harry

Im from Austria - we are part of both the EU and the EURO-zone. The general feeling round here is that it was a good thing to join the Union, mainly because of economical reasons.

There has been some scepticism through the years concerning where the Union is heading politically and most people shared the fear of a sprawling bureaucratic central government sitting in Brussels telling us what size our beer bottles had to be.

Right now its a different picture, because people are more angry about Washington than Brussels and many now think there should be a common foreign-policy and even a strong joint army to counter American domination and make them listen to the European view of things.

Personally I dont think we are going to have some sort of "United States of Europe" though, not in our lifetimes anyway. There are too many national interests and viewpoints as the discussions about the war in Iraq have shown. Secondly the smaller memberstates have already stated they will block anything, that shifts power to the bigger nations and brussels.

Anyway i dont think it would be a good idea to start some kind of rivalry between the EU and the US. Who knows where it might lead us and certainly world-economy would suffer.

I guess the best thing to do would be for the Americans to kick George W. and his henchmen out of the White house as soon as possible and everything will go right back to normal, ok folks?