With debt-struck Greece in focus today (there is widespread strike action there today), it’s revealing to see how EU solidarity is holding up. This Reuters report isn’t too encouraging:

The European Union has asked Greece to explain reports that it engaged in derivatives trades with U.S. investment banks that may have allowed it to mask the size of its debt and deficit from EU authorities ahead of its entry into the euro zone. “You simply put some amounts of money in the next year … it is what everybody did and Greece did it to a lesser extent than Italy for example,” Pangalos said in an interview with BBC World Service radio broadcast on Wednesday. On Tuesday a German state finance minister said Greece had to help itself out of its precarious fiscal situation and cannot expect Germany or the European Union to bail it out. Pangalos criticised Germany’s attitute towards the Greek crisis, saying Athens had never received compensation for the economic impact of the Nazi occupation during World War Two. “They took away the Greek gold that was at the Bank of Greece, they took away the Greek money and they never gave it back. This is an issue that has to be faced sometime in the future,” he said. “I don’t say they have to give back the money necessarily but they have at least to say ‘thanks’,” he said. “And they shouldn’t complain so much about stealing and not being very specific about economic dealings.”
Greek politicians have been outraged by the tone of media coverage of the debt crisis in German media, such as a front-page picture in the weekly magazine Focus of “Venus de Milo”-type statue making an obscene finger gesture with the headline “Swindlers in the euro zone”.

And who is Mr. Pangalos? He’s Greece’s deputy prime minister. So nothing to worry about then . . .