There\’s two ways this can go really.
1) The PIIGS are hung out to dry, they default or leave the euro and the European Project grinds to a halt for a generation or two.
2) Fiscal transfers start between rich and poor EU countries. In effect, we get the economic government of Europe as well as the current political one.
Now, since 2) has always been part and parcel of the European Project as desired by some, but no one wanted to mention it (similar to how everyone agrees that those noises and smells coming from the elderly aunt at the dining table are simply stomach runbles because she\’s hungry) which do you think will happen in the moment of crisis?
Yes, quite.
Dear Ms. Klein proven wrong again: the shock leads to the increase of governmental powers and integration.
Alas (2) means imposing rules on the feckless unionised state workers in Club Med. They won’t put up with it, bleating about “sovereignty” (just as in the 1970s Tony Benn bleated about how undemocratic it was that the IMF was imposing conditions).
As you suggest it likely will integrate further rather than fall apart.
Very little is allowed to fail anymore.
There was a book published a few years ago that argued that if we are to progress economically things must be allowed to fail. Anyone know the name of it?
The European Union will integrate further, and fall apart.
We have seen in the last twenty years in Europe the messy and violent disintegration of two rotten, venal and corrupt socialist empires.
The response of Brussels is to create a rotten, venal and corrupt socialist empire.
Get ready for Britain to pay its “fair share” of the PIIGS’ fees, as the begging bowl will inevitably be filled by Brown and the other lying traitors at Westminster.
Crisis always leads to further integration, and has been a central tactic in the federasts’ arsenal ever since the time of Monnet .
The Future is a Foreign Country:
‘…the introduction to Monnet’s own memoirs even applauds his vulpine instinct of attacking the nation states when they were at their lowest ebb, as it was said he perceived that during a calamity politicians could be pressurised into taking decisions that they would never have
considered, ‘in conditions of less stress.’ ‘In every effective negotiation there had to be a crisis.’
See: Jean Monnet, Memoirs, Doubleday & Co., Inc., New York, 1978, Pages 13 and 25.
@NeilS, I have a book called Creative Destruction by Richard L Nolan and David C Croson.
Its one of those business fad books about “transformation”. Not sure if that’s the one you mean.