Credit crisis a boon to European centralization

Boris Johnson has a point rarely made:

Indeed, there is a sense in which the slow-motion disaster of the PIGS - Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain - has been terrific for the federalist cause. Bit by bit we seem to be creating a fiscal as well as a monetary union, in which huge sums - including about £20 billion of UK bail-out cash - are being transferred from the richer to the poorer parts of the EU. [...] These profligate and improvident countries would be obliged, in return, to submit to a kind of economic supervision that is now proposed for Greece. Taxes, spending, benefits - all the panoply of economic independence - would then be subject to agreement with Berlin and Brussels. I sometimes think Kohl, Mitterrand, Delors and co instinctively knew that this would happen.