I don’t think that Walter Russell Mead really understands what’s going on in Europe:
That Brussels has been unable to develop a monetary union without causing the greatest economic disaster in many European countries since the Second World War, that it then proved unable to put the affected economies back on the road to prosperity and growth, that Germany benefited immensely (and continues to benefit) from a policy that impoverishes the south, that Europe then failed to deal effectively with the migration crisis in North Africa and the Middle East—and that it then developed a policy that, again, protected Germany at the expense of the southern countries… this does not bode well for the future of one of the most noble political ventures in human history.
Unable to craft policies that work, unable to share the pain of failure fairly: one must hope that history will give Europe a break. More crises—another round of economic trouble, an intensification of the wars in the Middle East, an even more aggressive series of moves by the Kremlin—could stress Europe to the breaking point.
The reality is that the plan is working beautifully, precisely as designed. The EU and later the euro have always been vehicles for advancing the Germans’ project of Germanizing Europe. Policy by other means. Other than war, I mean.
Now Germany’s elites have gotten their project of de-Germanizing Germany well under way. I don’t have any idea of how all of this will work itself out. Countries like Greece or Hungary, too large just to be subsumed into larger neighbors but too small to protect their distinctive cultures, will have little recourse but to fight or die.
