Indeed, contemplating the question of why Germany let a tiny offshore banking hub that had already lost de facto control over 40 percent of its small landmass into the eurozone in the first place underscores the generally low quality of thinking about how this whole operation is supposed to work.

Truth. And seriously there is no way that whatever plan Cyprus unveils (hopefully in the next 48 hours) could preserve the offshore banking hub aspect of the country’s economy. Absolutely no idea what they’ll do once they don’t have that. (via jakke)

This is actually a pretty good post to follow up that one with, because the answer is that if you take the internal logic of currency union seriously, there is no good reason to include Cyprus. So the inclusion of Cyprus suggests another underlying logic. I suggest it’s simply that it was territorially adjacent to the previous borders of the eurozone. And the idea that the eurozone and European Union are basically projects centered on Berlin – I mean, is that even controversial at this point? Like, in this quote, when you get to the point where the noun is Germany and the verb is “allow”, does that seem at all odd?

If you include communism (taken as, you know, the ideology developed by Karl Marx on the basis of a Rhineland-centric historical reading through the ideology of Friedrich Engels), 20th century Europe has been a succession of attempts to found a world empire on an ideology with a plausible aspiration to universalism, an ideology which just happened to come from Germany.

(But it’s not like Germany attained hegemony after all! For half the century, Germany was divided! Half subordinated to Washington, half to Moscow! Yes okay, territory, but let’s talk identity. How many Russian and American soldiers guarding the Fulda Gap learned German to meet women? How many German soldiers learned Russian and English? How many Russians and Americans of the time adopted elements of German humanist atheism? How many Germans converted to Orthodoxy or Evangelical Protestantism? How many students at Harvard and Moscow U studied Marx and Metternich? How many German students read The Federalist Papers or… god, I don’t even know what the parallel would be here. And isn’t that the point?)