Part One: The Democratic Deficit

By rights the European Union (EU) should have been a global empire. With a population of almost 500 million (100 million more than the US) and a well-educated, technically advanced workforce, it should be a comparable power to the US and China. OK, you can argue that they lack critical natural resources, unlike the US, which is a true autarky but Russia always fulfilled that role, delivering cheap commodities on time and at a favorable cost. But now they find themselves in a financial and social death spiral. So, what went wrong?

The idea behind the EU goes right back to the 1920s, with luminaries at the time expressing a need for a pan-European structure, like Austrian aristocrat Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi (who  founded and ran the Pan European Union – a right wing, Christian centric prototype of the current EU, for almost 50 years), left

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