Well, I'm on Merkel's side

I am getting a little tired of the over-the-top hype about democracy dying where it was born (a very questionable historical analysis) and sovereignty being destroyed in Greece. Let's get this straight. All countries that join the EEC/EC/EU lose their sovereignty, those that accept the position of being the recipient of largesse more than others. The Greek economy has functioned as the EU dictated it ever since that country joined the project and there were no riots, demos, burnings or lootings. Not even the odd protest. That is not what brought the mobs out - it was the thought that maybe now things will have to be paid for.

There seems no immediate answer to Greece. It cannot pay off the debts; it cannot turn its economy round inside the euro; it cannot function outside it (and, to be fair, no Greek seems to be suggesting that). And it is all somebody else's fault. Probably the Germans' who are behaving just like the Nazis by handing over large dollops of money. Or whatever.

Anyway, enough of that. Why am I on Merkel's side? Well, first and foremost, because George Soros thinks she is wrong and should be doing something else completely.

Global investor George Soros considers the German government's policies in the euro crisis to be disastrous. In a SPIEGEL interview, he warns of a vicious circle triggered by Chancellor Angela Merkel's strict austerity measures and pleads for more money to be pumped into the countries most plagued by the debt crisis.

An idiotic suggestion unless the man has found some way of snaffling that money. Let's face it, anyone Soros attacks must be doing something right.

One must remember that Soros considers the nation state, particularly in its democratic form, to be the enemy, while Merkel is beginning to emerge as the champion of the nation state, though she does not say so openly.

Mary Ellen Synon thinks that Germany is playing "a nasty, little game" by wanting to get rid of Greece and, possibly, the other high-spending losers and she may be right though I see nothing nasty about the German Chancellor looking to Germany's advantage. And the Boss over on EURef has described Merkel as a eurosceptic with only a smidgeon of irony.

It has always been my contention that the EU's days become numbered when Germany accepts its role as a nation state as a good deal of the project was based on German guilt about twelve terrible years of her history.

Some things have helped the process of overcoming that guilt. Time is the obvious one cause. The generations born after the war do not consider that they can be held guilty for something their grandparents or great-grandparents created. Secondly, Germany's history as a democratic country is now considerably longer than her history as a Nazi country and even the traumatic reunification did not destroy that. Thirdly, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Communist system in Europe raised the question of why should the guilt not be spread a little more evenly between the two monstrous systems of the twentieth century.

Angela Merkel unites all those factors in her person, having been born far too late to be blamed for the Nazi horrors and having grown up in East Germany even if she was born on the Western side. From her emergence as a political leader it seemed to me that she may well be the right person to initiate the process of Germany accepting its nationhood and, consequently, the EU disintegrating. I have been somewhat disappointed with her so far but now it looks like I may have been right in the first place. We shall see. Of course, she is a politician.