The European Union's unending quandary … The pace of European disintegration continues to quicken. Recession deepens in the 17-member euro zone; it is now the longest downturn since the currency was launched in 2000. The union will survive only by becoming minimalist. Europeans – who are first of all Germans, French, Italians, Poles, Brits and others – may distrust their politicians, but they know them. They know their faces, their backgrounds, their accents, their tricks, their virtues. They will not – cannot – transfer that loyalty to those they do not know. They will not allow them to make decisions on how to spend the taxes citizens pay. The creation of a more integrated Europe – which sooner or later will look like a state, act like a state and thus be a state – has to be a process of small steps. Or it won't be much at all. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: Eventually, the EU will go from strength to strength.

Free-Market Analysis: This is an editorial and does not speak formally for Reuters. But in studying Reuters editorials we find they hew to Reuters's editorial policy, which is a globalist one.

Thus, the editorials to some degree reveal the thinking of the larger globalist brain trust And Reuters IS a globalist institution, by design and business strategy.

Thus, the worries expressed in this editorial are instructive. We've pointed them out before, in fact. Start with an acknowledgement that the current malaise afflicting most of the world is at least partially a deliberate policy.

After all, what are we to think about statements from EU politicians stating bluntly that an economic crisis would needed to drive a deeper EU union?

EU's Plight: Sadism or a Cold-Blooded Takedown?

Well, they have their economic crisis now and it is one that has been caused in large part by incoherent and destructive central banking policies. We will leave it to our readers to decide if such malfeasance as has been evident in past and current monetary policy is deliberate or not.

But let us return to the political issue. There is no doubt, it seems, that the Eurocrats are facing a dilemma. They want a chaotic and despoiled economy; past statements have made that clear. At the same time, too MUCH civil unrest and economic chaos threatens the entire program.

Instead of a deepening, you get a break-up. We've written numerous times, this is the issue of deepest concern to those who are trying to drive the EU forward.

It's a balancing act, but it would appear to be an increasingly unsteady one, as this Reuters editorial shows.

In Italy, a new left-right government, launched on an anti-austerity program, finds the neighborhood more austere than it had hoped. In France, Maurice Levy, boss of the advertising giant Publicis, did a survey showing that northern Europeans – Poles, Germans, Brits – were moderately optimistic while southerners – Spaniards, Italians, Greeks and the French – were deeply pessimistic. France dipped into recession earlier this month, for the third time in four years. The union is pulling apart.

Nothing brings relief. In the Netherlands, a TV show persuaded the country's deputy finance minister, Frans Weekers, to watch clips of Bulgarians boasting about how they had defrauded his country's government of welfare benefits. Bulgarians and Romanians, the poorest members of the European Union, will be able to move to any state in the EU next year. What had been presented to the poor as a new freedom is now an imposition for the rich.

Those who have been most enthusiastic for the union now proclaim that it is in grave danger. In an interview earlier this month the financier and philanthropist George Soros said European leaders, in trying to find exit routes from the crisis, have "generated political dynamics that are leading toward the EU's disintegration."

"Euro-skepticism" – Euro-fury is more like it – has grown. A survey by the pro-EU European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) shows that:

"[S]ince the beginning of the euro crisis, trust in the European Union has fallen from +10 to -22 percent in France, from +20 to -29 percent in Germany, from +30 to -22 percent in Italy, from +42 to -52 percent in Spain, from +50 to +6 percent in Poland, and from -13 to -49 percent in the United Kingdom."

The ECFR sees the crisis as rooted in a "clash of wills" between northern and southern states – with the richer north no longer willing to pay down the debts of others without tight controls, and the southern countries resenting the call for centralized control of budgets, taxes, pensions and the labor market. "Europeans now know," writes Levy of Publicis, "that none of us can count on others to resolve our local problems. It may take years before we manage to recreate a real sense of union that can carry Europe into the future."

… But the elitism of the project has been exposed, and at a time of adversity it becomes a handy target. The absence of democratic accountability and engagement of ordinary folk meant the elites felt free to accelerate the development of a more and more integrated union, of which the euro has been the largest innovation. Now, for many states, it's the largest burden.

We are happy to say this reads like one of our own analyses. We've been predicting just this sort of dilemma because, indeed, the EU project has been driven by elitism and arrogance. The idea was that Europeans were infinitely manipulatable. Not so.

From our perspective, it is the Internet itself – what we call the Internet Reformation – that has woken up Europeans from their slumber. There is simply too much information being passed around these days, much of it electronically.

In a simpler time, as we have written, the globalists that stand behind the EU would have gotten away with it. Now they are gradually realizing that despite their best (or worst) efforts, they have miscalculated.

It seems that have gone too fast and this editorial states clearly that "it may take years" to recreate the momentum that has been lost.

This seems to us to be an important point – and this editorial may be more than a yelp in the dark. Maybe the Eurocrats have finally realized the Great Experiment is in danger of unraveling entirely.

The article concludes that it will be necessary to move very slowly to continue to create the "ever closer" union the European elites seem to want so desperately.

We would argue that by the time one is committing such a strategy to paper that proverbial train has left the station. Blinded by their own hubris, the top EU leaders and their backers were unwilling to slow down and if anything have speeded up the homogenization of Europe.

Striking various poses of "implacable rigor," they insisted on austerity even when blood was running in the streets.

Now they seem to be regretting certain rash actions. Eventually, perhaps they will conclude there is no choice but to take a step back, as we have long predicted.

If so, we would project that the entire greater EU project is at risk and that it will never again emerge as much more than a trade union.

The dream of building a pan-European empire via regulatory force and monetary malfeasance would be dead. If so, we can hardly wait.