Future systems must be destroyed

[OneFootInTheGrave]

actually that about having a competent leader that onefoot said in another thread made an impression.
after the yugoslavian war (or during?), onefoot said that croatia had a very good leader and the country did see improvement, whereas when at the helm was a mediocre leader the results were not that impressive.

i agree with cockney's assertion that change can come only in the form of massive popular demand (not a request but neccessity), no indivindual or fragmented "crusade" can bring results.
looking past at greece's (modern) history I think what happens is a corellation of both these approaches.
if enough people subscribe to an idea (be that of more social justice or whatever) then even with outside negative pressures, or with inside obstacles, a leader that can rise to the task may be produced. and that is when things can advance forward.

in today's age of clerks, not leaders, more and more things are left being run undemocratically with many people being willingly shut off from decision making processes.

in the EU this was called "silent consent" principle and it meant that political/administrative entities would keep the process going forward because a "silent consent" of the people was assumed to exist.
this principle lost much of its appeal after the first referendum rejection of the maastricht treaty. (in ireland? but i may be wrong).

however national governments in the EU remain paramount. nearly every decision can be blocked by a corellation of national governments.
where the structure starts to shake a bit is when the EU is being demoted from a law based sui generis entity to a "lender - borrower" relationship and many laws are bypassed and a new "lawless" structure immerges that rests on financial dealings

Well, yes that was an excellent example as the country got almost a decade of growth out of three years of a decent government. We are suffering again today due to the old crooks being in charge in the subsequent years, ex PM being in jail (finally), which does not directly help the current economic collapse that we are going through, due to having those crooks elected twice in a row, but it sends a message... the collapse is Greece like, not as severe though (exactly due to us not being in the EU, therefore having reduced access to financial markets during the boom times, which is an interesting coincidence).

Still bigger scale changes, on the level of EU are possible in theory if there is enough popular pressure (in reality the only viable large economy where this could happen, China, US or BRICS are going to be heavily centralized - not too sure about Brazil though, could it have some potential for power to devolve into the regions? )

All EU countries have internal areas with hundreds of years of local cultural development and existings local pressure for more decentralized power, so there is a baseline that with right top level leadership, this "natural" devolved state could be enabled. Not on the horizon though, but a possibility.

[Bereta_Eder]

I like how you and Cockney focus on decentralized gov.
To be honest, I haven't thought about it as being an obstacle to prosperity but I guess it is something worth noting to.
Yep, the free access to loans (like having your bimbo wife out in the shopping mall with a german credit card - where bimbo was the political elite) annulled the market autocorrection mechanisms with regard to interests rates. But behind it all lied irresponsible finance by both those who lent and those who borrowed.

I don't know much about what happens in non eurozone countries and that is a shame. The "front-runners" to any sort of meaningful coalition is the south countries (not that it is working very well), but it's not fair to exclude other countries with similar situations.