Spittle-flecked fury over Europe

Conservative hero Brendan O’Neill has been in full spittle-flecked fury because…

when powerful West European nations use extreme financial pressure to force a change of government in less powerful European nations, no one seems to mind.

Oh er, but he calms down a bit further along, noting…

There has been some disquiet over what has happened in the past week, however, even in pro-EU circles. Some have expressed concern about the “technocratic turn” in Europe.

But…? But…?

What these observers don’t realise is that this is not a “turn”. It is the extreme logical conclusion to the EU project.

Well gosh… but it’s also in large part an extreme logical conclusion of some extraordinary circumstances that presently beset Greece and Italy — an elephant in the room which O’Neill all but ignores.

Instead O’Neill sets up a series of strawmen, similarly ignoring context to bolster his overarching narrative about “the liberal EU project in all its naked, tyrannical, oligarchical glory.”

He excoriates France’s Sarkozy and Germany’s Merkel — whose economies have time and again been imposed upon to bail out less robust EU members, another detail ignored by O’Neill — as “EU overlords” who have, for example, “reacted with spittle-flecked fury to Papandreou’s referendum idea.”

Oh, the hyperbowl!

Greece and, to a lesser degree, Italy are in serious trouble, but the “liberal EU project” is only incidentally a contributing factor.