I just heard a BBC Brussels correspondent get through dissing Brussels qua city and qua incarnation of the EU. He said that there is momentum building to move the EU capital to someplace closer to the center of Europe like Prague, a city that is more vibrant, progress-minded, and that holds state socialism in lower esteem. It was also a specific attack against Brussels as the embodiment of the indolent social-bureaucratic state.
The first question is obviously whether one thinks the above is true but the second question is more important: Will the EU move from a bureaucracy that tends to be protective of established interests in Europe - a buffer/linker model - to an inter-government government that creates new ideas about economic and political development and acts on new principles - a facilitator/revolutionizer model?
I personally vacillate between being a cynical euro-skeptic and feeling that the euro is legitimately the beginning of the great next step in human socio-economic development. Right now the US is the most developed state in the world, in the stagist Marxian sense, and yet one sees the potential (particularly under Shrubya) for the US to fall from first place. I think we may really have seen the zenith of the American state and it's really interesting to me how that makes me feel.
---------------------------------------------------- Sign Up for NetZero Platinum Today Only $9.95 per month! http://my.netzero.net/s/signup?r=platinum&refcd=PT97