View from Brussels [News Comment]

EUROPE IS AT a crossroads. Should the EU ??? read, Germany ??? continue to bail out Greece, writing down previous loans and extending new ones? Or will Greece flounce out, default on its debts, re-establish its own currency and make the vulnerability of the euro project seem all the more manifest?Alexis Tsipras, the youngish new Greek prime minister, is a construction engineer by training. But what he and his team of radicals in the newly elected left-wing Syriza government are doing is pushing at the European edifice. At issue are things like the morality of the debtor versus the creditor. The Bible asks us to forgive us our debtors; the creditor can be seen as a drug pusher. And countries that have defaulted on their debts before, like Argentina in 2002, which also ditched a tie to the US dollar, have grown splendidly in subsequent years. If Greece re-established the Drachma, the currency would suffer instant devaluation against the euro, which might make Greece???s exports and services competitive again. It is true that private debts denominated in euros would become harder to pay, but then who can forget the statistic that one district in rural Greece had the highest density of Porsche Cayennes in the world? Or that the EU had to use satellites to detect cheating in the agricultural claims of Greek tobacco farmers?