Closer Integration or Bankers at the Gates?

As the President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi calls for closer integration in order to deal with the Euro Crisis, there is another sentiment that is historically based. In today's New York Times, Peter Frankopan, director of the Center for Byzantine Research at Oxford, reminds us that the situation in Greece and the European banking system has its roots in a Crusade of 800 years ago. The Bankers at the Gates sentiment resonates among the Greek people today and it's a sentiment that has been re-enforced throughout modern Greek history and the history of the eastern mediterranean among the people of the region. From the Fourth Crusade of 1204 to the building of the Suez Canal to the capitulations extracted for economic and geopolitical interests, are these failed attempts of integration and flattening the world along economic structures facilitating global markets, information and technology transfer or flattening people and cultures?