Withdrawal from the Eurozone

Withdrawal from the Eurozone denotes the process whereby a Eurozone member-state, whether voluntarily or forcibly, stops using the Euro as its national currency and leaves the Eurozone.

The possibility of a member state leaving the Eurozone was first raised after the onset of the Greek government-debt crisis. The term "Grexit" itself was reportedly first used by Citigroup economists Willem Buiter and Ebrahim Rahbari in a 2012 report about the possibility of Greece leaving the Eurozone. In the 2015 edition, the term "Grexit" entered the Oxford Dictionary, defined as "a term for the potential withdrawal of Greece from the Eurozone, the economic region formed by those countries in the European Union that use the euro as their national currency.

Speculation followed about other countries as well, such as Italy, withdrawing from the Eurozone, with economist Nuriel Roubini submitting that "Italy may, like other periphery countries [of the Eurozone], need to exit the euro and go back to a national currency, thus triggering an effective break-up of the Eurozone."

As of March 2017, no country has withdrawn from the Eurozone.

The prevailing legal opinion is that there is no provision in any European Union treaty for an exit from the Eurozone. In fact, it has been argued, the Treaties make it clear that the process of monetary union was intended to be "irreversible" and "irrevocable." However, in 2009, a European Central Bank legal study argued that, while voluntary withdrawal is legally not possible, expulsion remains "conceivable." Although an explicit provision for an exit option does not exist, many experts and politicians in Europe, have suggested an option to leave the Eurozone should be included in the relevant treaties.

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Wikipedia