The EU and the logic of selective intervention

The EU shows the risks of selective intervention:

But perhaps it would have been better to have stopped there with the single market, and gone on paying those billion-euro costs, than to move on to the next stage of currency unification, ultimately facing today's trillion-euro costs of Eurozone bailouts and possible collapse.

Why didn't they stop there? One can think about it along the lines of what Oliver Williamson called the impossibility of selective intervention ..

The solution they sought was to bind Europe's nations together commercially. But in the process, they created a self-serving international bureaucracy. The European Commission in Brussels was supposed to oversee the single market. A legislature in Strasbourg was supposed to oversee the bureaucracy. However, the lack of a strong popular European identity that could frame political competition on a continental scale led Europe to exchange one institutional deficit for another.

Instead of an institutional deficit there was now a growing democratic deficit. That deficit became a refuge for politicians that had failed on the national stage .. vain, limited people. Unlimited only in their ambition, they tried to take control of Europe's destiny and shape it in their own interests .. Every politician needs a stream of projects to oversee, institutions to build, offices to fill, and funding to allocate.

.. The logic of selective intervention is that nobody tells you when it's time to stop, and there is always good reason to go on. They could never have just ‘stopped there’.

Not knowing when to stop is at the core of the impossibility of selective intervention. Selective intervention is supposed to improve things .. If the government fixes one thing that needed fixing, this creates the justification for it to go on to fix something else. If that turns out to have made things worse, then this too becomes the justification for another fix. There's never a reason to call a halt.

This is how a beautiful dream went too far, and so became a bit of a nightmare.