Dr dear Dr: What is the structural Template for the structures and institutes and states of the Eu - is it the USSR as Dr Malvic has recently said at a Eurasia Forum, or is it the grand old dame of the USA?

When I was a strapping young lad of a mere 18 summers in seminary at a non-aligned state a la Yugoslavia at the time, I would often quietly and silently secrete away my brown envelopes from European outlets at the breakfast table with the post and then among my letters from lovely Christians around France such as Cecile and Francoise I would skulk away and read my hidden copy of the Pravda newspaper weekly edition in the safety and comfort of my little cell upstairs, oddly enough in a wing of the seminary building to the East which the majority of the students liked to call Siberia. This was my weekly check with reality as understood by the Soviets. There I would read of the lovely sun burnished housewives of the USSR recently receiving of the meritorious awards of the Order of Lenin. But we all have short memories and one of those short memories concerns the foundations of the Eu and especially of the Eu passport system and the Eu currency, now called the Eurozone. We forget that from 1950 to 1995 it was a huge and terrible crucifixion for Americans to “do europe” and come to Europe for many years, and to struggle and haggle with the various currencies and passport controls at borders and on trains of the pre-Eu member states in their various permutations. Eventually, the USAs put pressure on the Eu to schematise and standardise this experience of woeful inefficiency for American travellers and tourists - hence the rise of the Eu currency, in the Euro and the Eurozone. But it is true that some academics of the new right in Europe often complain bitterly about the Eu and chance their arm by suggesting very strongly and strenuously and stridently that the Structural Template for the Eu is now the USSR and not the grande old lady of the USA. Prof Malvic is one such academic, but there are others, especially in Poland and Hungary of this ilk and persuasion. So it has not all gone the way of the tourists of the USA, evidently not. Let us hope that this is merely an olde worlde gripe of the malcontents of the new arrangements and not a ripening wheat crop of the new future!!