Staff WriterGlobalists-in-chief Angel Merkel and Emmanuel Macron appeared together via video stream this week, with the German Chancellor demanding “the nation state alone has no future”.
The pair spoke at the Conference on the Future of Europe, which Politico reports “is supposed to develop proposals for EU reforms within the next two years”.
“The nation state alone has no future,” Merkel remarked, in an apparent dig at nationalists across the continent, managing to misrepresent their position along the way.
Merkel: "The nation state alone has no future".
Both insulting and misrepresentative of the populist-nationalist position.
No one believes in "nation states alone". But the nuanced response to that false argument isn't "everything should be centralized in Brussels". pic.twitter.com/dyZM0lTSDz
— Raheem Kassam (@RaheemKassam) May 20, 2020
Her comment comes as the European Union struggles to assert relevance against a backdrop of an international pandemic.
The EU response from the outset was effectively non-existent, and nation states and their populations across the continent have thusly became more skeptical of the entire project.
The National Interest reported in April:
The European Commission, led by Ursula von der Leyen, was slow to respond to the unfolding health crisis and belatedly expressed solidarity with and provided assistance to Italy. In President von der Leyen’s March 9 press conference on her first one hundred days in office, the coronavirus was barely discussed. Understandably, however, the EU was simultaneously focused on coronavirus and the recent migrant crisis along the Turkey-Greece border.
The Express reports:
Around six out of 10 people in France questioned said they “[d]o not trust” Brussels, the Jacques Delors Institute’s study indicated. The country’s lack of trust in the EU has jumped to 58 percent – a dramatic rise of 10 points since Emmanuel Macron’s election as president. Just 32 percent of participants said they could trust the EU, while the remaining 10 percent didn’t express a judgement.
