EU Hubris has consequences: Nemisis

Italy and Austria elections keep Europe on edge

"Nationwide votes in Austria and Italy on December 4 are causing palpable anxiety in Europe that, as in the Chicken Licken folk tale, this will be the day when the sky starts falling.
Austria will re-run its presidential election, which in May a far-right candidate came within a whisker of winning. Italy will hold a constitutional reform referendum on which Matteo Renzi, prime minister, has staked his political prestige.
Alarmists fear that victory for the Austrian far right and defeat for Mr Renzi will signal that Europe, no stranger to anti-establishment insurgencies, is being submerged by a populist tide washing in from the Atlantic. This tide swept Britons in June into voting to leave the EU and last week lifted Donald Trump to the US presidency.
In the context of rising populism, Austria’s election is arguably the more worrying event. No European democracy has elected a far-right head of state since the second world war. The symbolism of such a breakthrough in Austria, annexed to Nazi Germany from 1938 to 1945, would be immense."

Well, yeah! The EU has spent nearly two decades ruling Europe from the shadows. No one like it, or respects it, and its actions bind everyone. It is the quintessential nannycrat state. Instead of listening to the people, modifying policy, and achieving success, the nannycrat state plowed ahead nannycratocratizing everything. The pushback is Nemesis Populism. 

There is no Europe, no EU because the people do not think of themselves as either, they think of themselves as Austrians, Italians, Britons, and Germans, etcetera. But the nannycrats can not abide that, or understand that, and so sought to globalize the people themselves, to Europeanize, to EUize. But it didn't work. The people rebelled, and the EU is losing grip. 

During the late 1990s, and early 2000s I presumed the EU would collapse from either the currency/economic issues, or the radical muslims would take over one small state and trigger a conflict. I did not think the nannycrats would be this stupid. Never underestimate the attractiveness of stupid.

Now, all three problems haunt the EU. Violent muslims are a bane creating violence, and unrest within all of the EU even the major nation like Germany, and France. This unrest is a serious threat to the EU. The currency/economic issues have simmered to the point where the entire Southern contingent of EU nations is in depression with no hope for escape while they remain on the Euro. Obviously, depression is bad, although it appears that the peoples of these nations are bound and determined to remain in the EU, for how long? And now it would seem a wave of populism is sweeping through the halls of the myriad EU countries threatening to politically fracture the "union."

In the US people occasionally, and in Texas constantly, lobby for secession, but this is mostly just puffed up blowhards off gassing hot air. This is apparently why Texans look so big, all the excess hot air. Americans love Texans for this, and the feisty, bigger than life, Foghorn Leghorn like characters it engenders. But in Europe it is different, they have no history of this. To the contrary, they have a history where this becomes vicious nationalism, which becomes myopically focused on past slights, and results in long, multiparty wars of attrition. 

The EU nannycrats brought this upon themselves by failing to account for the people, their needs, and desires, and to structure a union with the liberty necessary for the various peoples to retain their independence from the EU as a whole. 

As structured, the EU cannot last. The political structure is wrong, the currency/economic structure is such that any country in economic peril, is simply dragged behind the rest, without ability to recover, and the social structure does not allow for differences between peoples. 

Goodnight EU, and, say hi to Nemesis for us.