COMMENT: For many years, we have explored the Euro­pean Mon­e­tary Union as the man­i­fes­ta­tion of the the­o­ret­i­cal con­struct of pan-Ger­man philoso­pher Friedrich List. In the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, List pro­posed cen­tral Euro­pean eco­nom­ic union as a vehi­cle for estab­lish­ing Ger­man world dom­i­na­tion.

Can­ni­bal­iz­ing cor­po­rate Europe dur­ing the occu­pa­tion years of the 1940’s, cor­po­rate Ger­many fold­ed the con­ti­nen­t’s com­mer­cial infra­struc­ture into its own.

A recent Wall Street Jour­nal arti­cle under­scores analy­sis pre­sent­ed in For The Record.

“Europe’s Not Play­ing Ball with Merkel” by Irwin Stelz­er; The Wall Street Jour­nal; 2/7/2011.

EXCERPT: For a while it looked as if the founders had suc­ceed­ed, espe­cial­ly when they cre­at­ed the euro as the most impor­tant step toward the replace­ment of nation states with a Euro­pean Union, or at least a euro zone. Then came the finan­cial cri­sis in the periph­ery coun­tries, and the emer­gence of Ger­many as the prin­ci­pal source of funds to pre­vent (post­pone, or con­ceal, would be more accu­rate descrip­tions) the restruc­tur­ing of the debts of Greece, Ire­land, Por­tu­gal and per­haps Spain and Italy, not to men­tion Bel­gium, home of the bur­geon­ing euro­c­ra­cy, and a nation seem­ing­ly inca­pable of form­ing a gov­ern­ment of its own.

Now, the mem­ber states of the euro zone, and indeed the entire EU, are con­fronting the pos­si­bil­i­ty that their effort to sub­sume Ger­many in a unit­ed Europe is about to fail, and a Europe danc­ing to the Ger­man tune—a Ger­man Europe—is about to emerge. But not before a strug­gle by sev­er­al nations to retain what remains of their inde­pen­dence. . . .