Will the European Union break down the centrifugal force?

In the XIX century, with the strengthening of the ideas of pan-Europeanism and Eurocentrism, the aspirations of ordinary Europeans to create a single European state, in the manner of the Holy Roman Empire of the times of Charlemagne, intensified. Only this "Third Rome" was to be built not with the sword, as in the Middle Ages, but on the basis of the goodwill of the member states. Writer V. Hugo expressed these vague hopes then: "The day will come when all the peoples of our continent will merge into a single brotherhood without losing their national and regional individuality." The national and interstate conflicts that swept Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries further strengthened these hopes. Centripetal force, moving the aspirations of Europeans, was finally manifested in 1957, when six countries founded the European Union.

What has happened over the past fifty-odd years, and, most importantly, why in the past five years has the European community been more skeptical about the viability of the European Union? Why are the centrifugal forces, at first weak, invisible against the background of general euphoria, now manifest themselves more and more, allowing us to put forward disappointing forecasts, to the point that the European Union will collapse before the end of 2013? Does the "Fortress of Europe" have the same sad fate as the once "stronghold of communism" - the Soviet Union? Is the supra-state formation born in the middle of the 20th century unsustainable due to inherent defects that now worked using the "time bomb" method? Or does the European Union simply go through the trials and obstacles that the global economic crisis has set before it ? Could, in the end, the centrifugal force to shake and sink a European boat?

The goal of the unified Europe was, first of all, political: to prevent new interstate conflicts and to resist a united front against such players on the world stage as the USSR and the USA. This goal was achieved by the EU 100%: "biting off" several countries from the socialist camp, this supranational entity has grown to 27 member countries today. And although a stable peace has come to the lands of Europe, the centrifugal force is manifested in the opinion of Eurosceptics that the poor Romania and Bulgaria and the troubled countries of the Balkans were superfluous or untimely members of a single European family. The migration wave of "poor relatives" that has flown to Italy forced the inhabitants of Western Europe to look at the integration processes in a new way .

When the EU was formed, the economic component was no less important than the political one. The founding countries wanted to create a world economic center that would be a powerful competitor to the US, Japan and raising the head of the PRC, India and Brazil. We can say that this goal was achieved. The single currency - the euro - is now the second most powerful and stable currency in the world, significantly pushing the US dollar. However, the centrifugal force manifests itself in the field of financial management. Eurosceptics call the euro a vulnerable currency, since there is no single unitary ministry of finance. Just extremely diverse economies of individual countries have a common monetary unit over which (experts warn) hangs a "sword of Damocles" of a sharp and at the same time a prolonged fall and even collapse.

And, finally, another sphere where the centrifugal force is particularly acute is bureaucratic delays, constitutional shortcomings and procedural blunders in management. Some strategic European programs, for example, Lisbon, which promised to turn Europe until 2010 into a "society that has outlived its unemployment" failed miserably. In an attempt to build a single economy, Brussels sometimes comes to the rake of the Khrushchev era, ordering what and where to sow, what to consider vodka, and what - real chocolate, etc. Such a policy forces small producers to regard Brussels as an abusive word and only strengthens centrifugal tendencies. The global crisis, when some of the countries of the Eurozone were on the verge of bankruptcy, revealed problems in the system, and the fate of Europe and the world will depend on how the European Union handles them.