YouTube Express.co.uk spoke to Professor Thorsten Polleit

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What is your opinion of the EU as it stands now? Originally the idea of forming the EU, they were trying to set up a community that would secure peace in Europe. It was a liberal or even a libertarian idea to have free trade, a free flow of capital and people across borders and that was a very wise concept. But over time the EU was no longer pursuing the route of a free trade area but it became increasingly politicised, and the idea was to set up a centralised power structure in Brussels to transfer national sovereignty rights on to the supranational decision making structure. Over time the EU has become a very different animal. Now the EU policy is about interventionism, they try to interfere in all sorts of economic and social fields to push through all kinds of political concepts and that’s a very dangerous idea. So how do you think they’ll treat a country, like Britain, that wants to leave? Sooner or later the free market system is going replaced by a system of coercion. This is the problem of the EU and now Great Britain is trying to get out and of course the remaining European interest groups don’t take kindly to this. You can expect them to do their best to give Britain a hard time to prevent the impression that an exit can be beneficial to a member state. So I can imagine that Brussels tries to give Great Britain a hard time and that includes a protectionist restriction on free trade. There seems to be a prevailing mood in the EU, and especially Germany, that punishing Britain is the best way to save the all-important Single Market. Is that wise? They won’t only harm British interests, they will also harm the interest of people in the EU. Because if you interfere and hamper free trade you reduce the material benefits that can be achieved, so it’s a lose-lose strategy which is being pursued in Brussels at this juncture. Germany has very much to lose once free trade is getting restricted vis-a-vis Great Britain.

Do you fear that, if trade is restricted with Britain, it could signal the start of a more protectionist era for the EU? We would basically open Pandora’s box. Once you start putting restrictions in certain areas, interest groups will start turning up and demanding the same types of interventions in other fields. In the EU, which is highly politicised, [this will happen] sooner or later. Germany is highly dependent on the demand in other countries, we keep exporting like hell, so German firms have customers in many countries around the world and without these markets economic growth and the employment situation in Germany cannot be sustained, so Germany has a vital interest that there is free trade. In corporate Germany, most CEOS are very aware that free trade is very important for the wellbeing of the economy. So what future do you predict for the EU? It’s the wrong direction they are moving ahead along, there’s not even a kind of plan discernible at the moment. The right thing would be to start decentralising the process and giving back more sovereignty to the member states, but the opposite is happening and that’s a big concern. The first signs are that the euro currency has failed and it’s only in place because the ECB has dropped interest rates to zero. Under normal conditions it would’ve collapsed already. It can’t compete - it’s a dead end policy. People in Great Britain have realised that this [the EU] isn’t a concept that will bring prosperity for the current and future generations, so they got out and I think others will follow. It will take some time but the EU in its current form will fall.