The European Union is the best thing that could have happened to the continent since the fall of the Roman Empire. For the jostling nations of the West to reach a state where they could no longer wage war on each other first required total catastrophe. After 1945, no sane European could go on seeking his salvation in nationalism. The ideal of a Europe united was simple: by gradually intertwining national economies, every motive for going to war – indeed, the sheer logistics of such an effort – would render war impossible. Who would lay waste to his own factories and fields?
That dream has come true. The continent is administratively and legally the strongest economic area in the world. It suffers no internal conflicts, mass poverty or dictatorships. And now? Europe has reached the end. The common currency is crashing, inflated into monetary waste paper by a handful of desperate bankers and business leaders pumping out emergency credits. In immigration, the EU is leaving desperate masses to play roulette with death on leaky sloops in the Mediterranean. And as the Near East rises up for freedom, every European country is fighting its own colonial war – or discreetly looking away.
Italian vegetable farmers are getting a drastic lesson in what the Common Market means today: lethal bacteria in Hamburg keep Italian crops out of Russian markets. France relies on nuclear power plants on the border with Germany, while the Germans prefer to hammer up windmills. The Danes are putting up new facilities too, inside the Schengen zone, for fresh border personnel, since everything bad now comes from beyond Denmark’s – not Europe’s – borders. And who wants to explain to a Slovak factory worker that his pension has been wiped out because those Greek balance-book fraudsters want to go on basking in the sun from the age of 53?
For more: Back to the nation | Presseurop (English)
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