Greece had long been the problem child of the European periphery. It came out of World War II and went straight into the bloodiest civil war in modern European history. When it ended, the already poor country stagnated (as the rest of Europe boomed) inside an unstable political order that finally collapsed into a brutal military dictatorship. When Greece emerged from the dictatorship period and stabilized in the late 1970s, the European Economic Community (the EEC, as the EU was then known) provided it with much-needed external funding for infrastructure investment while its modern political party system took shape.

Mark Blyth, Austerity, loc. 175