In a column that consists largely of a “what can you expect from the wogs?” attitude towards Greece’s economic problems, George Will has a substantive remark on the EU:
The E.U. exists to require nations to “pool†their sovereignties in unelected, unaccountable bureaucracies. The retrograde point of the E.U. is to leech from national parliaments powers that were hard-won over many centuries of struggle. National governments rendered unserious by the E.U. are apt to regress to adolescence, as with Syriza’s referendum — a tantrum masquerading as governance.
Seventy years after the guns fell silent, the drive to turn “Europe†from a geographic into a political expression lacks the excuse of preventing continental convulsions caused by nationalistic militarisms. Now, the drive for “ever closer union†— which means ever-more attenuated democracy — is fueled by the traditional socialist (and, in the United States, the progressive) goal of expanding the reach of a mandarin class of supposed experts in social rationality.
or, in other words, the European Union is a move towards a “United States of Europe” except without the democracy. Sadly, increasingly the United States of America is a United States except without the democracy.
The form of government to which we once aspired is hard. Among other things it requires forbearance, always in short supply.
Be reasonable, see it my way.