Back in the late ’90s, I began saying, ‘I’ll give the E.U. twenty years.’ At that point, the E.U. seemed to be going great guns, but I believed that it was an ill-conceived concept that wouldn’t stand the test of time.
There were several reasons for my view. First, I didn’t believe that those countries that were entitlement-focused, such as the Greeks, would ever be as fiscally responsible as, say, the Germans, so the Germans (and other countries where there was a responsible work ethic) would end up subsidizing the Greeks (and to a lesser extent, Spain, Portugal, etc.)
In recent years, we’ve watched the E.U. stumble repeatedly. Invariably, Brussels has arrogantly assumed that it can dictate to all E.U. members, and offers few apologies for doing so. The individual countries’ leaders then do their best to explain to their own voters why Brussels should be able to behave like an oligarchy, and the voters understandably have become increasingly angry.
Eventually, the wheels were sure to come off the trolley and, with the UK Brexit vote, we’ve witnessed the first major blow to the survival of the E.U.
This post was published at International Man
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