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the problem with Greece is much more profound than most politicians and analysts have so far calculated. In stark reality, and far more dangerously than its present financial crisis threatening the euro project, Greece looks like a failed EU state, which, as such, puts at risk the stability of the entire European project. This is why a European political, rather than simply economic, plan for rescuing Greece must become a most urgent priority.

failed states, according to the definition provided by the Crisis States Research Centre of the London School of Economics, can no longer reproduce the conditions of their own existence and, therefore, are under threat of imminent collapse.

Greece’s increasing difficulty in coping with border security as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers enter each year from Turkey.

In 2010, with Greece crippled by debt and threatening the survival of the euro, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank began imposing German-inspired austerity on the country. The aim was to slash the budget deficit and address fundamental problems like corruption and a failure to collect taxes. Such policies, they promised, would get Greece back on its feet, able to borrow again on financial markets.

Greeks grudgingly went along, assured that painful reform would return the country to growth by 2012. Instead, Greece lost 400,000 jobs that year and continued on a decline that would see a drop in the gross domestic product since 2008 not much different from the one experienced during the first five years of the United States’ Great Depression.

Greece’s unemployment rate was supposed to top out at 15 percent in 2012, according to International Monetary Fund calculations. But it roared to 25 percent that year, reached 27 percent in 2013 and has ticked downward only slightly since.

most — not all, but most — of what you’ve heard about Greek profligacy and irresponsibility is false. Yes, the Greek government was spending beyond its means in the late 2000s. But since then it has repeatedly slashed spending and raised taxes. Government employment has fallen more than 25 percent, and pensions (which were indeed much too generous) have been cut sharply. If you add up all the austerity measures, they have been more than enough to eliminate the original deficit and turn it into a large surplus.

So why didn’t this happen? Because the Greek economy collapsed, largely as a result of those very austerity measures, dragging revenues down with it.

And this collapse, in turn, had a lot to do with the euro, which trapped Greece in an economic straitjacket. Cases of successful austerity, in which countries rein in deficits without bringing on a depression, typically involve large currency devaluations that make their exports more competitive

Greece buses 2,000 refugees from border camp to Athens

Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans, but people of other nationalities, who make up roughly 10% of the total number, have been stopped at the border since early November. Instead of returning to Athens, many of them set up camp for several weeks – and several sewed shut their mouths – leading to Wednesday’s dispersal.

In northern Greece, an activist and an aid worker said hundreds of Greek police arrived in the morning to disperse the camp, which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco. The vast majority went without protest, though some Iranians held a short demonstration at around midday, before being bussed back to Athens in a convoy of around 50 coaches.

Top officials from both countries were also engaged in talks on issues including migration, energy, tourism and trade. The two leaders said their aim was to double annual trade between their countries, to $10 billion.

Mr. Erdogan appeared relaxed and smiling in a televised exchange with his Greek counterpart, President Katerina Sakellaropoulou. Greek television also showed Mr. Mitsotakis and Mr. Erdogan engaged in an unusually cordial handshake before ascending the steps of the prime minister’s mansion for talks.

“There is no problem between us so large that it can’t be resolved,” Mr. Erdogan said later in televised remarks with the Greek leader, “as long as we focus on the big picture.” “We want to make the Aegean a sea of peace and cooperation.”

While the debate continues over how much to give Greece and when to give it, Russell Shorto, a contributing writer for the magazine, takes you on a journey to discover how Greeks live now. In the process, he ends up unveiling much about how Greece is likely to live tomorrow, and the place it — and Europe? — may occupy in an international order that is rapidly shifting:

By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed.

The situation at the macro level is, if anything, even more transformational. The Chinese have largely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s main port, with an eye to make it a conduit for shipping goods into Europe. Qatar is looking to invest $5 billion in various projects in Greece, including tourism infrastructure. Other, relatively flush Europeans are trying to make “Greece the Florida of Europe,” Theodore Pelagidis, a Greek economist at the University of Piraeus, told me, referring in particular to plans to turn islands into expensive retirement homes for wealthy people from other parts of the continent. Whether or not the country pays its debts, he went on, other nations and foreign companies “now understand the Greek government is powerless, so in the future they will take over viable assets and run parts of the country by themselves.”

Migrant crisis: EU proposes $760 million emergency aid for Greece

The European Union announced plans Wednesday for 700 million euros ($760 million) in emergency aid to Greece as the economically struggling country copes with an influx of migrants stranded

Greece, the main gateway to Europe, had asked the EU for help to provide for tens of thousands of migrants in its territory.

Alexandros Konstantinou, of the Greek Council for Refugees, said that convicting refugees as smugglers was part of a broader strategy to deter more arrivals.

Other measures included the criminalization of illegal entry in 2020, applied to migrants at the Greek-Turkish land border, which led to dozens receiving prison terms instead of going to reception centers for identification, and a recent decision by Greece to designate Turkey as a safe country for asylum seekers. That move was aimed at pressuring Turkey to take back migrants currently in Greece and make it harder for migrants to apply for asylum there.

A root of the problem is Greece’s strained relationship with Turkey, which early last year stopped enforcing an agreement struck with Brussels in 2016 to halt the flow of migrants, and take back those who manage to cross into Greece illegally that do not qualify for E.U. protection, some observers say.

As they moved through the isolated villages in this region in 1943, systematically killing men in a reprisal for an attack on a small outpost, German soldiers dragged Giannis Syngelakis’s father from his home here and shot him in the head. Within two days, more than 400 men were dead and the women left behind struggled with the monstrous task of burying so many corpses.

Mr. Syngelakis, who was 7 then, still wants payback. And in pursuing a demand for reparations from Germany, he reflects a growing movement here, fueled not just by historical grievances but also by deep resentment among his countrymen over Germany’s current power to dictate budget austerity to the fiscally crippled Greek government.

Estimates of how much money is at stake vary wildly. The government report does not cite a total. The figure most often discussed is $220 billion, an estimate for infrastructure damage alone put forward by Manolis Glezos, a member of Parliament and a former resistance fighter who is pressing for reparations. That amount equals about half the country’s debt.

Greece is to take the drastic step of skipping a €300m payment to the International Monetary Fund on Friday, invoking an obscure mechanism in abeyance since the 1970s to bundle all debts due in June and pay them at the end of the month.

The IMF said it had been notified by the Greek authorities that they would pay the entire €1.6bn due this month on June 30, dusting down a procedure last used by Zambia in the 1980s.

The Greeks accuse the IMF of violating its own rules by colluding in an EMU-led policy that leaves the country with unsustainable debts. Athens is implicity threatening to escalate the situation all the way to a full default to the IMF, setting off a grave institutional and political crisis within the Fund itself.

ATHENS — The United States, wading into the international efforts to shape Greece’s economic and geopolitical orientation, is pushing the leftist government in Athens to resist Russia’s energy overtures.

The dueling sales pitches, reminiscent of a Cold War struggle, come as debt-burdened Greece is desperate for new sources of revenue of the sort that a gas pipeline could bring.

That pipeline would carry Russian gas to Europe through Turkey and Greece, bypassing pipelines that run through Ukraine.

Protesters have taken to the streets of northern Greece demanding the release of two Greek soldiers detained by Turkey, amid rising tensions between the two countries.

Greece’s defence minister, Panos Kammenos, described the pair as “hostages” and ordered border patrols to be stepped up along the heavily defended land frontier the two nations share.

In rallies in Orestiada, the Greek town closest to the border, and Thessaloniki, the country’s northern capital, protesters called for the soldiers to be set free immediately.

philosophy has a geography. To be in the places these thinkers knew, visit their cities, sail their seas and find their landscapes is to know something about them that cannot be found otherwise; and despite that locatedness, and despite their age, the frame of mind of these first thinkers remains astonishingly and surprisingly illuminating today.

Greece in the centuries between 700 and 500 was not land-based. It essentially existed at sea and, where it touched the land, it appeared and manifested itself as the cities from which these philosophers came.

What we think of now as the mainland of Greece, then filled with communities of farmer-warriors, played essentially no part. Recorded philosophy was almost entirely a harbor phenomenon, a byproduct of trading hubs on the margins of Asia

Not long ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to his family’s land holdings

No clarity on boundaries or zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered ownership of the same property.

As Greece tries to claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress.

The Greek economy is in free-fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. Unemployment is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year

Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary- and middle-school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.

, several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said, and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for food, she added. While she did not excuse it, she understood their plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not,” she said.

Markets fear a "Grexit," or Greek exit from the euro. That exit is almost a foregone conclusion. The endgame for the euro will be played out in Spain.

there is scant credit in Greece. Anyone who can is moving their money out of the country, either to banks in other euro-zone countries, such as Germany, or out of the euro to banks in Switzerland, the United Kingdom and U.S. (the franc, pound and dollar, respectively).

Greece will exit the euro not by choice but by necessity. It will do so not because the drachma (its old currency) is superior to the euro, but because the drachma is superior to barter

"One in three people arriving to Greece were children as compared to just one in 10 in September 2015

While more than 80,000 people crossed the Mediterranean safely -- more than 74,000 to Greece alone -- "near daily shipwrecks" had left at least 400 dead so far this yea

Some 36% of the migrants arriving in Greece so far this year have been children, and 21% were women, the U.N. says

Thousands of refugee children like him find ways to pass the time as they wait to cross the border from Greece into Macedonia.

More than 12,000 people are stranded here in Idomeni, as borders across Europe have slowly been shutting in the face of those most vulnerable and fleeing from atrocities.

They sleep in hundreds of little brightly colored tents that have popped up on fields along the border, now demarcated by a double concertina wire fence.

Migrant crisis: Boat sinking off Didim, Turkey claims 25 lives

A boat carrying migrants from Turkey to Greece has sunk with the loss of 25 lives, Turkey's coast guard says.

Reports suggest Macedonia has set new curbs on Syrian migrants trying to cross the land border from Greece.

just recorded the highest influx of migrants to Greece yet in 2015.

48,000 refugees and migrants crossed from Turkey to the Greek islands

flummoxing European policy-makers and swamping the ability of authorities to care for them.