Following up comments kindly added to my piece, The Dolorous Stroke, I have aired the following and wonder if it has any merit:
I have a half-formed theory that coalitions/unifications have a destabilising effect. If, as with Germany and its customs unions in the 19th C, the result is greater efficiency, energy is released and the system attempts to expand, with the results we saw in the 20th C; if, instead, the system becomes less efficient, as with some giant commercial company mergers, the result is decay and contraction as inefficiencies fail to be addressed in a timely manner. I think the EU is / will be an example of the latter.
4 comments:
There are many forces acting to implode the EU.
There is, I believe, a correlation between the distance of leaders from the led. The greater the distance, the greater the probability of failure.
The great general Nathan Beford Forrest, for all his later notoriety, was a great general precisely because he rode with his men. Israeli officers have the reputation for locating themselves at the front of their troops at the moment of attack.
By contrast, think of the isolation of the leadership of both GM and the UAW as they pushed their portion of American industry over the cliff.
Can't wait to see what Brussels will do to Europe in the next ten years!
I think the EU will tear itself apart for much more obvious reasons:-
1] At its heart it is run by a bunch of former communists that believe that the path to the communist state is best achieved via slow brainwashing with each generation rather than by violent revolution. However, my feeling is that communists states always fail because if you take away the carrot of individual self-advancement then the stick is all you have left - and the EU wishes to deny states the use of the stick as well, leading to gradual collapse of the society on which the state is built.
2] As the EU has gained more power it has become less popular with each attempt at flexing its power.
3] Since the EU is based on socialist idealism, it is bound to be undermined by the lack of shared idealism at each level of its component parts.
4] Idealism itself usually imposes a rigid structure on a society more defined by the vaguries of human nature. Thus the economies of Ireland and Spain are defined by the nature of the people of Spain and Ireland, but the economic model imposed on them is the model defined by Germany - a people with a very different nature. The socialist idealist denies that there is a difference between such peoples and that therefore they can be forced to have the same attitudes. In practice this will probably prove not to be the case, just as countries that have been for generations under the rule of another country have fought hard for their independence.
Excellent comment, Anon - do you have a blog/website we can see?
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