TRANSNATIONALISM DOES NOT EXIST:

Modern history knows no example where nation-states voluntarily coalesced into one. The United Kingdom is the product of endless war among the warring tribes of the Isles. Germany's 25 city-states and kingdoms were fused by "iron and blood" in 1871, to invoke Bismarck's famous phrase. In the beginning, the Thirteen Colonies did strike a peaceful deal in Philadelphia. But in the end, it took a murderous civil war to fuse North and South into one nation. In those four years, more Americans died than in all wars thereafter. 

Unification will not be achieved by committees hashing it out in Brussels. Or by national parliaments emasculating themselves for the sake of the greater European good. To bestride the world as a heavyweight like the United States requires cracking the hard shells of sovereignty, notably in matters of defense and public finance. 

Never in our lifetime will this Europe go to war because a majority of member states says so. Nor will elected governments hand over spending and taxation to Brussels--not when their fate at the ballot box hangs on the state of the business cycle. No national parliament will give up the power of the purse, the Holy Grail of democratic governance.

Cracking these shells would require fusing 27 post-Brexit states into one, complete with a supreme legislature like Congress and an elected executive like the U.S. president. Yet power in Europe remains rooted in the European Council representing 27 governments jealously guarding their turfs. 

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