The world is just enough: Ursula von der Leyen goes Bond villain

As a historian who also happens to be German, that was my spontaneous reaction to Ursula von der Leyen’s annual grand – and always grandiloquent – “state of the union” address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg.It’s not really a “union,” of course, and not really a “parliament,” either: technically, the EU is a confederation messed up by the ideological construct of “supranationalism”; and the parliament has no independent legislative power, but let’s not dwell on the obvious. At the head of her Commission (read: over-reaching Central Committee) of career bureaucrats, von der Leyen is the unelected de-facto leader and personification of the Frankenstein wanna-be-super-state that has long gobbled up idealistic dreams of European unity.Once, those dreams may have been about democracy, sovereign equality, prosperity for all, and peace. But real-existing EU-Europe is very different: the European dream has come true as a nightmare, dominated by a smug and self-empowered globalist establishment, thoroughly insulated from popular participation, economically stagnant and crisis-prone, as well as unequal, and ever more militarist.When von der Leyen boasted that, in effect during her t...