Random notes

First, the Abolish Russia! project, my Egyptian-born mental creation. What if this nation has played out its part on the big scene? If Russia is a failure, dismantle it. Make sure United Europe, and not China, gets, if not the greater, at least the better part of it. Second, isn’t the Nation-State a brainchild of romantic German nationalists of the 18th-19th centuries? Isn’t Europe facing challenges ominously paling the narrow, outdated national identity “problem”.

Third: the Brussels bureaucracy is actually doing a lot of good by pushing ahead unified regulations for everything and all; definitely so in antitrust regulation and corporate governance. In any case, it seems more efficient than the assembled national bureaucracies. Fourth, Europe has a lot of potential exactly because its economy is not yet as liberalized as the US/UK ones have been since the 1980s; it is like an undervalued stock that appreciates when new management shows signs of turning the company around. Brussels, a humongous leviathan as it rightly seems to eyes either dilettantish or impeccably professional, is actually slowly but surely disassembling the innumberable barriers to doing business nation-state governments have meticulously erected over the course of many, many years — some lean, some fortuitously fat-producing (years, that is, although the barriers have surely produced a whole lot of nutritionally valuable stuff too). Apart from and along with its pesky northern neighbors (former vassals, but rather bothersome ones, denying poor Counts of Flanders proper sustenance more often that good knightly manners permitted), France has been “implementing reforms” for years, which should bear its fruit in due course. The US economy, on the contrary, is, excuse the word, plagued with corporate malaise (the EnronArthurAndersenXeroxetcetcetc syndrome); while everyone knows that European corporations have always been inscrutable mammoths, so there’s no downside on this front for Europe.

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