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Comment by TruthAndDare | Hacker News Reader

> the freedom of movement that the EU offered them

If this is desirable, why can't it be had through agreements between pairs of countries without there having to be a European union that you hand over many other powers to?

The same goes for other things related to barriers between countries.

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Because the EU requires that negotiations be done with all member states as a whole. So if you let people in from Spain, you also have to let them in from say Romania. That's why the EU was threatening to tighten tourist/bussines trip visas for U.S. and Canandian nationals: http://www.dw.com/en/european-union-to-consider-reimposition...

I don't see that this answers my question. Why can't, say, Great Britain make such an agreement with, say, Spain, and then make the same agreement (or choose not to) with Romania?

Btw, non-EU countries in Europe are already in on some of the agreements that exist between EU countries, without having to agree to everything else the EU does. Wouldn't that be a working kind of collaboration?

If they join schengen, that includes all schengen countries. Also, not sure on this, but in your example, Spain would be negotiating with UK, while it is not allowed to (without the EU) as it is part of the EU.

Probably because the government of Spain and Romania have ceded that power to the European Commission, which is appointed by the Council of the European Union not elected.

I guess what I'm asking is why we need the EU in the first place when it comes to issues like this one when we could make that kind of agreements anyway, without having to cede all power.

You don't need to, but the EU is that way.

We don't even know what is going to happen in the real world, that's difficult to make projection in a hypothetical world were the EU was built differently.

For example, would the UK have voted out in the first place in such a world ? Would Turkey be a member of the EU ?

Edit: Let's add a bit more info. The goal of the EU was to become the USA of Europe. Can each State of the USA determine its own immigration rule directly with foreign nations ?

As a purely practical matter, try counting the number of unique pairs of N countries. It's N(N-1)/2. With N = 28, you would need 378 separate agreements. A nightmare to keep track of. That's one big reason why we have things like the WTO etc., to replace a jungle of different rule sets with a single set of them.

This is going to be an interesting issue. Freedom of movement was one of the strongest drivers in the vote - the desire to control immigration. So freedom of movement will be lost by popular demand, not just a side effect.

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