No. of Recommendations: 3
Europe isn't likely to ever take that step. For a time, it was a belief among One World Order conspiracists and the like that the European Common Market --> European Union --> Adoption of Euro as currency would eventually lead to a single European country, as a precursor to forcing all the world's nations to merge into a single World Government. But while the ECM --> EU --> Eurozone has led to much greater economic integration, it hasn't really promoted anything close to the integration you saw with other national integration projects back in the day (the U.S., the unifications of Germany and Italy in the late 19th Century, etc.). Folks seem to like having some degree of correspondence between the "People" they belong to and national borders, and the Germans and French and Spaniards etc. don't appear to have any great desire to all be living in a single country the way that the early New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians and Virginians were willing to do back in 1789.
The op-ed basically makes this point. There's no way that some European countries are going to set aside their national identities and subsume it towards a greater Europe. Not gonna happen.
Instead it argues the opposite - scale back the reach that Brussels has to just trade and travel policy, leaving other countries free to pursue their own defense policies. You'd see an Eastern group of European countries (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, the Baltics) pursue aggressive defense policies while other outfits like Spain kinda just sit there.
