Watching the EU unravel (1)

As is broadly agreed, even among its proponents, the EU is an empire, and as we well know from history, empires grow and grow until they seem all-powerful and then collapse* pretty quickly**. Something else that we learn from history is that things will not be 'different this time', nope, they will be the same. There are infinite strands to this, so it might be helpful to look at a number of areas in which the EU-project might start to become derailed, see posts (2) to (6) below. No doubt, when future historians write about the rise and fall of the EU, the reasons they give might be something else entirely - so if I've missed anything obvious, please leave a comment.

* If the converse were true, then all countries would have merged into empires, and all smaller empires would have merged into one large empire covering the whole world, which is clearly not the case.

** From Erich Honecker being chucked out to fall of Berlin Wall = one month; from fall of Berlin Wall to reunification of East and West Germany = eleven months; yada-yada; from German reunification to complete disintegration of Soviet Union = fourteen months. Notwithstanding that we have the Poles and Solidarity to thank for all this.