Unfortunately the European Union and the euro are by design anti-democratic. This is not completely intentional, but is based on the idea that there can never be a step backwards in integration. It means once an EU institution oversteps its democratic mandate it can never be fixed. This is the problem with Greece: it cannot live with the requirements for the euro, and has no alternative to leave. This is a function of both institutional design and mindset. Greece's situation is due to institutional design, where the Lisbon Treaty was due to mindset. The Lisbon Treaty failed to pass the required referendum in several countries. The EU officials had imagined a greater unity and could not imagine reversing that thinking, so they simply changed the title of the document, pretended they had democratic support and implemented it. All of the changes based on the Lisbon Treaty do not have democratic legitimacy, but at this point there is no way to fix any of it. (Yes there is a story about changes between the rejection of the EU Constitution and the implementation of the Lisbon treaty, but it is semantics without meaning - the transfer of sovereignty represented by establishing the ECJ required a referendum regardless of the vocabulary used.)