Maintaining the status quo or appeasing everyone for the sake of a cosy consensus is not always the right course to take, and it can be argued that it is hard choices which will define the EU as much as technocratic efficiency in the longer term. notes from no w here
There is no one in mainstream European politics with those qualifications.
So Europe's lapdog status continues for now, at least until the current generation of Atlanticists dies out and is replaced by fresh blood.
The best we can hope for is to start finding and supporting the fresh blood, with a view to 2020 or 2030.
But there's a continuing tension between scrappy charisma-politics, which is what happens at the national level in the EU, and the amorphous and not very well-defined push towards federalisation.
At some point those two trends are going to be personalised in a very public clash.
Blair would have forced that collision ahead of time, which would have been unpleasant for everyone, but interesting to watch.
The democratic problem hasn't been solved - Van Rompuys doesn't give the proles a reason to believe in the EU. That's not a huge problem now, but it's going to start becoming a problem within a term or two.
Besides, there are real issues of infrastructure and regional development that would benefit from federal involvement - high-capacity/high speed railways, water management along the Rhine and Donau rivers, fishing and environmental protection in the Mediterranean and Baltic seas, trans-European communications, phone and internet backbones, trans-European power generation and distribution and so on and so forth and etcetera.
Nationalists of all flavours can bitch and moan as much as they like - but geography and infrastructure are more powerful drivers in political unification than zeitgeist.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
Nor should he -- I am more concerned that MEPs and Barroso fail to. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
