Eurozone Crisis: Could Greece Have Been Avoided?

A BBC article, written a year before Greece joined the single currency in 2002, made alarmingly accurate warnings about the country's future.

Written by Jonathan Charles, who is now director of communications at the European Bank of Research and Development, the piece described how Greece had not fully complied with the membership conditions and how "some investors were worried that Greece would send out the wrong signal to the financial markets."

Charles went on to cite Greece's high inflation rate - one of the highest in Europe - and mentioned that the country's "public sector borrowing was much higher than would normally be permitted under EU rules governing entry into the single currency".

Greece, which had wanted to join the single currency upon its creation in January 1999, had initially failed to pass the "economic tests of low inflation and government debt and deficits", but was then allowed entry on 1 January, 2002.

Since Greece's multi-billion-euro bailouts earlier this year, which have kept the country afloat, albeit temporarily, many right-wing British eurosceptics have accused the eurozone of being a politically driven idea rather than an economic one.

In the same article, Charles touched on this point.

"They have seen the tough decisions they have to make in order to qualify for EU and euro membership," he said. "At the same time, it shows that the EU decision-makers can be somewhat lenient towards aspiring euro countries."