Want to keep Greece in the EU? Conquer it.

Much to the chagrin of the West's financial titans and the bureaucrats in Brussels, Greece has upset the course of history.

By decisively rejecting a referendum on a strings-attached bailout from Europe, voters in debt-plagued Greece have pushed elite anxiety to an all-time high. But it's not just the bankers and financiers who have a harsh lesson to learn. However this week's tense negotiations shake out, Greece should remind us all that you can't unify people with money alone, because money can't conquer pride.

The eurozone's economic centralization was meant to triumph, at last, over the pride of Europe's long-warring nations. But it didn't work. Europe's blood-drenched history should have clearly warned the eurocrats that national pride can't be conquered with spreadsheets and reason. Clearly, in the troubled age of the euro, national pride is still an embarrassing, unnerving emblem. The Greeks aren't playing by Europe's rules, full stop. How stubbornly does national pride still defy the elite vision of continental unity.

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So here's a hard but real truth: No matter how the debt is shuffled around, the only hope of replacing Greek pride with a Europe-first identity begins with Europe conquering Greece militarily.

Of course, that won't happen, nor should it. But it is to say that Greece — and many other European nations — cannot be tamed by the rattling of Brussels' adding machines, and the scowling of technocrats from beneath green eyeshades. Only at the point of a gun would the Greeks finally and truly back down and accept their shamed place in the eurozone.

The grand fable of the modern West is one that says the age of conquest is obsolete, and the age of commerce can last forever. Supposedly, we've all become too enlightened to think that true pride is worth the suffering that mass violence brings.

Unfortunately, the West's desperate bet on economic unity ensures that the EU — which can't and won't invade and occupy Greece — will lose out, whether it makes the Greeks an example or an exception. More austerity would fuel the Greeks' national pride by offending it. More relief would fuel the Greeks' national pride by encouraging it. Europe can't even turn to America to trump the dilemma with a boatload of cash. The EU and the IMF are already co-defendants in the court of national pride. Adding the U.S. to the dock would only swell passions further.

This whole mess has only ensured that Greeks are and always will be Greeks first, and Europeans a very, very distant second. Whether they officially stay in the eurozone or not, Greeks see Europe's economic powerbrokers as the enemy, and will for the rest of their lives. Even if Europe unleashes the full might of its economic power on Greece, it is far too late to overcome the country's national pride. Only military power could humble the Greeks so.

Of course, as European and American history show, even conquest can't always conquer the past. Wiping out a people's pride requires wiping out their identity as a people. But neither debts nor surpluses have effaced Europe's national identities, although that goal defines the whole "European project."

In the West, we look to money for unity because we insist that unity can be forged in peace. The truth is much trickier: The only way to forge unity through peace is by making a society so stable, stagnant, and settled that people just gradually forget their past. But with the likes of the Greeks around, the West's globalized societies won't reach that level of placid torpor for centuries to come.