They've had a good run, at least.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Europe’s Great Project Faces Its Biggest Challenge in Greek Bailout Referendum":
The great project that some hoped would eventually create a European superstate faces the biggest challenge of its 65-year history on Sunday, when Greeks vote in a referendum that could decide whether they crash out of the eurozone—and shift the continent’s destiny.Continue reading.
The European Union, whose precursor brought the region’s nations together after World War II and later helped cement a Western trajectory for countries in the former Soviet bloc, isn’t set to break up. But it has stumbled on the path toward what supporters saw as its future: an ever-closer communion of nations.
What has largely brought this about is the instrument seen as its crowning glory: the euro. The discipline required to tie one’s national currency to that of Germany and its relentless export machine has taken a toll on political systems and politicians across the eurozone, particularly in the south. It has tested Greek democracy to the breaking point.
“The EU is in deep crisis,” Kris Peeters, Belgium’s deputy prime minister, told a conference Thursday. “For the first time in its history, it’s in danger of becoming a less-close union.”
The risk of a Greek exit appeared to grow Thursday as the pivotal vote approached. The International Monetary Fund, whose debt Athens defaulted on earlier in the week, warned that the extended conflict with its creditors had left Greece in even worse financial shape than before, needing an even bigger bailout to remain in the eurozone.
Meanwhile, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras took to the airwaves to insist that voting against the bailout and its conditions would immediately spur a better deal for the country—the opposite of what his counterparts representing the country’s creditors have consistently said.
To be sure, the European idea has been eroded elsewhere. The British have attacked the concept of “ever-closer union” enshrined in the EU treaties and have sought a renegotiation to take powers back to London. Some nationalist politicians, such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, have presented a challenge to the values around which the bloc has been built.
Large-scale immigration—of people inside the bloc and the growing number of desperate refugees from the chaotic regions on its borders—is raising questions about whether the fundamental tenet of freedom of movement is sustainable and is putting pressure on some national welfare systems.
Member states, including Germany and France, are suffering “enlargement fatigue” and are resistant to further outward expansion to new members.
The EU has also been a victim of a generalized backlash against globalization, as many ordinary people see their interests as having been submerged by those of a globalized superelite, of which the well-paid bureaucrats in Brussels are viewed as a prime example.
The long-term rise in unemployment—which in Western Europe in the 1960s averaged below 2%, compared with rates above 20% now in Greece and Spain—is a manifestation of an economic malaise that many voters blame on the EU.
Wolfgang Schüssel, a former federal chancellor of Austria, said the EU is often a scapegoat for more general ills. “Would the results be better without European integration? Would there be more jobs, more investment?” he said in an interview Thursday.
The euro is at once the bloc’s most ambitious project and the one that may most seriously challenge European unity...
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