THE FUTURE LIES WITH DEVOLUTION, NOT CONSOLIDATION:

A recent front-page news article in The Wall Street Journal neatly summarizes how the European Union is backing away from plans for deeper integration, they've "run aground as financial markets have calmed and mistrust has simmered between power centers including Berlin, Brussels and Paris." This mistrust built up throughout the global financial crisis and seemed to abate with various proposals last year for stronger financial linkages. But of late these plans have sputtered, and are likely to continue to disintegrate.

Of course the Iron Lady, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who passed away this year, would have been too stateswomanlike to tackily rub it in anyone's face, but she was absolutely right in her outspoken euroskepticism. Decades ago, she rightly foresaw that a single currency union would be fraught with strain between vibrant, disciplined economies and laggard, overstretched ones. Thatcher was smeared as a xenophobe, and her firm opposition led to her downfall from power (though there were other factors that contributed, including her earlier support of the poll tax).

After leaving office, her 2002 book Statecraft accurately predicted the failure of the union, "economically, politically and socially."

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