Germany Must Decide What the European Union Is For: Clive Crook

For the past several decades Germany’s aim for Europe has been to create a wider and deeper union. In this way it sought to advance its economic and national-security interests, to bind itself to ever closer co-operation with its neighbors, and to atone for its history. Today, the system that it designed is in danger of coming apart, and newspapers in Italy and Greece carry digitally altered pictures of Angela Merkel in Nazi uniform.

Gideon Rachman writes in the Financial Times: “Across southern Europe, the ‘ugly German’ is back -- accused of driving other nations into penury, deposing governments and generally barking orders at all and sundry.” The European Union was intended to bury that caricature once and for all. Instead it has brought the ugly German back to life.