From The Daily Mail:
Coronavirus could mark the end of the EU 'European project' if member states cannot agree to share rescue package debt, the bloc's economics commissioner has warned.
Paolo Gentiloni, a former prime minister of Italy, said it was essential for Germany, the bloc's most powerful member, to come to an agreement over debt with states which have been hardest hit.
He told Italian radio station Radio Capital: "The European project is in danger of dying out... It is clear that if the economic differences between European countries, rather than shrinking in the face of a crisis like this, instead increase... it will be very difficult to keep the European project together."
All empires fall apart eventually, or else there wouldn't be so many individual countries, most of which were once provinces in somebody else's empire or part of a different country. What triggers the final collapse is often some random external event, like the Japanese military successes in World War II prompting British colonies from India to Singapore to seek independence. Or a change in the weather leading to a famine, or whatever.
Fast forward to a history lesson in a few decades, history teachers will be struggling to explain that the single event which ultimately led to most southern Member States leaving the bloc was somebody eating a bat in China (yes, that probably never happened, but it'll do as shorthand).
Debate Magazine
