In fact, the rise of populism around the globe is the largest threat to the global elite and their plans for Sustainable Development and Technocracy. 

 now, the European Union has been struggling for over half a decade to sustainably resolve the euro crisis. And as the latest round of brinkmanship over the next bailout tranche for Greece shows, the crisis is far from resolved. It's still too early to tell what kind of EU will eventually emerge from the crisis, but it is not too early to take stock of the political changes the past five years have already brought about.

Conventional wisdom has it that both left- and right-wing populism have been on the rise across the continent. Yet this lazy equation of left and right fails to capture a more complex picture: Only some of the new left-wing forces in Europe have really been populist. Their major achievement has been to establish an alternative to social-democratic parties that to some degree have been discredited by their association with the so-called Third Way of Tony Blair and Gerhard Schroeder, which sought to reconcile the European left with market-friendly reforms and globalization. Meanwhile, right-wing populism does indeed threaten national democracies, both opposing and in a curious way benefiting from technocratic EU policies advancing austerity.