Shallow but unwittingly revealing analysis.

Legrain ignores almost entirely the will of the voters. For him this is all about leaders and Brussels. Burden sharing in 2010 might have looked good on paper but it has zero popular support. Refugees may only be 0.14& of the population but there are 5MM unemployed in Spain alone, many of then=m the same area as the single male refugees arriving in droves. Suddenly the EU should have the resources and will to spend more per head on refugees than it has been willing to spend on its own youth? Refugees are economically a good thing but the unemployed are not?

A graying continent still has huge amounts of untapped labour between unemployment and low participation rates, not to mention the ability and often desire of people to work longer. Germany is selfish with its surpluses but those surpluses originated actually in part because of the ned to plan for varying with more savings.

Incredibly in the same breath he praises Merkel for her role in the refugee crisis while recognizing that she unilaterally suspended the EU rules and invited the refugees, thereby causing the woes that he laments. Again in all of this popular will or consent is absent. Legrain disinterested in intellectually appealing concepts, not the dirty reality of life for most people.

The EU has spent its history avoiding popular consent, hiding behind councils of ministers, summits and a deeply flawed central parliament that exacerbates rather than solves the lack of accountability. Legrain belongs to this tradition.

One finally though. He laments the likely semi-detached position of the UK but never asks whether that might in fact be a model for the EU once you strip away the bureaucratic obsession with ever closer union.