Charles Crawford at Blogoir ("A digital hybrid of blog and memoir presented on a daily basis, or not.") shared some excerpts from his piece in Commentator.
Money quote(s):
"Once upon a time world leaders met only rarely if at all. They maintained their dignity if not power precisely by not meeting.
Now EU leaders are meeting and talking almost every month in one way or the other. This (for now) has the effect of making wars in Europe a lot less likely."
Not that, Balkans and other "Bloody Borders" of Islam aside, that's been all that likely lately.
"There is nonetheless a downside. Which is that Trust reasserts itself in a peculiarly personal way. Private tiffs can spill over into public disagreements, and vice versa."
"And lo! ‘Dialogue’ diminishes. Trust declines. Emails start to get no replies, phone-calls aren’t taken. Differences start to count for more than what people have in common. Those who have money start to
bark out instructions to those who are hoping for yet more cheap loans. The whole mood shifts for the worse, defaulting to petulant
defensiveness..."
Which is where the EU remains today.
"The problem for the European Union is that it has very little legal or political room for manoeuvre for tackling the Eurozone crisis."
The EU is designed for ratcheting forward, into even closer integration and transnationalism. It's not designed for course corrections or reversals.
"... the mighty elite brains who got us into this mess will come up with an even better plan, but then implement it with even less public scrutiny and direct accountability than now exists. To do that they
may have to start taking serious legal short-cuts, to the point of side-stepping or ignoring key national laws and EU treaty constraints."
For an oligarchy, that's not such a big deal. For a democracy, or set thereof, it's a deal-breaker.
"Insofar as it means anything it sounds like a coup d’etat, or more precisely coup d’etats.
I might be prepared to sign away some of my own autonomy and my own little slice of my country’s autonomy in return for a wider economic package which makes sense, but only if I get to take part in a
proper debate about the options. Which, given what is at stake in current circumstances, means a referendum"
Which can be held again and again until a correct result is reached.
9/20
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