and clienteles. This is why it is so hard to rein in, let alone cut back. The modern welfare state creates a new vested interest with each new entitlement. It corrupts as it does good."