Trade Wars Have No Winners, Only Losers

Eurocrats have lost many of their ideals about how to make a better world. They used to believe that certain types of economic arrangements almost automatically led to a political order preferable to the alternative otherwise available. They very often used the United States of America as their example. In America, they found that interstate commerce was strictly free and a substantial part of taxes are collected by a central treasury, and these two features were sufficient to create a stable government with Washington, D.C. as its centre. The Eurocrats, in thinking about America as an ideal to imitate in Europe, manifestly forgot another characteristic of America as a nation, namely the melting pot. Europe, at least since the 16th century or so has never been a melting pot. Instead it has had distinct nations, and each of these nations had a history of its own which distinguished it from and continued to distinguish it from its neighbours. These histories are likely to make any construction of a "United State of Europe" an enterprise condemned to failure.