There is no other option for a crippled Europe than the break up of the EU

In 1972, as the United Kingdom was readying herself to join the European Economic Community, Neil Young released Harvest, arguably one of his greatest albums.

Alabama, a censorious ode to the state's presumed attachment to the Old South and to "old folks tied in white ropes", decries her condition.

Alabama is a ruin, a heavy load for "the rest of the Union" to carry.

"What are you doing Alabama?" he asks, finishing the song with another question: "what's going wrong"?

To this day Alabama remains one of America's poorest states.

However, with a gross domestic product per capita of over $53 000, the beleaguered American state is over 20% richer than Germany, the European Union's most important industrial power.

Germans have seen no GDP per capital growth for close to a decade. In that same period, Alabama's grew by half. The state ranked 47th (out of 50) richest state in the US then; it ranks 48th now.

In short, from a certain American perspective, Neil Young's song is still germane. It has aged rather well.

From a European perspective though, it is very much relative.

Indeed, France, Italy and the European Union as a whole, are poorer per capita than Mississippi, America's poorest - by a substantial margin ranging from $10 000 to $15 000 per capita per annum.

France and Italy are, after Germany, the European Union's bigger beasts.

It was not always thus.

In 1980, with only nine countries in the European Economic Community, the much more successful forerunner of the European Union, which included France, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom had a larger share of global gross domestic product than the United States.

The European nine represented close to 30% of global GDP; America 25%. Both had similar population sizes.

Americans and Western Europeans were close to parity on a GDP per capita basis.

Over the last five decades, America's share of global GDP grew slightly; in the meantime, a larger, more cumbersome European Union, with 18 additional member states and a virtual doubling of the population to close to 450 million nearly halved.

In a research paper PWC, a professional services company, estimated that the European Union's share of global GDP would shrink to 9% by 2050.

The speed of decline is perhaps debatable but not the trend.

Europe is failing badly and visibly because, some might say, of the European Union.

Enter Mario Draghi, the Italian "homme a tout faire", former central banker, academic, and politician - never elected, always appointed - and convinced economist to opine in front of the multitudes.

Standing next to him, in Brussels, in early September, was Ursula von der Leyen, European Union President, also reputed with having dismantled much of Germany's poorly funded armed forces among other major disappointments and, perhaps more damningly, an alumnus of the London School of Economics, the dismal science's high temple.

In front of him an expectant crowd of important people listened to his diagnosis on Europe's deadly, and seemingly, incurable disease.

Regulation, lack of competition, sclerosis: The crowd nodded in agreement.

On the regulatory front, Draghi said that "as of 2019, the EU has passed around 13,000 pieces of legislation, while the US has passed 3,000 and 2,000 resolutions", adding "that makes you think".

On wealth creation and competition, he explained "in the last five decades, no EU company worth more than €100bn has been created from scratch - and 30% of Europe's unicorns have left the bloc since 2008."

His answer to the European Union's terminal illness?

More centralisation; more planning; more Brussels, less national capitals; more powers to finance bigger European Union spending, to consolidate capital markets, and, the pot at the end of the supranational rainbow, to remove national vetoes.

In short, power with no constraints and more of what led us to continental wide decrepitude. No contrition was discernible for having led us up this already depressing garden path.

Mario Draghi, a reverse alchemist and loved by the markets for conveniently tearing international treaties to pieces in 2012 promising to "do whatever it takes" to rescue the struggling currency, turned a German hard currency into the modern equivalent of an Italian Lira.

Indeed, having created a system in which nothing is reformable, much like post World War II Italy, the only tool available to deal with the mounting problems faced by Europe's tone-death leadership is inflation.

With national politics shifting fast away from a project that has delivered relative pauperism on a continent scale and based on a fully ahistorical understanding of the European continent, immobilism is new normal.

The European Union is an animal caught in a bear trap. Unable to move, its leaders keep trying to pull away from it, wrenching at Europe's limbs in the hope of keeping the flame of their experiment based on an erroneous view of Europe alive - regardless of costs and repercussions.

Having passed five centralising treaties since the Single European Act of 1985, the proof is in the pudding: the European Union is killing Europe.

But the European leadership, like a lost Las Vegas gambler, is offering to double down on a bet that is at the core of Europe's fatal malady.

European-wide regulation acts like a layer of cellophane on the organs of the nation states.

The European Union would need to undergo such deep reforms as to become totally unrecognisable, not least ditching the French revolutionary concept of "les acquis", which sees every new directive and regulation as a step towards a more progressive future, regardless of what the rest of the world is doing and how it is changing.

The ability to take steps back, to re-assess, to drop ideas that are both expensive and unnecessary are some of the ways to rescue European Union members from the abyss of future economic subservience. Sadly, such reforms are not part of the system by design.

Mario Draghi is the bespectacled toad in the "The Frog that wished to be as big as the Ox" La Fontaine fable.

Seeing the stately American and Chinese bullock across the pond, he is filled with envy and spends all his resources trying to grow to their size. The toad stretches, swells, and strains, "enlarging till" he splits. That is Draghi's solution for Europe and, with Keir Starmer in the driving seat in the UK, for us too.

The countries of Europe have many advantages that come from their inheritance, language, size, history and much more. Centralisation has never made Europe more stable or more competitive.

It's high time to make the case for a proper Europe of sovereign nation states. There is in truth no other option.