[...] The essence of that sorry treaty was not so much that it crushed Germany economically and caused Germans untold collective pain, but that, in the end, it was an own goal: a terrible deal even for the victors--a self-defeating punitive act that John Maynard Keynes understood early on and the r…
The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas long ago recognized that capitalism has the tendency to develop a 'legitimacy deficit'-- a situation in which citizens, independently of their political beliefs or ideology, lose confidence in the right of political and administrative authorities to act as they do.
[...] a federation replaces sovereignty forfeited at the national or state level with sovereignty at the unitary, federal level, centralizing power within an alliance of states is, by definition, illegitimate, for there is no body politic that can legitimize it.