European crossroads

https://mishtalk.com/economics/hypocrites-in-germany-demand-eu-reform-but-only-as-it-suits-germany

It seemed inevitable that some crisis would bring the European countries to a crossroads. The Russia-Ukraine situation has done it.

The crossroads is that the EU has a built-in economic/financial dysfunction (being: too much disparity of productivity among member states) that can only be resolved by either going forward to a higher level of integration — more and more like a United States of Europe — or backing away from that vision.

Most liberals would probably hope for the former. Unfortunately, the German Greens tend toward policy orientation that is awfully similar to liberalism or social democracy. My own orientation to Green ideology retains the original valuation of decentralization. As a bioregionalist, I’m not a big fan of super-centralized polities.

And my assessment is that I don’t think we’ll ever see a United States of Europe. It’s a hypermodern concept. I think our hypermodern world is, rather, entering a period of decentralization and industrial-statist devolution. That will be messy, but the centralizing alternative represents a continuation of going in the wrong direction.