> Eurobonds would indeed solve this for small countries, but would effectively lower the overall standard in the long term.

It's unrealistic to think the whole of Europe will ever have the exact same economic standard as Germany. This doesn't happen even in the US, which have been a proper federal union for more than a century now. If we want a real union, we will have to harmonize things in both directions -- and yes, that means the Germans will have to endure in similar ways as they did when they annexed the DDR. The FED makes economic policy choices to suit the whole federation, not just California or New York.

If this does not suit the German people, then maybe we should just give up the federal project altogether.

> So lets start with easier tasks and save money by creating a single European military or introduce single European welfare systems

The military is already highly integrated through NATO, to the point that the UK for months relied on French capabilities for their naval aircraft carriers, while their own were being repaired or manufactured. If you mean integrating foreign policy, that's much harder than harmonizing a bunch of financial arrangements, because it's the sort of thing the man on the street will have an opinion about: ask a taxi driver what an eurobond is, and he'll just blank out. Same for welfare. Besides, you cannot integrate welfare without common money pools, because welfare is by definition subsidiary: the rich pays for the poor. So if you want an integrated welfare, you need integrated finances, and integrated finances require integrated debt, i.e. eurobonds.

Integrated finance and debt is the next big step for the monetary union, there is no way around it. Most people did not realize this had not been done when the Euro was introduced, and now we're seeing the problems that come from this approach. I like to think that the Maastricht "forefathers" actually expected this to happen and let it be, like Hari Seldon would have done, in the assumption that European elites would inevitably get around the inevitability of certain hard choices once faced with them. It's a more optimist view than thinking they were just idiots.

> Good luck getting the UK to do that.

The UK does not belong in a federal EU. They should be kept in a friendly economic zone, but they should be excluded from any decision-taking body, like it should happen for any country not adopting the Euro. Otherwise the fedealist project will forever remain a dream. This I've been saying for 20 years, btw. There is no point trying to keep them in -- England is the unofficial 51st State and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I say that as an European UK resident, so against my best interests, but it's the hard truth. If excluding England means losing the more "europeist" NI, Scotland and EIRE, so be it.

> And now we have a coalition of far-right and far-left wannabe rockstars.

Tony Blair really was a wannabe rockstar, and he ended up being the most skillful politician of his generation in the UK, and one of the most influential across the whole of Europe. So let's leave the weak ad-hominem to tabloids please. Besides, there is more economic policy intelligence in one of Varoufakis' fingernails than in you and me combined. You have to face the fact that these guys are actually good: they took a smalltime leftist operation and got them in government. They managed to coopt some of their worst enemies on the right and basically took them out of the game. They tried to build a coalition across countries with similar interests, and the failure there is just due to political weakness on the other side (Hollande is hapless, Renzi has no electoral mandate, and Spain is in the process of changing government), although there is some evidence that they might be coming around the idea of putting pressure on Merkel. If you don't help them now to establish a modern bureaucracy and statehood, you'll condemn Greece back to colony status, with periodic coup d'ètat and all that. Which would be very dangerous, considering the Russian neoimperialistic approach and eternal instability in the Balkans. But if you make them heroes to their people, making them appear as the saviours of national pride, they will have the political capital to make bolder choices in any area.

> The German chancellor is a physics graduate

Apologies, I got tripped up by UK exceptionalism: I referred to the chancellor in UK terms, i.e. the minister of Finance, Schauble, who is in fact a law graduate and much to the right of Merkel. And if the Merkel coalition is the most social-democratic effort Germany can produce, Europe will soon be a thing of the past.