before Europe is to square circles. And those circles include entire peoples who may not want to be squared. The conceptual flaw (if you prefer, the original sin) of the European Union was that it imposed a superstructure with demands of its own over sovereign democracies. European unification began in 1952 as a largely economic venture -- the elimination of tariffs between the coal and steel companies of France, Italy, West Germany and the Benelux nations. The greater goal was to forge common interests between Germany and the rest of Europe, thereby forestalling the kind of conflicts that had plunged Europe into barbarism twice in the preceding half-century. But as the Coal and Steel Community expanded into a Common Market, and then into a currency union with a patina of supra-national political control, the essence of European integration was altered. The euro created a house divided against itself. Monetarily, the continent was unified, but fiscally, politically, governmentally, economically and culturally, European nations remained separate and sovereign. Each still issued its own bonds, in which a new generation of speculative banks invested and on which they took bets. When bets went bad in 2008, it threatened not just the currency of underperforming European nations but of the overperforming ones as well. It was, after all, the same currency. What we're seeing in Italy and Greece are the markets triumphing over national and democratic sovereignty. The governments of those two nations may not have had much in common -- Greece has been