Now that it’s starting to crumble, a rational person would start to ask what went wrong - and not in a rhetorical sense. Certainly a lot of things have gone wrong with it. Perhaps a design review is in order.
[quote]If the ECSC was founded on just one bad assumption, the EU has grown and floundered on many other bad assumptions, detailed below.
Here are the worst of them:
• That a "European" national identity could be woven from whole cloth.
• That when Athens borrows it is no different than when Berlin borrows.
• That the credentials of eurocrats can and should supplant the experience of people.
• That the EU's southern tier of boutique industries could effectively compete with northern Europe's hypercompetitive conglomerates.
• That fake flags and fake monuments could erase hundreds or thousands of years of real history.
• That welfare spending is a substitute for military spending.
• That alien guest workers are a substitute for having babies.
• That national borders are an impediment to peace.
• That proud local traditions (French unpasteurized cheeses, British imperial measurements, Italian devaluations) would be happily subsumed by all-encompassing diktats from Brussels.
• That North African and Middle Eastern Muslims could be made into Good Europeans -- without any attempt at assimilation.
It is probably those last two points which most influenced those who voted for Brexit, and the sentiment seems to be spreading.
More broadly, the EU experiment is just the biggest and most expensive example of the Progressive need to pound every square peg into just one round hole.
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Yes, was meant as a post-war order for the continent for everlasting peace. Worked so far.
Was to be made into the United States of Europe. That failed terribly. Now crumbling.
Greater concentration of power, more bureaucracy, more regulations, higher taxes. All surefire ingredients for a better world. Derailed by enemies of the state concerned only with their petty self-interests.
The Euro and monetary union, no. Bad idea from the start and continues to be to this day. The EU? Yeah, good idea and worth remaining within. Needs structural changes of course, but does anything run by politicians and bureaucrats not need some changes?
Guess the Euro should have been the currency of a small inner union within the EU which would have been on a track towards a federal national state. But… saying this and looking at the EU now makes me think each word lost is a word too much.
Like the USA? The problem with the EU was it got the Articles of Confederation stage and stopped. It should have either stopped earlier, or gone further. Stuck half-way is not a good place
[quote]Most importantly, America must now address the larger “European project,” the effort to create a European superstate. We should understand that the EU’s founding intellectuals always had in mind an expressly political objective, rather than merely economic ones. Although we have been deluged by economic arguments before and after last week’s vote, these have always been secondary to the goal of “ever closer union.” This is what British voters emphatically rejected.
“Ever closer union” rests on a fundamentally flawed premise, and its logic leads inexorably to reduced US influence in Europe and globally. Its creators and adherents believed the very concept of the nation-state led to the 20th century’s two great wars; their principal goal was nothing less than eliminating nation-states on the continent.
They utterly misunderstood the reality that not all European states had caused military conflicts (and the Cold War), but a select few. Totalitarian ideologies were the problem, not the nation-state generally. Accordingly, creating a European superstate is irrelevant to preventing future conflicts.
EU theology manifests itself most clearly in the often-made, utterly fanciful, claim that the union is responsible for the absence of war in Europe since 1945. Instead, what’s responsible is NATO, led from the outset by America. Using our military predominance in Western Europe during the Cold War, and continent-wide since 1989, we have fully integrated the military-industrial complexes of NATO members into NATO structures.[/quote]
IF nothing else, the idea of the EU and to a large extent the reality were very much responsible for the economic and policy changes that brought nations from Estonia to Bulgaria into the fold. I hope the EU leaders work this out to salvage this project BUT the bureaucracy and lack of democracy will have to go and that can be a VERY GOOD thing for long-term sustainability. Time to face the challenge, address the concerns and allow progress to er, “unfold in a Hegelian dialectical fashion into s superstructure” that will contain all the “grand narratives” that give the average German a sense of purpose and meaning in life
I think that there are two underlying issues with the EU. The first is the last line of the OP’s statement regarding pounding every square peg into a round hole. No one has ever ruled over all of Europe (let alone also the people who come from outside it who are within Europe). In theory, this would be possible, but it wouldn’t be the cute and cuddly project a lot of people imagine. It would involve a pretty heavy hand to erase differences.
The second, is a much deeper issue that no one is going to solve without solving the first. Simply put, it’s that Europe continues to slide into irrelevance on the world stage. This is not the time of European empires, when relatively small countries could punch way above their bodyweight and control huge swathes of the globe. First, the USA overtook individual European nations. Now many nations on other continents have done so and will continue to do so. For a while, at least a couple of European nations will stay in the top ten nations in the world in terms of economy (and perhaps geopolitical influence), but for how much longer?
For instance, how much sense does it make that Britain, and especially France, have veto status on the UN Security Council, but India, for instance, does not? Likewise with a whole lot of other international institutions. If the EU had been able to overcome its own diversity issues (which I don’t believe it ever could, simply because Germans are not Greeks and Swedes are not Spaniards), then Europe and Europeans might have been able to stay relevant. As it is, they won’t except as a potential hot zone that distracts other countries. At best, Europe is going to be a spoiler going forwards.
