Fading challenger

This article from the British newspaper The Telegraph argues that the European Union's hour has passed.

This would be good news not only for the European countries (notably Britain and the newly-independent eastern European states) which fear losing their national sovereignty, but also for us.

I doubt that the euro will last until 2010 without the stresses imposed by different national policies and priorities forcing at least one or two major countries to abandon it, thus destroying its credibility as an alternative to the dollar. And I'd bet that by 2015 the EU itself either will have abandoned its efforts at political centralization and become a mere free-trade area, or else will have lost the British Isles, eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and possibly Germany, shrinking to a "Club Med" remnant.