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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did.

The UN, WTO, EU, etc, are ineffective, bureaucratic messes, but no matter how bad they are, they're a better way of solving international disputes than the historical alternatives.

Western nationalists like to talk about how the cultures of the middle east are inherently violent, but seem to forget that the history of europe was a centuries-long bloodbath that eventually engulfed the entire world in horror and put us nearly on the brink of the extinction of all human life.

It's those alliances and international organizations that allowed us to step backwards from it. Solving our problems in courtrooms and at negotiating tables rather than on the battlefield.

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Is the EU that ineffective? Some of its greatest triumphs are invisible because they don't exist.

I know someone who used to handle transporting goods around Europe and experienced the reduction of paperwork and inspection and costs and delays and so on, until he ended up with basically none. He says all the troubles he used to have that no longer exist utterly dwarf anything new.

I don't have much actual evidence, though.

The current hostility to standardisation and regulation seems a little strange to me as a programmer. Everything we do is dependant on having a reliable standard of how things are supposed to work. Obviously compulsion is bad, but without the EU we would still have compulsion. Instead of one required standard we would have hundreds which would need to be checked at borders.

What they really need is a way of reforming these things (namely the EU), instead of it being a "love it or leave it" type of affair. This is one of the big problems with human-created bureaucracies: there's no easy and effective way to reform them, so people end up either abandoning them (e.g. Brexit, various independence movements or revolutions) or they become usurped by some better competitor (e.g. IBM being pushed out of the PC business, American automakers losing to foreign competition) or they end up collapsing (e.g. DEC being split up and sold in chunks, or the Roman Empire falling apart).

It seems to be a constant that larger human organizations are simply impossible to reform effectively, so we're stuck with chaos. I don't think there's a solution for this, short of genetically-engineering humans to work better together, or else we would have found it over the past couple of millennia.

The roman empire Lasted 600+ years so I have trouble using it as a comparison.

they just don't make these things like they used to, do they?

In name only. The Roman Empire constantly reinvented itself.

Sometimes they are flawed even beforehand. Notice how fast US manufacturing declined after Japan beat them. I think part of the problem in this case is arrogance.

I anticipate that Brexit will be used to initiate overdue, broadly agreed upon reforms. Then everyone can save face and kiss and make up.

Introspection driven change is hard for every organization. Sometimes you just need a tantrum or external stimulus.

Yes, but this is international politics here. Your idea about Brexit being the stimulus for badly-needed reforms in the EU sounds great, but I think it's just too optimistic.

Instead, I think Brexit will happen, the EU won't reform, the economies of both will collapse, followed by the US's, and then China's, a massive world war will happen, and then life for the survivors will resemble scenes from "The Walking Dead".

But did the UN ever stop a World War from breaking out?

Practically, even had the UN been built instead of the League, World War 2 probably would have still happened (Italy was on the Detente side in World War 1 and would have vetoed any anti-Germany resolution).

I think it's just that:

1. A weakened Europe has nothing left to fight over, and any war between two European countries would have resulted in the Soviet Union sweeping through, swallowing them all up

2. Even the "winning" side would be devastated due to Nuclear weapons.

3. Land has much less importance in a service/technology economy. Look at Singapore, for example.

The Marshall Plan, the ECC (predecessor to the EU), NATO, and the Warsaw Pact were designed in large part to bind the European countries into alliances to make war between them unthinkable. This did result in the Cold War, where both NATO and the Warsaw Pact lived in fear that the other side was ready to invade across the Iron Curtain any second, but MAD probably played a big part in restraining tensions between the two sides in war.

The other thing that happened after WWII, which probably has a bigger impact on the lack of war, was that, rather than deciding which countries gets which land by plebiscites, the people who lived on the wrong side of the borders were simply deported en masse. Deportation of the Poles from Lwów, the Germans from Stettin, or the Finns from Karelia did a lot to dampen irredentist claims to those lands.

What about the Cuban missile crises, Kennedy did emphasize the UN security council framework as means to verify withdraw of Soviet missiles.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis#Crisis_en...

Now that you mention it, some of the rhetoric about the Middle East really is weird. The last time Europeans tried to go out and kill everybody with the wrong religion is still in living memory. And they were a lot more effective at it, too!

Don't be forgetting Bosnia (I assume you were referencing WW2). And while the war crimes were nowhere near the same scale, Bush did make a few uncomfortable remarks about evil, crusades and the Middle East.

Good point, I'm afraid I did forget, and your assumption is correct.

ISIS is committing genocide against Christian minorities right now.

These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though. The British working class finally voted for their interests and of course they've been vilified from the top for it. All these institutions have allowed for is centralization of power under one ruler/representative instead of dozen smaller ones.

You don't understand how the EU works. There is a parliament and a central bureaucracy, yes, but 80% of it is just leaders of national governments sitting in a surveillance-proof room hashing out deals. There are legitimate complaints against how the EU is structured, but this is not one of them.

> These international institutions are not visibly working for the vast majority of the electorate though.

This is cleary true, but it doesn't follow that the right solution is to quit the union rather than reforming it. There are more options than rabid nationalism vs total financialization.

> British working class finally voted for their interests

That's a funny way of defining 'interests'.

The raison d'etre for these kind of institutions is precisely to centralise power. So that matters of wider community importance can be agreed upon collectively and standardised. And we absolutely do have issues that need to be solved at a continental level.

The problem is that sometimes those institutions overreach into areas that should be handled at a lower level. Arguably the British Parliament is more guilty of this than the EU and has control of things that are much more important to everyday life.

> Yeah, just watching the news, it's becoming more and more apparent that people are so far removed from the horrors of WWI and WWII that they don't understand why we created the international institutions we did.

It is sad it only takes such a short time for people to forget.

I have met a couple of people who have experienced World War II, although most of them were only children at the time. I listened to stories of being woken in the middle of the night by sirens, and then spending the rest of the night in a bunker, unable to sleep, constantly being shaken by explosions. I cannot imagine what that must be like, but I know that I would not wish that on anyone.

Somebody once said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. So far, it looks like whoever said it was right.

The UN and WTO are not political unions though.

The WTO wields a lot of power as a trade broker, though.

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