When French MEP Alain Lamassoure first suggested 12 years ago that European Union member countries should have the option of leaving the bloc if they so choose, Greece was the furthest thing from his mind.
“Were we thinking about Greece at that point? Honestly, no,” Lamassoure, a member of Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservative Les Républicains party, told POLITICO.
“I was thinking about Britain. I was thinking about the neutral countries and the northern countries that might not want to move ahead with an ‘ever closer’ union and wanted to have the option, at any point, of exiting the European Union.”
Lamassoure, who participated in the 2003 Convention to draft an EU constitution, said he had come up with the idea of a “divorce clause” as a trump card against nationalist parties that opposed further integration.
At the time, the Convention’s president, ex-French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, had immediately seized on the idea and stuck it in the constitution. (French and Dutch voters rejected that text in 2005, but the 2007 Lisbon Treaty resurrected most of its substance — including the divorce clause.)
The rub is that any decision to exit must be voluntary.
And while the Greek government is fiercely opposed to the terms being imposed by its creditors, its leaders have never actually called for an exit from the eurozone. In fact, opinion polls show that most Greeks want to remain in the euro — just not on the creditors’ terms, which include further cuts to their pensions and tough tax reforms.
A referendum on July 5 is widely being cast as a “yes or no” vote on membership in the eurozone — as if Greece could simply be struck off the list of 19 countries that get to pay with colorful bills signed by Mario Draghi.
But Lamassoure said that’s legally impossible. “What we have is a divorce clause, not an exclusion clause,” he said.
In order to leave the eurozone, Greece must first ask to leave the European Union. It could then seek to be reintegrated as a non-euro member of the bloc.
To Lamassoure, none of that is likely to happen. Rather, what is commonly referred to as “Grexit” would in reality translate into a sort of limbo status for Greece, complete with an end to outside financial aid, capital controls, a scrip currency to pay public sector workers and a likely restructuring of government debt.
Greece would still be living on “euro street.” It’s just that nobody would peek in to say hello anymore.
“What’s going to happen is that the Greeks are going to be totally in default, they will have a separate status in the European Union,” said Lamassoure. “Nobody would help them anymore, and that’s their fault.”