When you ask people on the street if they would rather Greece went bankrupt than submit to further measures, many now point out that it is already bankrupt, that public sector workers have gone unpaid for months, that hospitals have no supplies, that the poor are being wrung dry in order to pay the banks. "Let's get it over with," a woman who works for the education ministry said to me. "Then we'd know we only had €250 a month and we could start again.

The trouble with historical metaphors is that they can obscure the present: what's really at stake here is not Greece's identity but Europe's. All eyes are fixed on Athens, but the way out of the crisis requires a choice about what kind of Europe we want. The one we have now, with its deep structural inequalities and its rigid adherence to a failed economic ideology, protects neither democracy nor human rights. Stiff-necked and punitive, it prefers to eat its children.

Global planemaker Airbus joined a chorus of concern that a European scheme to charge airlines for carbon emissions risks triggering a full-blown trade war, with implications for plane deals and even Europe's crippling sovereign debt crisis.

The EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), introduced on January 1, has drawn howls of protest from airlines around the world, with China banning its carriers from taking part.

Airbus Chief Executive Tom Enders said he was increasingly concerned at the potential fall-out if tensions are not defused. "I am very worried about the consequences of that. What started out as a solution for the environment has become a source of potential trade conflict and that should be a worry for all of us," he told an aviation conference on Monday ahead of the Singapore Airshow.

EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas acknowledged the growing opposition to the scheme, and said he was willing to be flexible in finding a solution, but the 27-nation bloc would not bow to pressure to suspend the scheme, which it says is part of a global fight against climate change.

¶ 3:03 AM