End of the European Dream?

By Joseph A. Harriss

Who says there’s anything wrong with the European Union? I mean, apart from the fact that it’s founded on little more than political hot air, that it’s profoundly undemocratic, that it struts and frets on the world stage, but, insecure about its own identity, is unable to muster either the will or the means to play a significant role in international affairs. That its only raison d’être is the obsessive, mischievous geographical and regulatory expansion that keeps unaccountable Eurocrats in Brussels at their tax-free jobs. That its botched attempt at creating greater unity with its own currency, the misbegotten euro, is instead stifling needed growth and causing deep divisions among its twenty-eight member states.

Today, more and more Europeans are beginning to find a lot wrong with the EU. Many are wondering openly whether it is only a necessary nuisance or an actual handicap as Europe struggles to recover from the six-year-old economic crisis. After all, they were never asked whether they wanted this artificial postwar creation. The brainchild of a French cognac salesman named Jean Monnet, it was contrived by technocrats eager to try their hand at creating the biggest multinational bureaucracy—carrying out the most massive redistribution of wealth—since the United Nations. The peasants were never told where they were being led...

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