The Future of the EU

Ronald J. Granieri, a Senior Fellow at FPRI, is a specialist in contemporary German and international history. He is the author of The Ambivalent Alliance: Konrad Adenauer, the CDU/CSU, and the West, 1949–1966 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), and is currently completing a book entitled The Fall and Rise of German Christian Democracy, From Détente to Reunification, for Oxford University Press.  He has developed an "E-Note", based on his presentation to the Foreign Policy Research Institute Study Group on America and the West, Philadelphia, 16 April 2012.  The title is "Who Killed Europe? A Provocation".

His premises are:

1. The European Union’s current economic crisis is but the surface manifestation of a more fundamental weakness of the European project.
2. That weakness is the failure of the EU to develop a strong enough political identity and correspondingly legitimate federal institutions to live up to its founders’ vision of a Europe that could act as a coherent unit on the global stage.
3. Such failure was not inevitable, but the product of specific decisions and historical circumstances.
4. The future of the European project depends upon confronting those specific circumstances and facing up to the reality that Europe must either become stronger or it will fade away, becoming as dead practically as it appears today to be dead intellectually.

The whole thing can be found here—the "E-Note" that is.

Is Europe, as the EU, dead?  Will elections in Greece and France tell us?  I doubt it.

I would not that in the premises I see nothing about bureaucratic bloat and arrogance.  I wonder to what extent that is a problem?  The author notes:

Indeed, they tend to take the positive aspects of integration for granted, yet still harbor fear and loathing for the Eurocrats in Brussels and for their fellow Europeans, especially those who live in the south and east and can now take advantage of those open borders and new work opportunities.

I wonder if the Europeans have failed to hoist in the lessons of federalism available across the Atlantic, either in Canada or the US.  Then sometimes I wonder if Europe understands us at all:

Regards  —  Cliff