Of course, it sounds better when a think tank author says it:
The European project is designed to gradually transfer sovereignty from the state to the supranational level in return for greater benefit—peace and prosperity. Its strengths—a 446-million-person-strong single market and the free movement of people, goods, and capital that eased trade frictions and internal borders—provide enormous benefit when times are good.
Still, the author didn't stop there and went on to prance about in Euro-Fantasy World by going from the real free-trade bloc benefits into the purported joys of political union as the price to get that without really showing that the former requires the latter. It does not.
The former economic benefits are simply the balm to make people not notice the gradual accumulation of power in Brussels to keep those bloody peasants from being free enough to compel their social betters from ordering mass slaughter in wars:
The [European Union] elites are pretending that the public is bloodthirsty and that only erasing democracy in a smothering European bureaucracy can prevent future bloodshed.
Imagine that, the Europeans looked to their past, noticed that the rulers of Europe often rallied their publics into repeated wars against each other and the rest of the world, and concluded that the key failure in this is their own public that failed to stop the leaders! Never mind that it was the leadership that led Europe to fight. I just want to know how putting an elite that has been prone to war back in complete charge will end European wars? Isn't this recreating the Europe of divine right rulers that created the bloody swath that Europeans cut across the globe?
I sometimes think I am too pessimistic when I have written that in 50 years we could be fighting an EU dictatorship. Reports like this do not make me sleep better at night. When we are pushing freedom and democracy to forestall threats from the Islamic world, Europe goes its own way back toward their violent, aggressive, and unfree past.
And here's a more recent take. Time has not made me change my mind about the EU.
Maybe the Wuhan Flu will make the imperial mask slip enough for people to notice the proto-imperial body slowly eroding that prefix. Let's hope the European people notice the imperial urge while they still have the power to say no.
UPDATE: Will the Wuhan Flu blow the EU apart?
This escalating economic emergency is a tragedy for the peoples of Europe. But their leaders created a madcap creation, a currency and monetary and fiscal construction that is not capable of swiftly transferring resources to the weak in the worst crisis since the Second World War. They put their faith in an organisation that is committed to the idea of ever-closer union but is incapable of meaningfully helping its members when a once-in-a-century pandemic stalks the continent.
Maybe the EU is incapable of meaningfully helping its members because it is only truly committed to an ever-closer union.
Remember, the EU is not turning the varied people who live in the continent of Europe into European citizens. A real country really would transfer resources to the neediest portions of the country. Because they are all in the crisis together. A multi-ethnic empire doesn't really care about the distant provinces that don't hold any power at the center.
