The Westphalian Chickens have come home to roost

I wonder if Tim Geithner has ever even heard of a Westphalian Chicken.

He might better look the term up on his iPhone because he and his entire entourage are about to choke on a chicken bone, a very big chicken bone.

Why the euro can’t, and won’t work: “Westphalian sovereignty is the concept of nation-state sovereignty based on two things: territoriality and the absence of a role for external agents in domestic structures.”

“Adherents to the concept of a Westphalian system refer to the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, in which the major European countries agreed to respect the principle of territorial integrity. In the Westphalian system, the national interests and goals of states (and later nation-states) were widely assumed to go beyond those of any citizen or any ruler. States became the primary institutional agents in an interstate system of relations.”

“The Peace of Westphalia is said to have ended attempts to impose supranational authority on European states. The “Westphalian” doctrine of states as independent agents was bolstered by the rise in 19th century thought of nationalism, under which legitimate states were assumed to correspond to nations—groups of people united by language and culture.”

Need I say any more?

Tim Geithner’s neoliberal world is all of 40 years old. Milton Friedman wasn’t even born until 1912. Alan Greenspan should have known better, he comes off as a rather well informed individual, what with his irrational exuberance and all.

And it’s not like this all started in 1648. The Peace of Westphalia was the result of a centuries long process which culminated in the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). Europe, by definition, is Europe because of Westphalian sovereignty. Europe as we know it today did not exist before the Peace of Westphalia. The European “Union” would not exit if there were not something to unite and an underlying conceptual framework. The conceptual framework upon which the European “Union” is based derives from the Peace of Westphalia.

In other words, if a supranational authority were to exert its influence over the nations of Europe then the very concept of Europe would cease to exist.

Conversely, you can’t have a “European Union” with no Europe.

A rational mind would think that once the inevitable becomes obvious one would begin to consider alternatives, like an organized dissolution of the European Monetary Union.

But, who said anything about being rational?