Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details the increasing level of Greek defiance to its ECB overlords in the wake of a left-wing, populist uprising in recent Greek elections. It has become blatantly obvious that the political, legal, fiscal, regulatory, and monetary centralization project known as the EU has increased rather than decreased nationalist impulses in Europe. While tension and friction among postwar Europeans have always existed-- Germans joke about lazy Italians, Italians joke about uptight Germans-- they have escalated under the common yoke of the Euro. As Philip Bagus explained in The Tragedy of the Euro, one cannot simply create a currency as a political project.
Centralization of political power across nations with different interests, histories, and cultures is a predictable disaster. The dominant political shibboleth of our time, “democracy,” is the un-ironic banner carried by the globalist centralizers in DC, Brussels, Frankfurt, the UN, and the IMF. The centralizers promise greater prosperity, trade, and harmony, but they produce nothing of the sort. And they abhor truly localized democratic mechanisms.
Those who believed the EU project would finally create a European superstate, free of the old resentments from two wars, should note this comment by Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras (who is only 40, by the way, and thus should represent the “new” Europe):
He vowed to implement every measure in Syriza’s pre-electoral Thessaloniki Programme in their entirety with no ifs and buts. This even includes a legal demand for €11bn of war reparations from Germany, a full 71 years after the last Wehrmacht soldier left Greek soil.
It’s scarcely possible to imagine Greece seeking war reparations from Germany (in 2015!) had both nations not become hostile partners in a disintegrating political project.
