I don't get it.
Greece borrowed money from others, now they are keen not to pay it back?
It doesn't quite work like that. There are 3 reasons (IMO) why it's outrageous that the Greek people have to carry the can for all this austerity.
[1] - lets say I have a banking license and you don't. You ask me for EU 100,000. I don't have it (in fact I don't have anything of value whatsoever to lend you). However, I can lend you your own future if you'll just sign this form. So you sign the form, I go to my garage and print up EU 100,000 and off you go to work your butt off for the next 25 years of your life to underwrite that little 5 minute printing session I did in my garage. Then you come back a quarter of a century later having managed to 'earn' your 100 grand from others who similarly "borrowed" from me, only you now owe me another 100 grand for the interest. So, off you go again.....
There is no sense whatsoever in which this process can be called "borrowing" which is a very different thing (at least the kind you're alluding to). The way borrowing works is that something of historical value changes hands so that the lender no longer has it.
[2] - the particular merry-go-round that Greece is involved in has very little to do with the people who are "on the hook". They've never seen any of this money - it was basically a bit of fancy footwork to bailout Western European banks who'd made risky loans. So "new money" was levered up out of nowhere from a capital base of around 500 Billion to form the EFSF. That was lent to Greece who promptly gave it straight back to the banks that were going to be "in trouble" if things went the least bit awry
And all that money grubbing charade that started with -
surprise, surprise - the pinnacle of the Financial Crime Cartel, glorious Goldman Sachs helping "the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit," (source: Der Spiegel February 08, 2010) ended with this beautiful situation:
"A debt that can not be paid will not be paid."
[3] - there is a cultural background "myth" to all this that is sometimes used to justify externally imposed austerity measures. That is that the debtor countries are somehow "lazier" and haven't worked hard enough or saved and it's therefore their own fault. In fact - statistically - the "laziest" two countries in the Eurozone are Holland and Germany by a country mile. Average Greek working hours are almost twice that of those countries
It is not entirely accurate, that Holland and Germany are "the laziest" and, at the same token, that "average Greek working hours are almost twice that of those countries." The U.K. Office for National Statistics published data that shows that Greek workers actually put in longer hours than anyone else in Europe — 42.2 per week, compared to just 35.6 in Germany. This is hardly double.
However, there's another, to me much more valuable piece of data, Productivity index per hour worked. If EU average is 100 than:
Greece stays at 76.3
Germany stays at 123.7 i.e an average German working hour is 62.12% more efficient than an average Greek working hour.
I guess we all know, there's work and there is "work." I intimately know both nations and from a neutral standpoint (I am neither Greek nor German) if I'd be forced to apply the world "lazy" to either of these two nations, it for sure will not have been German.
Take this as my 2 cents or shrug it off entirely.