Confession.
I was once all in on the European Union.
Not mildly sympathetic.
Not cautiously hopeful.
A believer.
When Austria acceded, I felt something close to uplift. My small Alpine country, historically fussy, peripheral, occasionally self-important in provincial ways, had entered the circle of the grand and beautiful.
An ennoblement.
Or so it felt.
Then came the Euro—well, not a cryptocurrency, despite some days tempting the comparison—and I was positively elated. A continental project! Shared destiny! History bending toward reason in administrative form!
One can almost smell the youthful incense.
There is that old saying:
If you are not an idealist when young, you have no heart.
If you remain one when older, you have no brain.
Crude.
But not entirely false.
Fortunately, the brain eventually caught up.
Unfortunately, it arrived carrying invoices.
And that hurts.
There is a particular embarrassment in recognizing one’s former enthusiasms as carefully marketed illusions.
It is hard to believe I did not see it sooner.
But perhaps that is how large abstractions work.
They seduce first.
Disclose later.
Because over time I watched the European Union become something rather different from its liturgy.
Not a guarantor of flourishing.
A scapegoat.
For Austrian politicians especially, it became a magnificent excuse machine.
If domestic policy failed—
Brussels.
If regulations strangled some sector—
Brussels.
If something unpopular had to be imposed—
regrettable, but Brussels.
And if citizens objected?
Well, terribly sorry, our hands are tied.
Marvelous arrangement.
Power exercised nationally.
Blame outsourced supranationally.
A bureaucratic ventriloquist act.
And people call this integration.
But this points to a deeper pathology.
Large sprawling bureaucracies live by ossification.
That is their metabolism.
They harden.
Codify.
Standardize.
Freeze living complexity into administrative cement.
And then call this order.
But systems too rigid do not create dynamism.
They suffocate it.
Particularly economically.
Because competition—real competition—requires mess.
Experiment.
Failure.
Disruption.
It requires room.
Heavy-handed rule systems do the opposite.
They bury small firms in compliance burdens they cannot absorb while entrenching large incumbents who can hire armies of lawyers, lobbyists, and regulatory priests.
And then we are told competition still exists.
It does.
As cosplay.
A pageant.
A supervised simulation.
Meanwhile the giants feast.
This is one of bureaucracy’s dirtiest tricks:
It often presents itself as disciplining power while quietly consolidating it.
The European Union has become very good at that.
And this is where reform enthusiasts usually arrive waving proposals.
We can fix it.
Democratize it.
Streamline it.
Reform it.
Really?
Some systems may be improved.
Others become so internally contradictory that reform is merely a gentler word for prolongation.
I increasingly suspect the EU belongs in the latter category.
A failed experiment.
Not because every aspiration behind it was ignoble.
Many were understandable.
Even noble.
Failure often begins with noble premises.
But some structures fail not through bad intentions, but through scale, incentives, and the slow triumph of bureaucracy over life.
And once that sets in, reform tends to be ceremonial.
A rearrangement of symptoms.
Not cure.
Which leaves an impolite thought.
Perhaps it must collapse under its own inconsistencies.
Not dramatically.
Not necessarily in fireworks.
But through the ordinary erosion by which overextended systems eventually lose coherence.
Now people recoil at this.
Collapse sounds cruel.
And it would be.
Exiting such a calamity would hurt.
Probably badly.
There is no painless divorce from accumulated illusion.
But here is the harsher possibility:
Given what may be coming globally—financial strain, geopolitical fracture, institutional exhaustion—the breakup of the EU may prove not the great catastrophe, but the lesser evil.
Sometimes preserving a malfunctioning structure produces greater damage than letting it fail.
That is not nihilism.
It is triage.
Empires, federations, bureaucratic cathedrals—
they all eventually meet the same question:
Can this still serve life?
Or does life now serve it?
Once the second answer dominates, decline is already speaking.
I once mistook the European project for civilizational ascent.
Now it looks increasingly like administrative overreach in ceremonial robes.
A costly misunderstanding.
Though perhaps not uniquely European.
Modernity seems to specialize in those.
https://clintel.org/european-energy-policy-full-speed-towards-the-wall/