Let me start by saying that I’m an European Citizen, and I’m all for European cooperation. At the moment Europe isn’t all that great however. There are many problems with the current framework which facilitates European cooperation, so much so that in its current state I would go so far as to say that ‘Europe’ is in the twilight zone. In limbo. It is on the verge of dying all the time. I will share my ideas on this topic in a series of blog posts.

Of course, there’s the Euro crisis. But the crisis is more of a symptom than a cause of what’s wrong with Europe. What’s wrong with Europe is that the unification process has stalled and actually partially reversed. The cause of this halt is what’s at the root of the disease Europe is suffering from: Lack of true leadership of the Union itself.

And this lack of leadership has been there since the decision to create an entity that amounted to more than just a cooperation on certain economic issues such as agriculture and minerals. Basically, when we decided to integrate beyond the then existing framework of economic cooperation, we should have decided that we should subjugate the member states of the then EEC to a central European government, and let it decide the fate of all euopeans. What happened instead was that individual member nations continued to hold on to their sovereignty and this is what is at the hart of the ‘European Condition’. This is where everything went wrong and why the Euro, and ultimately European cooperation as a whole could very well fail.

You see, not handing over sovereignty kept the door open for national leaders to push their own agenda’s and leave the European agenda as some kine of orphaned child. And this is what has happened. The leaders of the UK, France and Germany all have interfered with Europe being an effective framework of cooperation in favour of their own agenda’s. This is being worsened by the fact that the de facto leadership in the EU is made up of the councils of ministers, and not by a true European government like the European Commision could or should have been.

Next part: How this affects European Citizens and the future of the EU.