Just a small thought:-
It seems like Iraq has failed because it's an artificial construction of 3 tribes, forced together, initially by us, and later kept together by strongmen like Saddam Hussein. And isn't this similar to Yugoslavia? A load of people stuck together after WW1 with the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian empire, who fought each other, got a dictatorship (the king), then a different dictatorship (Nazis), and then another (Tito) and when he died and there was no tough guy, they fought each other.
The EU is made up of a number of countries that are broadly organised around their tribes. Or, they historically kicked out people from other tribes that stirred up trouble, until they got to roughly a tribe per country. And OK, there's people who feel a bit split or unsure about which country they belong to, like the Scots, the Northern Irish, the people of the Basque regions and a few Cornishmen, but the French mostly want to be French, the Italians Italian and the Danes Danish.
And we all want to trade, and maybe having loose trading blocs is quite a good idea. We can probably even see benefits of certain things being standardised in a trading region, like safety signs. But when you start getting into areas like currency or foreign ministries and defence, that's where the alliance oversteps itself, and steps into things that people in a country want someone from their "tribe" to decide. Which is why this just isn't going to happen. The more the EU push at things, the more likely they're going to end up breaking up the whole thing.
Debate Magazine
