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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

It's true that the real ramifications of Brexit remain to be seen. But it's interesting to see how many people want Brexit to fail. What if we don't need a fledgling world government in the form of the EU? What if its okay for different groups of people to retain their autonomy and their sovereignty--something people have fought and died for throughout history? Would that be such a disaster?

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The whole reason the EU even exists is because Europeans kept fighting and dying to retain autonomy and sovereignty, and they finally got tired of it. People are afraid that without supernational institutions tying it all together, Europe will return to its old patterns. That would be a disaster almost beyond imagining if so. Modern weapons will make the Second World War look like a fun romp in the park by comparison.

Of course, maybe it won't happen that way. But pointing out that people have gone to war over this stuff throughout history is not really helping.

The question is: is the EU the symptom or the cause of peace in Europe? According to the Nobel price committee, the EU is the cause. But I have some doubts... a badly governed EU could even spark nationalist resentments instead of containing it.

Certainly, it's a big question that nobody can answer for sure. My point is mainly that saying people have fought and died for this stuff throughout history isn't really an argument against disaster after the fall of the EU.

The American/Allied victory in World War II is the responsible for most of the relatively peaceful world situation. A cooperating West Europe resulted from this.

And a cooperating West Europe existed for years before the EU. Ascribing the peace to the EU seems somewhat revisionist.

The various precursor institutions to the EU go back to 1952.

Sure, but nobody's crediting the six-member European Coal and Steel Community with being the source of European peace.

Look at what's happened to Greece under ECB control. Do you really think a monetary union like the EU will prevent war? If anything it encourages it; imagine having your country's economy ravaged by policy set by unelected officials a thousand miles away.

Personally, I believe that the Erasmus programme (the EU+ student exchange programme), which is, admittedly, a part of EU, has done much more for preserving future peace in Europe than all the rest of EU institutions combined.

> What if its okay for different groups of people to retain their autonomy and their sovereignty--something people have fought and died for throughout history?

Depends. I much prefer personal autonomy over national sovereignty. While I understand that many people feel strong national identification, I lost this long time ago, maybe because I felt Czecho-Slovak but my country split, maybe because I see the pain of my grand-father due to his Palestinian origin.

Fortunately, currently for me the soverenity of states usually result mostly in bureocratic annoyances, such as when a colleague of mine couldn't join me on a face-to-face meeting, because he is from Ukraine and would first need to obtain visa for Ireland.

I'm sorry but that is astonishingly ignorant. The EU isn't an affront to the people who have fought and died, it is a project to bring European countries together after a thousand years of warfare and tens of millions of killed in the 20th century alone.

I would prefer if any group of of people could exit from a parent government, without any preexisting precedent of autonomy.

Maybe the right level of governance is the one people choose from themselves instead of the one into which they were born.

> Maybe the right level of governance is the one people choose from themselves instead of the one into which they were born.

I may be being overly facile, but "I consent to the government that I choose" sounds almost exactly like "I do not consent to being governed" to me. (Perhaps you mean that one gets to make such a choice once, rather than at will and repeatedly; but then when should such a choice be made?)

Nationalism is exactly what lead to centuries of bloodshed in Europe. Nationalism is the evil: this conceit that people from different nations with different rulers are sufficiently different from one another that it's worth going to war with them.

The EU has its flaws too, of course. Because of its necessarily top-down nature, it tends towards grand aspirational things which it can't quite achieve very well because national governments retain too much power, so it interferes in things where national governments care a little less, not always wisely. It should have more regionalism and subsidiarity.

Democracy necessarily means giving up your individual autonomy and permitting others to make the laws that govern you. It is not pernicious nationalism to repel at the idea that a polity of 700+ million people with diverse cultures and values should get to bind you through the democratic process.

It's a proxy for the UK's equivalent of the culture wars... that's the long and the short of it. Nobody really gives two craps about the EU one way or the other ;)

What ifs are tricky. What if the fifty states of US of A have decided to go their own way?

Then Maryland could have pot and socialized healthcare.

A lot of people who currently work for or aspire to work for the government would be mortally offended.

And then?

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