If you include step 2 you could get a two-sided conflict.

It's a bit like a staring match: the one to blink first looses.
In this case, the party perceived to have caused EZone collapse will get the blame and will be shouldered with the lion share of the damages.
That is the motive behind the blaming game we have witnessed for the last couple of years.

The direct losses of 4 countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) leaving the EZone are estimated at 17 trillion.

Money you can print.

This would be the worst economic crisis in modern times and take more than a decade to overcome.

This is already the worst economic crisis in modern times, it will already take decades (plural) to reverse the damage, and rebuilding cannot even begin until present policy is scuttled wholesale and replaced with one that is not starkly insane.

So far the losses haven't been materialized, they are potential.

Going by the Russian experience, somewhere between 5 and 15 thousand people are likely to have died of austerity-related excess mortality in Greece alone since the beginning of the present depression. And that number increases by a handful every day.

That is true. However, France is a split country in the sense that socialist supporters including intellectuals, civil servants and the like see themselves as the leader of the South, whereas the business and industry community is much closer to Germany and the North. That is why a split of the EU is going to very much polarize opinion in France.

That doesn't mean that France will split north/south. It is much more probable, particularly given the French tradition for strong centralism, that France will commit fully to one side or the other, with the defeated fraction dragged along kicking and screaming, and, if the bad guys win that internal confrontation, occasionally rioting.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

The direct losses of 4 countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) leaving the EZone are estimated at 17 trillion. This would be the worst economic crisis in modern times and take more than a decade to overcome.

It is not the 'losses of 4 countries' that matters so much as the 'losses occasioned by the default and debt repudiation of 4 countries' and what really matters is who would suffer those losses. The answer is that the losses would be suffered by the wealthiest elements of Germany and France, along with pension funds that have been suckered into sharing that risk. The losses have already occurred, but TPTB have agreed that they do not have to be recognized as it cannot be said with total certainty that these losses cannot be recovered. Rebellion against the Troika by, say Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal could break the denial that has kept the financial system semi-functioning.

The problem with such an event is that those owning the debt that is being defaulted won't just accept that their claims have to be written down and they have to lose money. OH NO! They will be demanding to be made whole until every poor person in the EZ has been thrown into a meat grinder and sold as hamburger, regardless of whether that will or will not make them whole.

The situation in the Euro-zone is similar to the real estate melt down in the USA. Much of the debt has been created by fraud, but it has all been mixed together or comingled, so now all is tainted. But the most powerful people, many of whom were responsible for the fraud, are demanding to be made whole and those they are blaming are not capable of making them whole. So what we have is an ugly drama of vindictive spite inflicted mostly on those who had nothing to do with the origin of the problem other than, perhaps, having voted for politicians who colluded with fraud. I guess the assumption is that the citizens are not like investors in a corporation who are only liable to the extent of the value of their stock.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."