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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be operating under the belief that the disintegration of the EU started three weeks ago or something? It's been an ongoing saga for years. I mean, Brexit predates Trump, and Brexit itself is the result of years of pressures.

I can see why you'd be so confused by the "strategy" if you think Trump is causing it, but he's reacting to it. And my assessment of the situation is the other way around; there's nothing Trump could do to stop it even if he wanted to. The explosion is in progress, the very latest I could put the date for that is the Brexit vote (which, again, is itself a result, not a cause), and the only question is who can best surf the aftermath.

The EU is falling apart because of issues within the EU, not because somewhere in the early 2010s the penumbric emanations of the future Trump presidency reached back in time and started whispering in politician's ears.

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I doubt that the EU is falling apart, but if it ever does, then certainly more because of perceived issues rather than real ones. Although it was created democratically and by countless unanimous votes of its member states, the EU has always been an easy scapegoat for national politicians who did not do their own job right. In the UK, they quite obviously got the revenge for this behavior. (Remember, most MPs were and probably still are against the Brexit, and for good reasons, of course.)

The good news is that the vast majority of national politicians know fairly well how they abused the EU rhetorically and that their own countries would be crushed by global economic pressures if they left the EU. The UK and Germany are quite possibly the only countries who may be able to afford to leave the EU without major harm, and most smaller countries are aware of that.

But I agree that the perils of cheap populism and nationalism ought not be underestimated, and let's not forget that weakening Europe is in the current interest of Russia, the US in the eyes of the current Trump administration, and maybe even China. Anti-EU forces are strong, no doubt about that.

In the end, the current state of discussion is rather saddening anyway. The EU was primarily funded as a way to prevent Europe from being destroyed by inner conflicts again, which makes some sense after two devastating world wars that left Europe in ruins and killed millions of citizens. It's sad that this is sometimes forgotten and only emphasized by older politicians.

"The EU was primarily funded as a way to prevent Europe from being destroyed by inner conflicts again, which makes some sense after two devastating world wars that left Europe in ruins and killed millions of citizens. It's sad that this is sometimes forgotten and only emphasized by older politicians."

This is such an important point.

Whatever problems the EU indeed might have, its role in keeping the peace in a continent that has seen war almost uninterruptedly over the course of its history cannot be emphasized enough.

It is human nature blaming others for our own problems: as soon you cannot blame the EU anymore, you will start blaming your neighbors...

>>Whatever problems the EU indeed might have, its role in keeping the peace in a continent that has seen war almost uninterruptedly over the course of its history cannot be emphasized enough.

I think you are confusing the EU with NATO.

No, he's right. The freedom of movement is instrumental in educating people about the other countries, and realizing that they are also normal people, not some evil zombies.

Of course it can only help with preventing incidents between member states and other cooperating actors.

> because of perceived issues rather than real ones

10 years of stagnation or decline of GDP in all top 5 countries of the eurozone (which account for 50% of all GDP of EU) is not a perceived issue.

I don't want to start some longish economic argument here, but given that the EU is primarily a trade union and only around 1% of the total GDP of all member states is spent on the EU by its members, or, in other words, spending to the EU budget by member states is ridiculously small in comparison to national spendings by the respective national governments, it's hard to find an argument that could somehow contribute this development to the EU. How would more trade barriers improve the economy of individual member states? (Note that I do not deny that Germany and the UK might be able to exploit their strong economic forces in bilateral treaties to gain advantages over smaller countries within the EU in some trade wars, but I'm talking about the prosperity of the 28 EU countries as a whole.)

Moreover, if you honestly compare EU GDP development to the rest of the world, you will also find out that the EU has done fairly well despite the financial crisis that hit it harder than the US.[1]

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...

The Euro has been a gold standard hung around the necks of the poorer Eurozone countries. They haven't been able to devalue, engage in Keynesian stimulus, or do anything else a country normally ought to do when confronted with a demand-driven depression, let alone a financial crisis.

You are forgetting the whole austerity thing, a combination higher taxes, lower government spending, forced privatizations and strong euro.

> Ms. le Pen may not win this time, but she will one day

There is very little to support this. FN has been around 20% for decades, racking in about the same 5-6M voters at most elections. Structurally, far right in France (as in other countries) splits up as soon as it starts compromising to reach a wider audience. Also structurally, contrary to UK/US, all elections in France have 2 rounds - and Le Pen will never get to win the 2nd one.

Yes, she and Mélenchon are symptoms of anger/apathy. Netherlands and Germany have similar issues. It doesn't mean the extremes are nowhere near winning.

> The EU is falling apart because of issues within the EU

Predictions on how the EU will die started in 1957. The last 10 years have put an impossible amount of stress on it - and here it is, alive, and with increasing voter support.

If gp thinks a win by Le Pen or her counterpart in Germany is a given, he does not understand the election system in each respective country.

Living in the EU, I actually experience quite the opposite to what jerf is predicting: a reemergence of the EU as a passionate project after Brexit. People have taken the EU for granted for way too long, now it starts to emerge as an issue that is worth fighting for (check e.g., pulseforeurope.eu). Granted, there's also a nationalistic reemergence acting against the EU, but at least it's proponents are starting to fight back.

I don't necessarily predict the disintegration. I'm pointing out that the idea of blaming Trump for it is temporally silly. It's an ongoing process that didn't start three weeks ago, and even trying to backdate it to Trump's candidacy would A: be insufficient to explain anything anyhow and B: have to explain how Trump somehow knocked over the EU despite hardly saying a word about it during his campaign.

But as for everything being fine and dandy, when you get to the point that you've got sub-polities not only seriously talking about secession, but actually doing it, no, that polity is not in good health.

Yes, that fully applies to the US.

If you look again, I didn't mention that name at all. The only relation is that, after the changes in London and Washington, outside interference will now not only be coming from Moscow, and they are capable of exerting far more refined influence than Moscow's online troll army and funding of anti EU activists.

The Brexit campaign was fueled by lies. The real issue is a trend of anti-intellectualism and xenophobia, which I fear we've seen before, triggered by the great depression and a precursor to WWII.

It's as if, whenever a financial crisis happens, people go dumb.

That's moving the goalposts. Nothing about what you said makes it the result of Trump's administration.

Also, might I just point out the irony of accusing people of being "anti-intellectual" in reaction to the financial crisis that is precisely the one the intellectuals promised us could never possibly happen under their guidance, and were mocking people for even considering it possible right up to the day it happened. How rational is it to belief false things simply because they carry the label "intellectual"?

It's not moving the goalposts, I was just noticing the global trend that links Brexit, Trump and possibly other upcoming events like Le Pen.

> the intellectuals promised us could never possibly happen under their guidance, and were mocking people for even considering it possible right up to the day it happened

Well, source please. Not that I don't believe you, but don't remember the deriding or the predictions you're mentioning and it's actually really hard to predict a financial crisis, being dangerous to put a break on the economy based on speculations.

Check out Debunking Economics. It's kind of a horrible book, but the economic arguments seem sound and are very interesting.

Xenophobia, or rational self-interest? How is the common worker better-off by allowing immigration? The only advantage I can think of is having the option of abandoning their country to seek better fortunes elsewhere (assuming immigration is a two-way street). What about the great majority who wish to stay in their own countries?

I would call it stupidity, because the biggest threat to jobs is provably automation and not immigrants.

Immigrants are occupying either the low end jobs that nobody wants, like what you get in agriculture (e.g. strawberry pickers - if you don't know how that's like, try it out ;-)), cleaning services, etc, or they are occupying the high end jobs, like what you get in Silicon Valley, an industry that creates jobs, or say medical doctors, which are hired because of their expertise or to lower the prices, which in the end translates to lower healthcare bills, etc.

Either way, if you ban immigration, you'll get automation, or a crashing economy due to other countries being more competitive. And if you get automation, it's worse than immigrants, because those immigrants are spending their salaries locally, whereas robots don't get salaries.

You know, it's funny you should say that. I'm from an ex-communist country from Eastern Europe and let me tell you, the problem with communism was the extreme inefficiency due to the state's incentive of keeping people hired which ultimately led to hunger and the fall of the USSR.

You get automation either way - immigration only buys you ten or so years before the costs fall below even immigrant wages, after which you're left with unemployed immigrants.

And lets not pretend the availability of cheap labour has nothing to do with jobs being low-end.

Medical doctors sure is a funny example to give however - the USA has a lot of immigrants - how well has that worked in keeping healthcare affordable?

Immigration is keeping health care affordable in Germany and probably a bunch of other European countries. Until the Brexit, cheap foreign labor helped keep prices low in the UK.

The USA don't have a problem with immigrants - they have a problem with the runaway corruption of their political leaders. Corporate lobbyists get to write laws for representatives to rubber stamp. The reason the same drugs cost 5x more in the US than in Canada has nothing to do with immigrants.

I'd love some statistics on this - what is the proportion of immigrants who are doctors, and how does that compare to the native population (for Germany, the U.K., etc..)? How does it depend on the immigrant's country of origin? And, if the goal is to reduce medical costs - why not accept only doctors?

I'm sorry, but I'm too lazy to dig up those statistics for you. Part of the reason is that I consider your question to be fundamentally misdirected.

First, I'd like to point out that medical staff form just the tip of the iceberg in terms of wage-reduction by immigrants. For example, my father in law lives in an old age home staffed almost entirely with low-wage foreigners - a mix of immigrants, migrants, what-have you. There are job markets in health and old age care, cleaning, agriculture and construction that completely dwarf just that for doctors.

Secondly, because much of the current discussion of immigrants relates specifically to refugees: to selectively accept desirable highly-qualified refugees from countries people are fleeing for their lives would be deplorably, cynically selfish and inhumane.

Third, if I remember correctly, "nationals-only" reproduction in Germany and some other European countries, but also e.g. Japan is below the level required to sustain a population (there's a technical term for that, but I've forgotten it), so many modern countries actually _need_ immigrants to fill job vacancies in countries with industries that insist on continuing to grow regardless of populations.

The Japanese are (at the moment) resolved to let their country dwindle out before diluting their treasured racial stock. That's their decision, and they can go that way if they want to. Other countries, meanwhile, don't base their immigration policies on -let's be honest- racism, or less so.

Fleeing from countries such as Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Slovenia? And pretending there are only two options - let them stay forever, or gun them down at the border, is dishonest at best. We ship food half way around the world, there's no reason wealthy countries can't fund refugee camps and in general help and give aid to countries that accept refugees. This would also reduce the number of tragic drownings in the Mediterranean. But I don't see it suggested much as an option in the media...

And, are you saying the stance of governments to their people is "We need more workers - breed faster, or we'll import someone who will"? Britons are now an ethnic minority in London, but only racists would be bothered by the same taking place in their countries, I guess.

>We ship food half way around the world, there's no reason wealthy countries can't fund refugee camps and in general help and give aid to countries that accept refugees.

Except that those countries are, frankly, undemocratic, corrupt, and devoted to suppressing working conditions.

>And, are you saying the stance of governments to their people is "We need more workers - breed faster, or we'll import someone who will"?

Except of course that these same governments don't want their local capitalists to have to pay family-founding wages.

>Britons are now an ethnic minority in London, but only racists would be bothered by the same taking place in their countries, I guess.

I'm an ethnic minority everywhere except a tiny, embattled corner of the planet, about the size of New Jersey. What sympathy ought I have for inheritors of the British Empire being concerned about foreigners?

First of all, governments are for the most part able to differentiate between refugees and economically driven immigrants - the main influx of refugees in Germany and other European countries these days is from Syria, and it's not easy for Croats, say, or Slovenes to pass themselves off as Syrians. So unsurprisingly enough, we're not seeing a huge influx of Eastern Europeans - partly thanks to sensible limits on immigration.

Turks, Greeks and (though you didn't mention them) Italians are another matter: The industries of Germany (and other countries) practically begged people from these countries to come to Western Europe and augment labor pools here. The first deals were for short-term working arragements; later it was decided that there were good humanitarian and societal reasons to let these people emigrate and stay. The city I live in has a complement of about 10% (ethnic) Turks plus a colorful mixture of other origins. My dentist is a Turk!

Your idea of shipping aid to where it's needed is poorly considered, as another commenter has explained nearby. Syria, for example, continues to be a slaughterhouse, and its broken infrastructure can't feed and house people in bales of money.

No, it's not governments blackmailing their public to breed faster - the compulsion to maintain population figures is a purely social thing, no coercion needed. Former immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere will be working to pay part of my pension. You, meanwhile, are considering immigration as a threat. I have to tell you, your concern about "ethnic minorities" in London really is troubling. When people from other countries emigrate to England, they become British, and then only racists are concerned that those British people or their parents were formerly residents of a different country. Do I need to remind you that the USA is populated almost exclusively by emigrants from other countries? Oh wait, most of those were white, so that makes it... different? Conclude what you will.

There are no limits on immigration for people from Croatia or Slovenia in the EU. They could move over here to Germany tomorrow and immediately start working. They can't immediately apply for welfare though.

Syrians are not the only significant refugee group, there is also Afghanistan and Iran in the top 3. Together they currently make up about a third of all applications for asylum in Germany according to BAMF.

Threats of job security might not be the only threat they see. In a society with a lot of automation where you need a high level of education just to get a job, taking in a lot of unskilled immigrants means very few of them will be able to land a job, and overall poverty will rise.

Poverty is detrimental to societal security.

Immigration is more-or-less irrelevant to the common worker either way. Macroeconomic labor conditions affect the common worker more: if labor's share of income is large but immigration is high, people are fine, but if labor's share of income is low with zero immigration, people are still miserable.

How much immigration is there into, say, Belarus? Practically none. How well-off is the common worker in Belarus? Miserable.

I'm a fairly intellectual guy and I'd say that it's fairly disingenuous to point at "anti-intellectualism" and ignore massive inequality and corruption as party in these latest events.

There's plenty of economists running around assuring everyone that Piketty is wrong, inequality doesn't matter, someone being a billionaire doesn't affect someone on welfare who has cheap iPhones, etc. However, I think these defenders of the status quo will be proven wrong. It all rings very hollow.

Anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, inequality. Don't forget that last one. It's the one that puts us liberal techies on the hook too.

your being dismissive. they have legitimate complaints that have been ignored for more than a decade. their situation (and really most people) continued to get worse as pro misses of prosperity from globalization landed on a few.

maybe they are wrong, but basically they are being called dumb for being pushed into minimum wage jobs and told 'dont worry, we'll raise minimum wage to 15 an hour and give you free community college' and rejecting that offer.

> they have legitimate complaints... we'll raise minimum wage to 15 an hour and give you free community college' and rejecting that offer

So should we throw our sabots at the microcontrollers and robotic arms? Or what?

>...free community college

I suppose those people have college degrees?

Oh, no?

So basically they want a well-paying middle class job but feel they're entitled to that wage without getting any education.

Feelings of resentment and entitlement aren't mutually exclusive with "going dumb". In fact, they usually co-exist.

And financial crises of varying degrees seem to happen every decade at least.

It's almost as if this economic boom > financial crash > war socioeconomic system we have in place is utter insanity.

>The Brexit campaign was fueled by lies.

The Remain campaign certainly was, your comment being evidence.

Have we tried not allowing financial crises to grow in the first place?

The UK was never a very convinced member of the EU, so Brexit is not a good example. But more importantly, the EU is not falling apart, it is merely facing a crisis. A pro-EU US administration could help to save it while Trump will likely accelerate it's decline.

If the EU, designed to be the counterbalance to the United States, is so delicate that it lives or dies based on the decisions of one man that doesn't even live there, it is falling apart.

There's no way around this; if it's gotten to that point of illness it has already proved itself extraordinarily weak. Blaming Trump for pushing it over the edge is just a politically-convenient privileging of the numerous other forces that must be pushing it over, and it's hard for me to believe that Trump is even in the top 10 reasons, especially given the lateness of his entry on the scene. Do we seriously believe that things would be so much better if Trump had not won? It's not like Obama particularly managed to hold it together or anything.

> designed to be the counterbalance to the United States

That would be news to me. The EU has never claimed it is a counter-balance to the United States. Some people argue for a stronger, independent EU, but this is surely not the primary purpose of it.

> If the EU, designed to be the counterbalance to the United States

That was never the reason for the foundation of the EU. If that's the level of your understanding of European politics, I can't take you seriously anymore.

If the EU fails, which I doubt, Trump would have played a minuscule role, exacerbating existing tensions. I actually expect quite the opposite from a Trump presidency, though unintended by him.

The EU is designed entirely for internal reasons: to end the cycle of great wars between France, Germany, Russia and Britain over resources and arable land. The basic idea is that you don't need to fight over coal and steel, if you can just buy it. Protectionism, by design, leads to conflict. This could be intentional, expecting to win that conflict, but for Europe, with several adjacent powers of similar strength and modern weaponry, it was obviously not working out well.

American influence has actually been instrumental in getting the project started[1]. 'Europe' doesn't have any geopolitical or military ambitions, and as so many member states are NATO members, it tends to follow American interests in these matters.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Eur...

The EU will fall apart, it's only a matter of time. The Euro as a currency is not sustainable and the moment a net paying country moves out of the Euro, the EU will disintegrate for sure.

At the moment the Euro is just a mechanism to transfer wealth from the northern countries to the southern countries and to make exports easier for Germany. Greece and Italy would be able to import much less goods from Germany if they had their own weak currencies, so would be bad for German exports, but would allow Greece and Italy to recover their economies by devaluing their currencies which would result in decreasing imports, increasing exports.

In the current situation a country like Greece will never recover and Northern European countries will pay perpetually. The same stuff could happen with Italy, Spain, etc...

The Euro is not the same as the EU.

> mechanism to transfer wealth from the northern countries to the southern countries and to make exports easier for Germany

I agree that it works very well for Germany. This, by the way, also implies that the transfer of wealth is not a problem. It is economically reasonable for Germany to pay and the Greek people, for instance, have clearly stated that they want to stay in the Eurozone. Additionally, the Euro can be fixed, it is just currently not politically possible to take the required actions, because the current state of affairs is "good enough". This will change if the Euro is seriously threatened.

On the contrary, a Trump presidency and the Brexit actually creates the external counterparts that is needed for people to gather around. Adding to that, the US feels like a very alien culture nowadays, reenforcing the feeling of being somewhat more similar to each other in the EU.

People have been saying the Euro will collapse "any day now" since about 2008. Things don't just happen by themselves, and trends do not continue forever. It does seem like Trump and Putin are playing a divide-and-conquer strategy with Europe, but not necessarily coordinated.

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