The EU Is Falling Apart +

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Like to share, a wide ranging discussion, (Middle east, europe etc)

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Related

Blurb

British author and commentator Peter Hitchens joins Jonathon Van Maren to discuss Russia, the West, and why war in Europe may be inevitable.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Related

Europe must take its fate in own hands, can no longer rely on US for protection: Merkel

German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europe can no longer rely on the United States for protection, urging European Union member states to take the bloc’s destiny in their own hands.

“It is no longer such that the United States simply protects us, but Europe must take its destiny in its own hands, that's the task of the future,” the German leader said at an award ceremony in Aachen, a German resort city near the border with Belgium, where French President Emmanuel Macron received the prestigious Charlemagne Prize for his efforts in boosting EU integration and cohesion.

Merkel’s comments came two days after US President Donald Trump declared that his country was pulling out of the Iran nuclear agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), saying Washington would not only reinstate the anti-Iran sanctions lifted as part of the deal, but would also “be instituting the highest level of economic” bans against the Islamic Republic.

The JCPOA came out of years of negotiations between Iran on one side and the P5+1 group of countries -- the US, UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany -- on the other, in July 2015.

The American leader announced his controversial decision after his European allies, including the UK, Germany and France, and a number of other countries failed to convince him not to pull out from the landmark accord. Trump also threatened all countries, the US allies included, with sanctions if they violated the US-embargoes against Iran, worrying Washington’s traditional allies in Europe.

Merkel's remarks also echo those of President of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker, who noted earlier on Thursday that the White House “had lost vigor, and because of it, in the long term, influence,” urging that Europe should take over the role of the US as the self-proclaimed global leader.

For his part, Macron, who has been insisting on his flagship reform proposals for the eurozone since he came to power in May last year, exerted further pressure on Merkel to agree with his proposals, most notably a common eurozone budget and finance minister, saying to her, “Don't wait, act now.”

“If we accept that other major powers, including allies, ... put themselves in a situation to decide our diplomacy, security for us, and sometimes even make us run the worst risks, then we are not more sovereign and we cannot be more credible to public opinion,” he said, in a clear attack against Trump's decision to withdraw from the hard-fought Iran nuclear deal.

“We need to choose, build, speak with all so as to construct our own sovereignty that will be the guarantor of stability in (the Middle East),” Macron stressed, whose other ambitious proposals for the eurozone include a joint military “rapid reaction force” and an EU tax on the revenues of technology giants.

Merkel, however, said that discussions on the eurozone were “difficult” between Berlin and Paris, underlining that disagreements still dogged many proposals for further integration of the bloc.

But she acknowledged that “the European economic and currency union must be made more sustainable.” The German leader also vowed that EU member states would make the eurozone “more crisis-proof.”

Although Merkel said that she expected agreements on a banking system, she remained silent on the French president’s call for a common eurozone budget.

In January last year, Trump described the UK’s referendum in June 2016 to withdraw from the EU as a “great thing,” arguing that the bloc was heavily influenced by Germany.

EU leaders have since been rattled by Trump's comments on Europe, which they say are aimed at destroying the integrity of the bloc by advocating other nations to follow Brexit.

http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2018/05/10/561251/Germany-Merkel-Macron-US-protection-Iran-JCPOA-eurozone

[Futuwwa]

What Merkel says Europe should do now, Europe should already have done after the Cold War ended.

Vive l'Empereur Macroleon!

Hey there! Looks like you're enjoying the discussion, but you're not signed up for an account.

When you create an account, you can participate in the discussions and share your thoughts. You also get notifications, here and via email, whenever new posts are made. And you can like posts and make new friends.
Sign Up

[anatolian]

Is this the same Merkel who was pissed off with the Greeks, who are considered the forefathers of the European civilization? :) I believe it is not possible to keep such a union any longer without dominating it by a specific nation. Germans are doing that at the moment. If others are happy with it it will survive, otherwise it wont.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Yes, the European Union has been described as 'Germany by other means'. Germany has been wanting to dominate Europe for some time (over a century). It fought two wars didnt get its way, but it has through the European Union (due to its economic might).

For now anyway.

The 'World Order' is really being shaken up at the moment.

Edit

For some background on Germany

Geopolitics of Germany

[anatolian]

Also there was a huge stacking of US troops in Germany, Poland and Baltic countries in the last year..She seems too late..




]

[anatolian]

Salaam

Yes, the European Union has been described as 'Germany by other means'. Germany has been wanting to dominate Europe for some time (over a century). It fought two wars didnt get its way, but it has through the European Union (due to its economic might).

For now anyway.

The 'World Order' is really being shaken up at the moment.

Edit

For some background on Germany

Geopolitics of Germany

To be honest with you I disagree with you. There always must be a leading group in a union. You know the Ottoman Empire was a multinational Islamic union but Turks were the leading people. In the example of EU if there must be a leading people it must be Germans.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Another update.

Embedded Tweet

The Fall of the German Empire

The first modern German empire was announced by Otto von Bismarck at Versailles in 1871; it died on the Western Front in 1918. The second German empire was forged in a swift march of annexations and blitzkriegs; it lasted seven terrible years, from the Anschluss to the bunker, and died with Hitler and his cult.

The third German empire is a different animal altogether. Repudiating both militarism and racist mysticism, it has been built slowly and painstakingly across three generations, in cooperation with other powers (including its old enemies the French), using a mix of democratic and bureaucratic means. Today Germany bestrides its Continent, but German power is wielded softly, indirectly, implicitly — and when the fist is required, it takes the form of fiscal ultimatums, not military bluster or racial irredentism.

But still the system is effectively imperial in many ways, with power brokers in Berlin and Brussels wielding not-exactly-democratic authority over a polyglot, multiethnic, multireligious sprawl of semi-sovereign nation-states. And thinking about the European Union this way, as a Germanic empire as well as a liberal-cosmopolitan project, is a helpful way of understanding how it might ultimately fall.

The possibility of such a fall has been haunting the Continent since the Great Recession, as the sense of crisis, the threat of dissolution, has spread from the Balkan periphery to an increasingly nationalist Eastern Europe and a Brexit-chasing Britain. Now with the near-takeover of Italy’s government by a populist coalition, it has reached the original European Union project’s core.

As this crisis has developed and encompassed grievances beyond the economic — immigration and national identity above all — it has been covered more and more as a clash between liberalism and illiberalism, between freedom and authoritarianism. In the wave of liberalism-in-peril books written since Donald Trump’s election, the European and American experiences tend to get folded together into a story of democratic values threatened by ethnic chauvinism and would-be strongmen — by Putin imitators, to borrow a common trope, who want to use the democratic part of liberal democracy as a ladder up to power and then burn away the liberal part.

This story has some truth to it. There are ideological affinities as well as funding streams linking Moscow and many of the nationalists to Russia’s west, and the most empowered populist within the European Union, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, is explicit about his intent to replace liberal democracy with a form of “Christian democracy” that looks suspiciously like de facto one-party rule.

But if the test of Europe’s unity feels like a test for liberal democracy, it’s a mistake to see it only in those terms. It is also a struggle of nations against empire, of the Continent’s smaller countries against German mastery and Northern European interests, in which populist parties are being elected to resist policies the center sought to impose upon the periphery without a vote. And the liberal aspect of the European system wouldn’t be under such strain if the imperial aspect hadn’t been exploited unwisely by leaders in the empire’s German core.

This disastrous imperial dynamic was first manifest in the fiscal policy imposed on Southern Europe in the wake of the Great Recession — a policy that manifestly made more sense for Germany’s economy than for Italy’s or Spain’s or Greece’s, even as it was confidently presented by German bankers as a hardheaded necessity that no merely national government could be permitted to reject.

Then the same dynamic repeated itself on immigration, when Angela Merkel took it upon herself to make migration policy for the Continent, in atonement for Germany’s racist past and in the hopes of revitalizing its aging society. The resistance from other Europeans to her open door to refugees and migrants, the refusal to let the German chancellor and her admirers determine immigration policy, is one reason among many that populists won the Brexit referendum and find themselves on the cusp of power in Italy — and it’s the major reason that populist parties rule today in Budapest and Warsaw.

Two recent essays make this point well; a short piece by Branko Milanovic, a former lead economist for the World Bank, and a longer one by Damir Marusic, the executive editor of The American Interest. Here is Milanovic, describing the belt of Eastern European countries stretching from the Baltic to the Aegean, most of which happily joined the European Union but have since found themselves in tensions with its core:

When one draws a line from Estonia to Greece … one notices that all currently existing countries along that axis were during the past several centuries (and in some cases, the past half-millenium) squeezed by the empires: German (or earlier by Prussia) Russian, Hapsburg, and Ottoman. All these countries fought, more or less continuously, to free themselves from the imperial pressure … their histories are practically nothing but unending struggles for national and religious emancipation.

Most of these nations, Milanovic continues, experienced the events of 1989 primarily as a national liberation, and only secondarily as a victory for liberal principles over totalitarian or authoritarian alternatives. And the nation-states that emerged from ’89 tended to be ethnically homogeneous and proudly so, with their political independence and sense of shared identity inextricably linked.

So it should not be surprising that countries so recently emancipated would embrace the project of European Union liberalism only insofar as it does not seem to threaten either their long-traduced sovereignty or their just-reclaimed identity, and would be wary of a cosmopolitan vision that seems like it could dissolve what they so recently have gained.

As Marusic writes in his essay, from a liberal-cosmopolitan perspective that “sees 1989 primarily as an ideological triumph” for universal values, “much of the politics of the past 10 years in Eastern Europe can only be seen as backsliding,” with leaders like Viktor Orban “a symptom of political decay.”

But from the vantage point of those same countries, for whom independence itself feels hard won and precarious, it seems strange that they should be expected to surrender to a different form of empire just because it dresses its appeals in the language of universal liberalism — especially when the language has a distinctly German accent.

Now of course those same nationalists — encompassing Brexiteering Britons and populist-voting Italians as well as Poles and Hungarians — often want to have it both ways, to have their sovereignty and also have the advantages of membership in the European imperium. Orban rails against foreign influence in Hungary but still takes what Brussels offers; the Brexiteers want to keep as many of the benefits of their soon-to-be-erstwhile European Union membership as possible; the Italian populist parties are busy rewriting their joint agreement to make sure it’s clear they do not want to leave the euro. There are no political innocents in this story.

But there is a complexity that’s lost when the situation is framed as simply about enlightenment versus authoritarianism. Political norms matter, but so does sovereignty and the substance of policy disagreement. And the problems that have pitted populists against Berlin and Brussels — a common currency that remains misbegotten even though the fiscal crunch has eased, a demographic-economic imbalance between Europe and neighboring regions that promises migration crises without end, a democratic deficit in how the European Union is governed — cannot be resolved by simply appealing to an abstract liberal project.

If they are to be resolved or at least managed, if the third German empire is to last, it will require a change in how its present leaders think about their role. Paradoxically it may require them to become more consciously imperial in certain ways — to recognize that the complex system they are managing is unlikely to ever evolve from a loose empire into a United States of Europe (not least because our own system is increasingly imperial as well), and that it can be governed effectively only by a more modest, self-critical and disinterested elite.

In the meantime, it is a grave mistake for liberalism’s champions to portray the tensions between the center and the periphery in Europe as just a choice for liberal values or against them. Because framing the choice that way, to people who recognize all too well that it can also be a choice for or against their own sovereignty, is a good way to hasten the fall not only of Germany’s third empire but of liberalism itself.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/opinion/germany-europe-populism.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=H omepage

[سيف الله]

Salaam

Another update.

Blurb

The EU’s policymakers like to obsess about government debt, but the 2008 crisis was caused by something they ignore: private debt. Credit of as much as 40 percent of GDP per year fueled Spain’s housing bubble, for example, and drove private debt to 260 percent of GDP, more than four times the Maastricht Treaty limit on government debt. Spain’s private debt is still 200 percent of GDP, and is a millstone around any recovery. France and Italy carry similar burdens.

EU attempts to reduce government debt could trigger a return to private sector de-leveraging and cause another slump: not as bad as 2008, but still debilitating. Europe has “turned Japanese” and doesn’t know it.

[Futuwwa]

Predictions of "The EU falling apart" have been made nonstop by those who would want to see it happen, who would feel vindicated by it happening. Yet here it is, rolling on, having just displayed a firmness and unity of purpose over Brexit that exceeded the expectations of even the most ardent Europhiles.

[anatolian]

EU is not falling aspart but it is transforming from western to eastern Europe. Westerners are bored of feeding the poorer easterners and they either want to leave as britain or change the system as germany. I think france is ready for both options after the recent protests.

My prediction is with or without an official union, the entire continent will be more dependant to america.

[سيف الله]

Salaam

The problem with the EU is the old problem of trying to unify Europe under one authority. It eventually breaksdown and fall apart. There are benifets but also many costs (EU is mockingly refered to by some as the EUSSR), hence the nationalist and populist reactions at the moment.

This would serve Trumps interests because he would like to do trade deals with a fragmented Europe. Plus hes not interested in the USA shouldering the costs of protecting the EU any longer. Though this might change with a different administration.

The UK public have always had an ambivalent attitude, in fact the Eurocrats complained that the British couldnt accept the EU because they haven't been invaded since 1066!

Insight into those who oppose British membership of the EU.

Blurb.

Presented by Peter Hitchens about the history of the UK's relationship with the EU.



Good book on the subject.

Blurb

Now published with a new preface explaining why The Great Deception is of the utmost importance today as it was when it was first published and to coincide with Great Britain's EU referendum in 2016, this book suggests that the United States of Europe and its edict of 'ever closer union' have been based on a colossal confidence trick.

The Great Deception tells for the first time the inside story of the most audacious political project of modern times: the plan to unite Europe under a single 'supranational' government. From the 1920s, when the blueprint for the European Union was first conceived by a British civil servant, this meticulously documented account takes the story right up to the moves to give Europe a political constitution, already planned 60 years ago to be the 'crowning dream' of the whole project.

The book shows how the gradual assembling of a European government has amounted to a 'slow motion coup d'etat', based on a strategy of deliberate deception, into which Britain's leaders, Macmillan and Heath, were consciously drawn. Drawing on a wealth of new evidence, scarcely an episode of the story does not emerge in startling new light, from the real reasons why de Gaulle kept Britain out in the 1960s to the fall of Mrs Thatcher. The book chillingly shows how Britain's politicians, not least Tony Blair, were consistently outplayed in a game the rules of which they never understood. But it ends by asking whether, from the euro to enlargement, the 'project' has now overreached itself, as a gamble doomed to fail.

Since their collaboration began in 1992, Christopher Booker, a Sunday Telegraph columnist, and Richard North, who worked for four years in Brussels and Strasbourg as a senior researcher, have won a unique reputation for their expertise on Britain's relationship to the European Union. Their previous publications included The Mad Officials (1994) and The Castle of Lies (1996). But they regard The Great Deception as the book they had been waiting to write for ten years. Christopher Booker's preface now adds up-to-date detail for the current era as Britain heads inexorably towards a possible 'Brexit'.