The Current Discussion:After Ireland voted 'No' in last week's referendum on EU reform, we're left wondering: Is the EU unraveling?

MADRID -- The European Union is losing strength. The main reason has to do with today's political environment. During the Cold War, it seemed to be a useful institution to safeguard the region in the face of the Soviet threat. That forced the Germans and the French to bury their old antipathies. Later, the Spaniards, Portuguese and Greek saw in the EU a way to strengthen their tottering democratic institutions and receive cohesion funds to improve their national infrastructures. That's more or less the same that's happening today to the newcomers from the former Eastern bloc. To the Czechs, Poles, Slovacs, Slovenes, Hungarians, Romanians and Bulgarians, the European Union makes sense. It is profitable from every point of view.

The ones that are exhausted today are the mature and prosperous democracies. The societies that form them are not very clear on what they gain with this weak and asymmetrical union of independent states. Also, there is no evidence of the emotional subject that allegedly gives life to the project: the European. There are still no Europeans. There are French, English, Italians, Spaniards et al, but the inhabitants of the Old World still have not shown anything resembling a common soul and probably never will.

On the similar subject of MERCOSUR, a Latin American body conceived in the manner of the European Union, Argentine writer Mariano Grondona said something that explains the phenomenon well: “I know many Argentines who would be willing to die or kill for Argentina, but I don't know a single one who is ready to do so for MERCOSUR.” The European Union continues to be an artificially created entity that arouses no emotional adherence on the part of the inhabitants of that region of the world. If the crisis worsens, the temptation to break ranks will increase thousandfold.