The EU’s Internal Market Commissioner and Euro-federalist fanatic Thierry Breton is giddy with glee, as for the first time, the EU has given itself the power to “borrow money for Europe and Europeans”. This week, fiscally conservative Germany finally capitulated to let the European Union assume shared responsibility for some debt. The EU will now issue €390 billion worth of grants and €360 billion worth of loans. It’s the first time the EU has borrowed money like this to give out as grants to countries…

The frugal EU nations of Austria, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands have softened their opposition to fiscal union. One thing Eurosceptics and hardcore Euro-federalists have always agreed on is that EU monetary union without fiscal union is bonkers. The sceptics saw this as an argument to not pursue monetary union as fiscal union would in effect create a United States of Europe, which was not desirable. The federalists saw the former as a way to pursue the United States of Europe by the backdoor…

This week’s move is not yet the famous ‘Hamiltonian moment’ – where the now famous United States founding father and first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton persuaded Congress to allow the United States as a federal entity to actually assume the debts of all 13 distinct colonies in the 1790s – yet the federalists at the heart of the EU project see this moment as a first step towards that assumed inevitability. They probably dream that one day there will be a musical depicting Guy Verhofstadt dancing with Ursula von der Leyen. The United States of Europe project marches on…