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.
