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| Europe's current look. |
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
The European heads of state and governments are sitting in a burning house haggling over the total sum they will have to rustle up for the water damages from putting out the fire. The reproach that they have lost contact with the citizens doesn’t ring true: the fact is, they never had any to start with. The system we live in neither provides for nor admits any legitimate representation for the citizens of Europe.Whoever makes “democratically legitimate” policy at the European level – that is, who has been elected to do so – has come into that position only through national elections and must, to survive politically, defend the fiction of “national interests”. Whoever today at the summits of the European Council always obstructs Community interests to win the approval of the national electorates harms all the others – and, considering how interlocked the nations are within the European single market and the eurozone, harms his own.
I once had great hopes invested in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung invested. A newspaper so serious that it never used photographs in its first page when it was the standard practice. And yet I begin to read the note by noticing that the authors acknowledged that the current European Union deepest flaw was the lack of representativeness. A bunch of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Brussels dictate to 493 million people how they will live, and always get away with it.
Otherwise, the Euro project wouldn’t have been advanced in spite of the doom forewarnings that became true. The smart guys in the European room might have realized that the economic collapse with such an arrangement was inevitable, as it would be inevitable the proposed “fix”: a fiscal union, something closely resembling the French-and-Dutch-rejected constitution for the United States of Europe. The repudiation sent such intense shockwaves along the members of the EU, that no more referendums were held after these, leaving Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Luxembourg and Spain completely flat. Of these countries, Greece, Italy and Spain are experiencing the worst crisis since the UE started. The water is boiling, but they insist to keep their hands in the heat.
And that’s precisely the solution proposed by authors Ulrike Guérot and Robert Menasse: to “pay attention to the dreamers” and proceed with full steam to install a European Republic, i.e. keep the euro currency, implant a fiscal union and abolish all the nation states that conform the Union.
Insanity...
