In today's Handelsblatt the remarkable essay by the newspaper's editor in chief, Gabor Steingart, must be read very carefully by all committed to the European idea in one way or another -and especially by those assembled tonight in Brussels in order to lay the foundation of a common governing mechanism. The essay convincingly shows that the federal Europe that some loathed and others pined for was actually inaugurated on May 10, under the alias of the financial support mechanism for those countries in the Eurozone that might in the future face the same debt travails as Greece. This, together with the effective financial takeover of Greece by Brussels, means nothing less than that the old "no bail out" pieties have been thrown overboard and that a new institutional framework of interdependence and mutuality, i.e. of functional political unity, has been embarked on. Otmar Issing, a staunch enemy of such a development, had predicted this eventuality back in February as he argued against any rescue of Greece. He was right in his predictions, wrong in his evaluations.

The Euro in and of itself, naked of all political significance, was just a financial phantom meant to be blown away by the gales of the market sooner or later. In order to save it, the collective will of the European governments was forced to extract the political dimension of this experiment, which some wanted to ignore, but which was uppermost in the minds of all those statesmen who since the fifties took all the crucial initiatives in the direction of a unified economic area.

The ultimate goal of European togetherness was primarily cultural, even philosophical, in conception and intent: an attempt to work against the historical legacy that wreaked havoc on the continent. This means that it was primarily continental in scope: the Brits had no essential place in it, even though they were and are indispensable as partners contributing, advising and influencing from a distance. This is a choice that they themselves have irrevocably made. It is a choice right for themselves, and they are entitled to it.

It is from this perspective that the case of Greece must be analyzed. The decision to include the country in the common market and the Euro area was never an economic one to begin with: neither by the Greek nor by the European leaders. The economic weakness of the country was well known to all, and despite the chicanery that everybody is pouncing on these days all responsible international authorities were fully cognizant of the real situation. This in no way absolves, of course, the Greek ruling classes of their criminal mishandling of the European bonanza that flowed in. But something like that was to be rationally expected. As Ken Rogoff has shown the country has been in a recurring state of financial default from its very inception in the 19th. century. And it was rather a pleasant surprise that a feeble attempt was made under Simitis between 1996 and 2000 to rein in the endemic corruption and waste -an attempt that soon fizzled out of course under the relentless onslaught of the forces of plunder and debauchery represented primarily by Simitis' own party.

Nay, Greece has always been an idea and just an idea in Europe's mind -and the present-day country called Greece owes its existence to the potency of that idea and the irresistible hold it exercised over Europe's collective consciousness. Had the political fate of the country been left to its inhabitants it would never have arisen in the nineteenth century or managed to stand on its own feet in the face of tough reality both in its immediate neighborhood and in the wider European theater. It would have gone under in 1898, reduced once again to an Ottoman province; and later in 1944 it would have been gobbled up as a mere amputated province in Stalin's Balkan Federation.

Its internal society has always been extremely weak and disparate, lacking any solid cultural or moral cohesion. Its varied contents have been constantly at war among themselves -a diagnosis, interestingly, that was only yesterday repeated in a report by the IMF delegation resident here. The various factions have always felt, and continue feel, an intense and consuming hatred primarily against their domestic opponents, on the altar of which they are blindly willing to sacrifice the common country and its collective interests. For, indeed, as far as they are concerned there is no common country, and in the place of the collective interest they place their particular selfish designs. This is a self-destructive political culture, once again splendidly evinced in the present turmoil, in which the ideological obsession of anti-westernism, under leftist or rightist guise, has been the vital motivation of the majority of political formations, including the ruling "socialist" party. That this immovable attachment threatens to cost the country's bankruptcy, i.e. people going without the basics of life, is of complete indifference to all these militant champions of the people.

Greece on the ground is, hence, nothing but geography: the eternal "isles of Greece" sung by Byron that are still today drenched with the glorious spirit of antiquity. It is this spirit that informs the collective soul of Europe, and it was for this spirit's sake that Europe undertook to effect the independence of Greece back in the 1820's. It was that same spirit that prompted and guided the decision to include Greece in the architecture of united Europe. Without Greece the idea of Europe is mutilated. Europe understood this quite well, even though it knew of the decisive discrepancy between this idea and the human and social reality that unfolded within the geographical confines it pointed to. In the same way the Philhellenes of the 19th c. were soon enough disabused of their romantic notions concerning the Greek insurgents as reincarnations of the heroes of antiquity. And if they persevered in the defense of Greece it was out of loyalty to the glowing concept of eternal Hellenism to which they were unwaveringly committed. As to the indigenous tribes they were either oblivious or outright hostile to these ideals, which they rightly perceived as possessions now of the western nations having died out in their geographical place of birth.

The same holds true today. Of the inhabitants of the country only a small minority has any truck or trade with the legacy of classical antiquity, with the very language itself being ground to dust under the feet of the marauding political cliques that have destroyed the country -first the educational system and then inevitably the economy. Among this minority,surely, are found individuals of the highest intellectual and moral quality, capable of shining to world-class achievement under any decent and just political system -and they frequently prove this when they escape from here. But it is these individuals precisely that are trampled underfoot by the ugly nonentities that control the levers of power domestically. So, these unfortunates just hide away in their undergrounds or attics, communicating secretly among themselves and just praying for the wolf-packs in control of public space to go away. Which they won't.

Hence, the concepts of Hellenism -and Latinity for that matter- are among the noblest attributes of the European identity, and the construction of a united Europe has been meant above all as a resurrection of a common civilization founded upon these universal pursuits. Greece, and Italy, as components of Europe were never meant as a money-spinning enterprise. It is quite gross to express it in these terms, but for Europe to affirm itself in its universality, i.e. as a latter day incarnation of the cultural prototypes of classical Greece and Rome, it would indeed have to pay through the nose. If alternatively you chose to integrate Europe on narrow criteria of economic efficiency and financial probity, then you would have to content yourself with a much truncated version thereof, which would forfeit the alluring aura of universality inspiring peoples far and wide to transcend their forlorn and miserable nationalism. The Germans, for one, know full well what it means to sacrifice narrow economic interest in favor of an overriding moral and political idea: they after all granted parity between the East and the West German Mark (a patent economic absurdity, for which they paid dearly in material terms) in order to secure the unification of their people. The same order of priorities applies, then, on a European plane. The Greeks are, of course, not the Germans' "blood brothers". But to express the problem in these terms would mean to drag it further down into the swamp of biology, into which presumably present day Germans would not want to be again sunk.

The integrity of the idea of Europe is comprised of the complementary, but also antithetical, components of a northern culture of austerity and a southern one of vital enjoyment -just ask Goethe about it. If it is rather expensive to achieve it, and the material burden falls inordinately upon the shoulders of the northern puritanical peoples, then this must be suffered and endured. The moral and political greatness of Germany up to now has been to boldly shoulder this. Besides, she has also done pretty well economically out of the arrangement.

We have now reached a threshold of decision and opportunity, i.e. the necessity to proceed to the next inevitable step of closer political union. As for the miscreant Greek elites they are going to be punished anyway -either by being forced to dismantle their evil system of mendacity and exploitation, thus empowering the decent minority to assert itself and truly help the people at large to a new dawn of just well-being; or by being thrown out of the European project altogether. But this is a mere side issue, and it was a huge mistake by Merkel to turn it into the main consideration in the present crisis. The essential challenge, as she herself has belatedly realized, is the further consolidation of European oneness, as a matter not merely of economic prosperity, but also of political peace and cultural progress. The true Europeans, in other words the true Greeks, in Greece will cheer on this epic endeavor from whatever place the harsh winds of history consign them to.

Sometimes silence is the only available stance in the face of an unbearable reality. Language is simply too poor to express the horror that we have lived through this month. The Swedish finance minister spoke some days ago about the "wolf-packs" of speculators trying to tear apart the weaker states of the EU. But we here came face to face with very real wolves with a human countenance who deliberately and in cold blood burned to death three innocent workers trapped in their building which these beasts torched. And all around this horrendous scene the "revolutionary" crowds of protesters cheered the crime, cursed the victims gasping for breath and fought to prevent the fire brigade to come near to put out the fire. That we would be living in such hell on earth today I could never have imagined even in my worst nightmares, despite the face that the depraved condition of this society was quite evident to me within a couple of years of my return.

Meanwhile the government is degenerating into a collection of clueless buffoons, constantly announcing new measures of restructuring that at this point are nothing but a bunch of words. At the same time the greater part of the government itself together with the middle echelons of the state administration are skilfully conspiring to nullify the few changes that have managed to percolate downwards, while the opposition parties are engaged in a destructive politics as usual guaranteed to keep the country under foreign economic tutelage indefinitely -if not actually to push it over the cliff of financial ruin from which it was saved in the last minute. No wonder, then, that no one abroad considers it slightly likely that the country will indeed manage to dig itself out of its self-inflicted disaster.

A glimmer of hope might be left if things had stabilized on the European plane. But even from that planet the news are hugely discouraging. The stubborn self-righteousness of the Germans which initially managed to turn the relatively minor Greek debacle into a full-blown European and then world crisis has in the past couple of days mutated into a panicky sort of maladroitness -unless it be a deliberate strategy to scuttle the Euro so that Germany might once again revert to its splendid Kantian and Prussian aloneness. One is assailed by crazy thoughts like that in the current darkness. In one of my early posts back in February I wrote that the situation could be saved provided that the chief actors did not all of them together manage to screw up completely in all fields at the same time. At this point it seems that they have achieved precisely that exceedingly rare feat.