I genuinely think it might also just be that since the economies were deindustrializing in general, the people who could best “pivot” to either financial fuckery, real estate or paper shuffling ended up on top. And since the EU for a while consisted of at most 2 countries actually making and exporting stuff, and the rest of the countries seemingly only existed to absorb said exports, things were fine for a while. The problem comes when these people have to acknowledge that they aren’t in the same world that they grew up / came up in, and a lot of them seem to struggle with taking this step.
I genuinely think it might also just be that since the economies were deindustrializing in general, the people who could best “pivot” to either financial fuckery, real estate or paper shuffling ended up on top. And since the EU for a while consisted of at most 2 countries actually making and exporting stuff, and the rest of the countries seemingly only existed to absorb said exports, things were fine for a while. The problem comes when these people have to acknowledge that they aren’t in the same world that they grew up / came up in, and a lot of them seem to struggle with taking this step.
That’s a reasonable point I agree.