'He questions whether Europeans are willing politically to sign up to such federalism: "As we are already starting to see, German largesse will not feel anything like solidarity in Athens or Madrid. And in Germany and other surplus countries the solidarity may start to look excessive and politically unsustainable."
He concedes the transfers in power being proposed to create a fiscal compact require unprecedented solidarity, the deployment of community resources across the eurozone's periphery that dwarfs the postwar Marshall fund and finally "the largest measure of sovereignty that European leaders have so far contemplated collectivising".
He warns that "will require German politicians to recognise that the badly designed eurozone has brought substantial benefits for Germany in the form of suppressed exchange rates and massive export surplus, but in return [they] must accept as a compromise the cost of correcting the eurozone deep imbalances.
"From politicians in Greece, Spain, Italy, Portugal and Ireland it will require the courage and discipline to present both painful austerity and structural economic reforms for what they are: not something that is externally imposed by Brussels or Berlin but as a sovereign choice dictated by national circumstance and necessity," he adds.
He predicts that within a decade the EU will have been rebooted, with the UK on the outside.
At some point, he suggests, "Britain will have to confront the choice between taking part in greater integration including joining the euro, or an uncertain future".
That uncertain future he claims will set challenges for the City of London and mean the UK will have to trade with an export market over which it has no influence.'
So it seems that countries have to go through the austerity before Germany can agree to pay for the whole thing to be united in closer union. That explains why he said on the radio that Greece is the author of its own problems. He seems to believe that the austerity is necessary before the new union can emerge.