[Palpatine]

It is hard to believe these days that the ideas of limited government and capitalism were once fundamentally European. As Paul Belien writes, the capitalist idea came to England from the Netherlands, part of the Carolingian Middle Lands. It was also the Dutch who established Nieuw Amsterdam (New York) and imported capitalist ideas to the 'New World'.

The European Economic Community did not start out with superstate ambitions and had it's roots in the Carolingian Middle Lands where ideas about capitalism and limited government originated. But unfortunately, almost immediately pro-superstate politicians such as Jean Monnet managed to pervert the EEC's original intention of simply being an economic union of sovereign states and started pushing for political integration. A political integration that was specifically non-democratic. Monnet and his crowd believed (and his successors believe to this day) in the idea of an unelected political elite running the show from a centralized location. The EU today stands for many things, but democracy, capitalism and limited government are not amongst those things.

[jla]

I often wonder, if every country in the world was left to fend for itself, no foreign trade, no mutual defense pacts, etc., which would not only survive but be prosperous and strong in doing so.

I've concluded that in this scenario we would be left with a single 'first world' nation...the United States of America.
And I think Israel would survive quite well, although a little battered from extinguishing her enemies.