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Comment by Merem | Hacker News Reader

Greece screwed up Greece before they even joined the eurozone. They weren't even eligible for that but still managed to do so by cooking the books (with the help of the likes of Goldman Sachs etc).

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Which was well known to the EU, happy to have them on board regardless. Expansion at any cost.

The same reason much of the corruption is tolerated in Eastern Europe. Expansion at all costs -- must have a buffer between Russia.

Na, I don't think Russia played into this all that much. Excessive ambition, overzealous idealism, and internal politics were much more relevant. Don't forget that when these decisions were made Russia wasn't perceived to be the threat it's seen as today, at least not by the EU of that day. E.g. poland joined in 2004, but much of the talks were in the 90s- and thus in an era when Russia was far from threatening. Putin didn't become president until 2000. So while the EU certainly wasn't looking for a buffer, it's much more plausible that the new members were less sanguine about future Russia (and how right they were), thus seeking to cement their independence from the USSR.

It's somewhat ironic, for instance, to consider that it was the UK that particularly pushed for expansion. Not only did they lobby hard internally beforehand, they were (IIRC?) only EU country to immediately grant free immigration from the new members, without any transition period - how times change!

Ireland also did this. Mind you, they probably just copied whatever the UK was doing, as was the style of the times (spare a thought for the poor Irish public servants, who will be forced to transpose their own European directives into law from next year, rather than just copying the UK).

And they were hoping it would be fixed, which obviously didn't happen. So to be fair You can't solely blame EU for that.

I suppose it depends of your definition of screwed up.

The emigration, life expectancy, and growth data don't say that. Not even the public debt data say that.

A whole generation's life chances ruined across several countries?

It seems I'm being down-voted.

I will clarify in case the reason is that I didn't explain myself properly: the data don't say that Greece screwed up so much before the current crisis.

It has been always a country with problems but the statistics were improving until they get "rescued".

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