Elliott School of International Affairs professor Scheherazade Rehman was a guest on “The Colbert Report” Wednesday night, discussing Greece’s economic downturn with comedian Stephen Colbert.

Rehman explained that, even though Greece’s struggling economy and massive debt is weakening the euro, nations in the European Union cannot generally bail out another country.

“Only if there’s a catastrophe or a natural disaster can they give money to a country,” she said, citing a clause in the 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, which reformed legislative and financial practices within the European Union. “Now, a country overspending or cooking their books, I don’t know if that’s a natural disaster.” In 2001, investment firm Goldman Sachs helped Greece hide much of its debt so the country could join the European Union, according to The New York Times.

Rehman explained that Greece was not the only country to “cheat” its way into the European Union.

“When [the European Union] was formed, only six or seven countries were supposed to join the euro; it is a big boys’ country club,” she said. “But…when the ball got moving, more and more countries thought that if they didn’t join the euro, their currency would be worthless. And so there was more and more pressure to put more and more countries in there, and eventually, in 2002, Greece was in.”

Rehman, who is also a professor of international finance in the School of Business and the director of GW’s European Union Research Center, handled Colbert’s line of questioning well. When he asked if Greece was in fact a “natural disaster,” she replied, using a technical term, that the country was “in doodoo.”