EU to come apart?

Started by arpad, November 17, 2010, 03:42:42 AM

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arpad

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard has a story - link - at the Telegraph about the strains the EU is under and why those strains might lead to a collapse of the whole organization.

He might be right.

Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland have all dived head first into socialism which inevitably means government in service of government employees and elected officials with everyone else getting the scraps off the table. The good, old days of retired Greek government employees getting fourteen "monthly" checks are coming to an end with, what you'd expect, a lot of hard feelings and anger; it's tough enough getting people to part with what they've earned legitimately but people who have no claim on what they're getting seem much more inclined towards violence to hang onto it.

Ol' Ambrose seems to think that the EU's going to fly apart under the pressure of the financial collapse of its member nations but sort unsaid in the article is the other possibility, that the EU will go from being a sorta, kinda supernational government to the real thing with the power to coerce its member states with threats of force or the use of force.

Evans-Pritchard (gawd I hate those double-barreled names) is implying, I think, the possibility of the formation of a United States of Europe in a less then entirely voluntary way. It's already started with Greece having to bow to the EU and the World Bank for their bailout, giving up some elements of sovereignty but I think Evans-Pritchard is implying that all the smaller, weaker countries, just like the ones that are in financial difficulty, may be strong-armed into giving up even more sovereignty then Greece has. There's the mention of a certain Viennese corporal who had similar aspirations.

I just can't see anything good coming out of a forced federalization of the EU. Ruling by dictate is favored by those who see themselves as the dictators but even for them things rarely work out as well as they hope. I'm concerned that a forced federalization of Europe will lead to the economic stagnation of the entire region along with the possible rise of authoritarianism.

Solar

I remember reading an economists take on the Euro before it was instituted.
He warned that a socialist system, given the means of printing money, will collapse under it's own weight.
He went into more detail about it, but it appears he called this one.

Britain stayed with the Pound, didn't it?
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