So my question is:
What is the EU elevator speech?
My feeling, speaking as an outsider, is the EU Start-Up, LLC suffers from too many people and entities haring off in too many directions from too many different starting points attempting to achieve too many different, antagonistic, goals to achieve even the faint resemblance of a 'going concern.'
As it is now constituted.
It seems to me, speaking as an outsider, Europeans have rejected two Modern Historical prototypes of Unity:
Or alternatively:
"Help me keep those damn germans down."
Your next points about unity are strange. When were 1 and 2 ever options for post WWII Europe? Unity rather than war, that was certainly an option, and one that was taken up. I suppose you can poke fun at it, but there are good reasons for commending it as serious progress. Next, unity as a federal project (the one the US succeeded in getting in the eighteenth century, when the states were young and only thirteen of them, and yet the debate was still long and strenuous) is opposed by those who want a free trade zone with minimal political unity. The latter include US-foreign-policy-mongers. Last time I looked, they were still wielding quite some clout in obstructing progress towards European unity.
This is not denial of pro-EU unity shortcomings, they are manifest and there's a huge job to be done. But for years now the media tide has been about liberalisation, globalisation, free trade, less government... Definitely not an easy context in which to swing major sectors of opinion behind a project of "ever-closer union".
