The EU is alienating eastern Europe

For most of its 66 years of existence, a vital part of the EU’s mission has been the inexorable expansion of its power to tell member states what to do. It now has to grasp though that in future it will need to backtrack. Unless Brussels morphs pretty quickly from a centralised technocracy dispatching orders to its vassals, into an organisation based on broad consensus between elected governments, it is likely to find itself side-lined or even facing a continental schism.

The latest illustration of this arises from a sudden glut of Ukrainian grain. For the last nine years or so this has enjoyed largely tariff-free access to the EU. Until recently this was no big deal, since although Spain and the Netherlands imported a fair amount for cattle-feed, the rest of the Ukrainian grain nearly all went elsewhere, especially to the developing world.