Although I am afraid that it will be a tragedy for Europe and for Britain if Brexit goes ahead, its up to the British to decide Britain´s future. And if there is anything European leaders should do, as they always should have done before, it is to put Europe’s interests ahead of their own political, nationalist or individual interests.

Your a bit off the mark thinking that UK citizens will change their minds if the can is kicked down the road. We will just see it as more EU meddling in our sovereign affairs. Don't confuse what our hapless political leaders desire with the desire of the people, and don't believe the people will vote to remain if the original democratic vote is ignored and re-run in the hope of a different outcome. Two years of blitzkrieg media scaremongering, hoping that it can terrify the UK public into changing it's mind won't wash and I suggest you take anything you absorbed from that very same media with a very large pinch of salt. Do you suggest we keep kicking the can down the road and re-runing the referendum over and over until we get the outcome the EU desires? That isn't my idea of democracy. The EU are in no doubt that brexit will be the start of the domino effect and under no circumstances does it want that. Recreating the USSR isn't what the UK signed up to, we love our European cousins but we signed up to an economic union first and foremost. We never wanted a single currency, a single army, a single parliament. We are all different, with different strengths and weaknesses so thinking one size fits all and everyone is going to fall into line ain't going to happen.

I honestly can't believe that anybody in Brussels would want the UK to change its mind

If European scull duggery tries to thwart Brexit all it will prove is that democracy is dead and the EU is a prison. What should happen is that Britain be allowed to leave on fair terms and the EU changes itself using brexit as the catalyst, if the change is deep enough and thorough enough the UK might wish to come back, if as we suspect it will be, superficial and insincere the EU dreams of which Macron speaks will be dead. The EU needs root and branch change, but the mired complexities of a structure designed to keep moving forward and deaf to change will probably mean the EU cannot operate in the way it currently does, the spider in the web, an old fashioned inefficient method of management. Devolution on a grand scale is the only way forward, the UK had to do this just with the UK Europe has much more complex reasons for doing the same. Learn from history and don't repeat the same old mistakes.

The voice of a modern liberal speaks - wishful thinking and delusions. Britain won't change its mind...you have to be working from the idea of a second referendum to get there: which in itself is a shameful, authoritarian dismissal of democracy, one that gets frequent practice in Europe.

I contend that far from silencing the voices you dismiss, it will only make them louder: in fact one worries about a spill over into civil disorder of one sort another if disgusting and failed elites like you do disrespect the will of the people.

It's always the same with Europe - talk of noble goals without a hint of pragmatism or a road map. Either that or the failed execution - the risible ERM and then single currency. If you thought either would deliver positive outcomes then you shouldn't even have a seat at the debating table.

I mean one pragmatic idea would be to harmonize corporate tax rates - should have been done ahead of any single currency. But they simply don't have the balls to tell Ireland, Luxembourg, Holland etc about the egregious arbitrage from other nations.

Typical Europe and Macron - talk the talk, can't walk the walk.

My dear Mr. Schneider,
I fully agree with your interpretations and analysis. Greece went bust many times in its history, managed to pull itself out and survive and it will survive this time as well.

Even if the law was "outdated" - what I seriously doubt because to me it seems that it is still the democratic will of the people of Northern Europe that there shall be no transfer union, and TFEU art. 125 and art. 130 effectively prohibit the ECB from being a lender of last resort - but even if it was "outdated" then it sureley cannot be the task of the ECB to first act as an legislator and decree the collectivization of European public debt and then act as the executive to implement their own decisions. The abolition of the separation of powers to me means totalitarianism. No, in the political system in which I grew up, it would have been surely the task of democratically legitimized parliaments to change the law and abrogate art. 125 and 130.

My rival hypothesis is that not the law is "outdated" but the will of the elites and the will of the people are out of sync and that the elites just don't have a majority to implement their will (and never had since 1989). So, my suspicion is that those who want to install the ECB as lender of last resort, actually refuse a democratic form of governance and instead favor an aristocratic or even plutocratic form of governance in which the few decide and not the majority.