I remember well debating the concept a single European currency with my Dad when I was growing up in Germany long before the Euro was actually introduced. As a teenager I was fervently in favor and he was deeply skeptical. I am now watching with fascination how the very concerns my Dad had at the time are playing themselves out in Greece. A monetary union is not sustainable if it is not accompanied by a deep fiscal and political union. I had, naively, assumed that the political and fiscal part would quickly follow the monetary union.

Forming a deeper union takes a long time. Germany itself used to consist of tiny principalities which were frequently at war with each other and local accents were so strong that people often couldn’t easily communicate with each other even over relatively short distances. It took several hundred years and countless lives to arrive at modern day Germany and even today echo of the differences between say Bavaria and Prussia linger. So it shouldn’t be surprising to see the current debate replete with generalizations about Germans versus Greeks or even broader Northern versus Southern countries in Europe.

People’s values, cultures, goals, etc. all can change and have been changing. It is just that the timescales make those changes hard to see. Does that mean I think Greece should have accepted one of the proposed arrangements so we can have more time? No because progress doesn’t proceed on a straight line. In the US we just had an epic decision by the Supreme Court making same-sex marriage legal in all 50 states. It is easy to forget that along the way we first had to go through the opposite which was a series of legal and constitutional bans at the state level from 1970 on with legalization only starting with civil unions in Vermont in 2000.

So I for one think that a Grexit would actually be a good thing in terms of moving the European Union forward in the long run. Immediately it would look like a defeat for the whole concept but the existing system clearly was not working and needs to be shaken up. I sometimes tell CEOs that change is a good way to produce new information. This is the case here also.