After ukraine, serbia? Then turkey... Where will the eu end, says r...

Despite repeated denials from many quarters about the objective of forming a European super-state, the fact is that the founding fathers of the European Union believed in precisely that.

They wanted to create a European super-state and they intended to achieve this through a project of integration imposed by the European elites on the peoples below, whom they did not trust.

  They did not believe in democracy; they thought they knew what was best for European people.  However much of the EU’s early years was good, at two key points the EU took a wrong turn;

first the extension to the east; second, the formation of the euro. To say that things went wrong with the extension of membership to the east is not to say that this extension was a

mistake. Indeed it can be seen as the EU’s greatest achievement.  I am not one of those eurosceptics who believes that the EU is and always has been the incarnation of evil and cannot

possibly do anything good for the world.  On the contrary, I supported the EU in the early stages; and in the 1975 EU referendum I voted to stay in. Extending EU membership to the refugee

countries from communism was a significant achievement.  This set this group of countries objectives to qualify them for membership; and EU membership helped to keep them on the straight and

narrow afterwards, helping to reabsorb them into the European mainstream.  So why should this be identified as the first point at which things went wrong?  Because no one considered the

idea that the fundamental nature of the Union would have to be changed. The mistake was not extending membership to the former members of the communist bloc.  Rather, the mistake was to do

this while continuing with the same concept of Europe, with the same institutions and the same objectives as earlier, when in essence the goal had amounted to an attempt to reconstruct the

Holy Roman Empire. From this huge mistake stem many of Britain’s current difficulties with the EU, particularly with regard to migration.  In the 1975 referendum this question of migration

was not a factor, because at that stage the movement of people was more balanced.  The members of the EU as it was then constituted were roughly similar in levels of income per head.  Once

the Union was extended to the East, taking in countries with both different cultural and political backgrounds and much lower levels of income per head, substantial net migration emerged as

a significant problem. This, of course, is a continuing issue because the EU has not made up its mind about exactly what it is, or more appropriately, where its borders should be.  Already

we have seen the EU cuddling up to Ukraine in a preliminary attempt at some sort of relationship which could eventually include full membership at some stage.  And next there could be Serbia

– and, before long, Turkey. Where will all this end?  _Roger Bootle is Executive Chairman of Capital Economics. This is an extract from his Politeia publication The EU: An Idea Whose Time

Has Passed which considers the themes in his new book The Trouble with Europe, Referendum Edition, 2016._