The key issue — from a German viewpoint

AN editorial in the influential German daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on June 15 had an important insight into the crisis facing the European Union in the wake of the Irish no vote.

“The peoples of Europe,” in the newspaper’s considered view, “apparently are no longer prepared to go further down the path agreed by their governments for ever closer union. This is because the EU decision-making processes are now so complex that hardly anyone understands them; and this is why their outcomes are no longer being accepted. To state it in abstract terms: both the expansion and the deepening of the EU raise doubts which at the first opportunity are expressed in rejection — not least because people detect that the two are not contemporaneously compatible.”

This is a key issue.