Long read but offers a great analysis of the situation:
There's much more to it. I'm sure you've noticed that there is a big difference between how Greece is being discussed here compared to the others. Of course some of it is due to Greece needing the biggest chunk, but the main reason are the causes for their issues.
Ireland had a housing bubble and an over-leveraged banking sector that blew up during the 2008 financial crisis. Before that, they had an exemplary budget policy, with low debt and surpluses, and their economy is strong and structurally healthy. They're in a temporary tight spot, but they do whatever they can to get out of it and it's really just a matter of time.
Portugal does have structural problems and some that resemble Greece's, but on a much smaller scale. They had overlooked the necessity to increase competitiveness when low wages and an educated work force alone didn't cut it anymore after the Eastern Expansion, and Poland, the Czech Republic and so on were eating their cake. They need to reform, but they're working on it and they'll get there eventually with a little help.
Both needed some bailouts, they've got them, they're working on it, no problem. The notorious anti-EU crowd aside, I hear nobody complaining about those bailouts, and there even is a relatively broad support for giving them a stimulus.
Italy has been having high debt since forever. They were permitted into the Eurozone because of a clause that said entering with high debt levels was OK if a country was seen as working on reducing them, which they had dine until they took a break from reforms after they had been let in, and, well, they were still on that break when the crisis hit.
But they're working on it now and are going through structural reforms. They have a very strong industrial base in the North, and there's really no reason why their (Northern) economy wouldn't be just as strong as its Austrian neighbors. Give 'em a bit of time to enact reforms, and if markets stay calm they'll have some very impressive growth coming their way.
If markets act up, however, we have a problem. Italy is the third largest economy in the Eurozone. There is very little room for error here.
Spain had similar surpluses and low debt as Ireland (and we'd be in big trouble if they hadn't had them, or if their banking system had blown up similarly), and a giant housing bubble as well. They were over-reliant on construction, which due to said housing bubble lead to wages increasing above of what their productivity would have normally permitted far too quickly, and they have nothing to replace it with.
They've started out on very low debt levels, but their deficit is huge, their unemployment is scarily high and causes those deficits, and there are no credible plans that could fix it. Not because they don't try, they do, but because there simply doesn't seem to be an obvious solution.
They're the forth largest economy in the Eurozone and sustaining them for the long term would be extremely expensive. That's a problem, a big one, but at least they're doing what they can and haven't needed any bailouts (yet).
On the other end of the spectrum we have the core, among them hawks like the Netherlands, Finland and Austria, and of course Germany. Germany is a special case among them, in several ways. Populist anti-bailout parties haven't made governing difficult like in the Netherlands and Finland, although the sentiment is still there. But the main difference is a result of the Reunification:
Remember what the situation was like back then -- we went from two countries, one with a highly decentralized and extremely efficient free market economy and one with a planned economy that operated on a modus of "this be our city for
iron works!" None the less, the workers in the East were very well trained, and the economy operated in the same sectors -- industrial machines, chemicals, and so on. Predictably, the industry in the East could not compete with that of the West, unemployment went through the roof, and a wave of migration set in as the young and the best trained part of the Eastern work force headed to greener pastures in the West.
Germany's solution was to drop money on the problem, huge amounts of money, but in the early 00's it became all too obvious that this
didn't work. People referred to Germany when they talked of the "sick man of Europe", unemployment was very high, and the overextended social net was dragging the Western economy down. At the time, we had a center-left government of the Social Democrats and the Greens. They created a commission to come up with a solution, and then went through with it a labor market reform, welfare cuts, an overhaul of the unemployment system and an increased retirement age. Those reforms kicked in in 2005, you can very easily spot it when you look at a graph that shows unemployment figures.
There was another factor, however, and that aggravated the negative effects of wages rising faster than competitiveness in the Eurozone periphery. During the decade before the crisis, unions had a deal with the employer associations -- we accept stagnant real wages to regain competitiveness in return for job security.
When the reforms kicked in, there suddenly was a hyper-competitive Germany, and shortly after the 2008 financial crisis pulled the rug under the feet of the periphery. Some of the problems were caused by it, some had been set up domestically and were merely triggered, and some had existed all along but now became all too obvious. In the case of Greece, it forced the government to come out and explain that the statistics weren't as accurate as they should have been.
Now, Greece is a very special case. They combine an enormous debt and deficits with too low productivity. They do have qualified workers, but what little economy there is to work with is uncompetitive and tied up in red tape. They didn't have a housing bubble or a similar trigger, they got there over a long time in a slow motion train wreck, and it was allowed to escalate to this point because the fact that it was happening had been veiled by their corrupt bureaucracy -- which is seen as them having undermined the common currency. They lack the governance that is necessary to even begin to clean up this mess, and their electorate is about to vote a party into power that outright states that they don't have to because the Eurozone simply can't afford to let them descend into chaos. That there is some truth to that in case of a country that is responsible for a mere 2% of GDP is a big part of the problem.
This all happened right after tax payers had to bail out banks that had made risky bets for high profits, and they don't distinguish between speculation and supposedly secure government bonds that hardly beat inflation -- Greek bonds yielded only very little more than German ones when banks bought them.
People aren't good at putting themselves in other people's shoes, their perception is selective, and they like to put blame on others. Greeks see what they had to endure and compare their situation to how things were before the crisis. People in the core focus on what hasn't been done, and it's difficult to explain to them why they have to pay while some rich Greeks don't. In the case of Germany, that we had to go through unpopular reforms that Greeks reject fuels self-righteousness, and people pay way more attention to burning German flags and Nazi cartoons than to people cueing up in breadlines.
There's another important difference between the Eurozone and transfers within Germany or the US, apart from the unemployed being more easily able to move to a different state though the lack of language barrier:
Those are federations. States do have sovereignty in many areas, such as education or the police force. They can set their own taxes, in the US and to a lesser degree in Germany, but by far the biggest chunk gets collected and is spent federally. In the US, the federation simply ties spending on infrastructure maintenance to policies in areas that states in theory would be fully sovereign in. This restricts a state's ability to get itself into trouble, and the others have a lot of power through federal budget allocations, both in the US and in Germany, and welfare spending is set centrally.
We should have this in the Eurozone and indeed the EU, IMHO, but we don't. The core doesn't like transfers, and the periphery doesn't want to give up full budget sovereignty. Every transfer of sovereignty has to be agreed to in each individual nation state.
