Peter, don’t be too sure that, for the Germans, the EU is a way of losing their national identity. It’s far better to see it as a (politically correct) way for them to impose their way on the rest of the continent. It beats Stukas and tanks, I suppose, so there has been some progress. The French are pleased to go along with this because they believe that they can manipulate German strength to pursue their own economic and geopolitical agenda.

Here’s something you might find interesting:

”The only possible aim of economic co-operation must be the establishment of the European Economic Community. The decisive conclusion in terms of economic policy is that Europe is not to be what one would call a major area or market…in which the old structural rules of the Anglo-Saxon world economy apply; rather, the European Economic Community must be shaped in accordance with new political criteria and will consequently appear different from the economic structures of the past.”

Those words come from a compendium of papers by the president of the central bank and others (Europaische Wirtschaftgemeinschaft, Heinrich Hunke (ed)) published in Berlin in, ahem, 1942.