Britain And The EU Face Challenges

When the Europeans Community graduated to the European Union further integrating itself with a common currency under the Euro banner it looked as though all was going according to plan.

And for the most part it has.

Depending how you look upon things.

Yay. All of Europe is united!

Nay. European individual sovereignty was given to a technocratic structure governed by uber-bureaucrats.

Trade did improve I guess but growth never really took off. How can the EU guarantee growth to a country like, say, Italy who have an aging population, low birth rates, and restrictive labor policies? All issues that impact growth. Or how can it assure a dysfunctional and corrupt poor country like Greece its GDP will take care of paying for all their unaffordable welfare benefits?

It can't.

And when economies can't give what is promised you have a recipe for disaster.

I could never shake this concern of deep rooted nationalism that always seemed to simmer just below the surface of a smiling EU. I watch a lot of European soccer and you can't tell me some of the crazy things you see there are not symptoms of deeper problems. It happens too often in almost every stadium.

We'd be fools to dismiss it as just a bunch of isolated punks.

You don't see that sort of unrest here in North America. Here, when it does occur, it really is an isolated act.

Mostly because we're at peace with ourselves. Even in Quebec where nationalist shit heads constantly drive a linguistic divide does it ever spill over into violence; except for some truly distasteful incidences where civil servants feel compelled to lecture non-Francophones or demand to be spoken in their country dialect. They can, excuse my brief digression, go fuck a donkey for being nothing more than ignorant hicks who happen to have a couple of laws on their side. Yes, I loathe nationalists that much. They're (and not just in Canada) the source of all that is wrong with a civil society.

Never mind, to get back to the larger North American context, the nonsensical gibberish echoed (mostly on the left) by special interests screaming about injustices who mostly lurk about in places like Salon and other similar publications.

They never had it so good.

Europe is on a very tricky path and I hold little confidence in a place that has so thoroughly rooted out individual liberty from the equation. It is the supreme entity run by technocrats.



Perhaps but while Britain has maintained its democracy, it too has embarked on a bad wagon. A healthy society assured of itself does not have its top police agency ask for cameras be put in people's homes, witness shocking depraved acts seen in Rotherdam or Oxfordshire, consistently take decisions where political correctness trumps liberty.

The continentals may have problems, but I wouldn't be looking down on them if I were a Brit.