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Comment by djaychela | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely hope that today (and obviously the day it actually happens) isn't something that I look back on with sadness in the future. I live in the UK, and am really saddened by the way that politics is 'progressing' - in fact, regressing to a time where nationalism seems to be the voice, and one which I think will inevitably lead to conflict. Combined with the Trump situation in the USA, I am extremely pessimistic about the future - more so of my four step children, who are all going to reap the adult world that people such as Johnson, Gove and Farage have sewn.

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Nationalism may have a voice but it hasn't been defeated on the continent at all. Golden Dawn, 5 Star Movement, Front Nationale, AfD. UKIP are currently polling 10% in the UK and have just lost their only MP (who it turns out only joined them to marginalise Farage in any EU referendum).

There's a case to be made that the increasing centralisation of Europe is provoking a national reaction in members states. You don't have to be Greek or Italian to empathise with why people might not be happy with their situation or the "German" approach to solving it.

I'm hoping that with the return of a lot of powers to Parliaments (be they Westminster or devolved) that there will be more of a distinction between parties and more debate around policies. The public will have to own far more than we currently do - the most high profile recent example is the "Tampon Tax", everyone seems to acknowledge it shouldn't exist but politicians currently shrug and say "Europe". That excuse is going away.

We had plenty of conflict while part of the EU: the Falklands, Iraq, the IRA, Bosnia for example.

It wasn't nationalism which caused conflicts in Europe, it was a lack of democracy.

But that suggests that the UK itself lacks democracy. If the UK doesn't change because of this, how will staying in or leaving the EU change that?

The UK does lack democracy. It has an unelected upper house and elections for the lower house are profoundly undemocratic. I have never lived anywhere in the UK where my vote counted for General Elections.

Falklands happened "because of the EU"? Thats news to me. I thought it happened because the UK needs the oil reserves to prop up its broken economy.

Except I didn't say that the Falklands happened because of the EU, did I? It happened because Argentina invaded British sovereign territory, and the British defended it. Interestingly, not a single other EU country aided the UK.

Would this be the same EU that wasn't founded for another 13 years?

While we're putting forward spurious facts not a single non-EU country aided the UK.

> Would this be the same EU that wasn't founded for another 13 years?

Yes; the same one, too, that grew out of the EEC founded 35 years prior.

So your argument is that the Economic body that was the EEC was supposed to help the UK fight a war half a world away because.....reasons?

I haven't said anything of the sort; I don't have enough knowledge of the period to comfortably comment on it.

I only commented above to explain why, it seemed, you were disagreeing on whether the multi-European-country group existed before the Falklands conflict.

Highlighting the Economic in EEC hardly seems relevant either, seeing as the EU is basically just MaastrichtTreaty(EEC) - a treaty which insofar I'm aware makes no mention of supporting member states' wars, "because.....reasons" or otherwise.

Since the founding of the EU there have been several steps towards common military work. In the mid 2000s EU battlegroups were created. In 2009 SAFE laid the foundations for a EU military. Since then EU forces have been involved in peacekeeping missions.

The EEC was very much just an economic body. Since then the EU has been taking steps in multiple areas beyond just it's initial economic competencies.

Not true. Chile was a vital ally, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/falkl... The United States secretly provided satellite imagery and telecommunications during the conflict but was careful to project a neutral stance in public.

Also France was perhaps ambivalent about the conflict, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9767736/Thatc... Certainly support from EU countries was not easily visible.

Sorry for the links from the Telegraph since there a clear source of bias there but there are plenty of other references which can back these up.

That link showed that France did help the UK. Also they provided ports in West Africa for UK ships as well as details of all the weapon systems sold to the Argentinians. At least as much help as the Chileans.

France aided the UK and was the UK's best ally during the campaign. They declared an arms embargo against Argentina, they allowed use of french controlled ports in West Africa, they provided lots of information about Exocet missiles and they aided British intelligence in preventing Argentina obtaining more of them.

Our biggest "frenemies" during the Falklands were the USA and Israel. Israel were selling them arms (or attempting to) throughout the war and the USA was neutral (with lots of Argentinian sympathy) until their hand was forced.

> USA was neutral (with lots of Argentinian sympathy) until their hand was forced.

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage would disagree with you. Reagan wanted to keep the USSR out of Argentina so the public line was neutrality even with Thatcher pushing him to do otherwise. Behind the scenes the US provided intelligence to Britain.

Fair enough, I suppose I overstated that!

The USA was, at least at first, divided on the issue and didn't exactly come swingeing down on the British side - many members of the Reagan administration thought that aiding the UK would hamper their anti-communist efforts in South America generally and I guess as hegemon they just wanted the whole inconvenient problem between two US allies to go away.

Later when it became clear that the UK was going to war, that was that. They did support the British position but didn't get entangled publicly for their own reasons, not least there's no point getting involved if your ally can take care of it anyway.

>Except I didn't say that the Falklands happened because of the EU, did I?

I understood that you implied that the UK 'did Falklands' because EU 'let the UK do it', as if .. as would have been proper, membership in the 'union' would have meant such unilateral warfare would have been anathema.

I mean, its not like the EU wants to sell billions of dollars of weapons to the world, including its enemies.

No, they were simply saying that being part of the E.U didn't preclude conflict.

If anything, the existence of the EU almost certainly prevented things getting worse. While British warships were busy heading down to reclaim the Falklands, Spain was on the verge of invading Gibraltar...

Citation needed? All I could find was that Argentina had plans to sink ships in Gibraltar.

Yeah, as someone with familial connections to both the Falklands and Gibraltar, this is absolute bullshit.

No citation needed, it's just cobblers.

There were Argentinians attempting to use Italian tech to cross the bay of Gibraltar and target Royal Navy assets at dock, but they were arrested by the Guardia Civil.

> "because of the EU"

Weird you put that in quotes, because the only even remotely similar quotation of GP's I can find is "while part of the EU"...

Well, you didn't see a war between Germany and England though... Bosnia, Iraq etc were not part of the EU. The point was to create a closely integrated Europe so that war would become unthinkable just like a war between England and Scotland is unthinkable now. Of course it was nationalism which caused conflicts in Europe. Did democracy prevent Russia to invade Ukraine? UK simply decided the European project is not worth it and they are better off trading as an independent country than part of a european family. This may prove true but we will have to see and for how long. If the EU reforms and sticks together I fail to see how leaving it is a good choice. I hope this will make EU stronger and more competitive as UK will force their hand to do more.

Based on statistics I would say that any war between the UK and Germany is more likely to be inflicted by Germany... just saying...

Does it matter who started? I don't think blaming one state or another helps much once the nukes take off.

Russia isn't exactly democratic.

> Did democracy prevent Russia to invade Ukraine?

Russian democracy is a charade at this point.

I'd argue we didn't see a war between Germany and England, or Britain as we are these days, as we were occupying them in the aftermath until 1949 and maintained a British Army of the Rhine there until 1994. The Allies also established a new Constitution and political consensus that is vehemently anti-war - witness German reluctance to be involved in fighting in recent NATO and other coalition conflicts.

There's also the small matter that the Russians were effectively still occupying half of Germany until the late 1980s. The origins of the EU came that trade prevents wars. The Democratic Peace Thesis likes to discount all sorts of countries as "not a democracy", a good example of No True Scotsman. Given we're seeing Turkey rapidly heading towards dictatorship, Hungary's far right leadership despite being an EU member, and all the problems the US is going through it is a salient reminder that just because you are a democracy doesn't mean you stay one. One of the pretty unique things about the UK in the EU is its political history - France is on its 5th Republic, Germany has only been reunified within living memory, Italy's system is from 1946 etc. You can see how relatively new, potentially fragile systems of Government might want to prevent resurgences of problems, especially under the shadow of the Cold War.

Edit to add: Oh - there's also this thing called NATO as well. When two countries are in a military alliance they also tend to avoid going to war with each other. NATO is of course also the body that intervened far more decisively than the EU in the Bosnian and Kosovan Wars - those pesky examples of genocide in Europe that people overlook about how fantastic and peaceful we are as a continent.

A military alliance (such NATO) alone cannot prevent war between its members. The recent events(Trump threating to pull U.S. support or Turkey's behaviour) proves how fragile a such alliance is. I wouldn't be surprised to see Turkey leaving NATO and join an alliance with Russia.

If a member decides that the alliance doesn't serve its national interests anymore nothing can stop it from leaving and joining a different alliance.

The point of EU was to make european interests indistingusible from national interests. It seems it hit a brick wall on UK.

After Turkey shot their plane?

I think they already settled that.

>or Britain as we are these day //

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is the country's designation I gather, at least based on the title of the head of state it is.

> It wasn't nationalism which caused conflicts in Europe, it was a lack of democracy.

This is infuriatingly vague.

What are you complaining about? That the various EU councils aren't directly elected? Well, they are all delegates of politicians who have been elected in their home country. And to have a direct election makes no sense, because it's not like a Swede will vote for an Italian politician. For that to happen the EU would have to turn into some kind of United States of Europe, but "surprisingly" people who complain about a lack of democracy also always want their own home country to remain autonomy. Which is a driving force in the exact opposite direction: less direct democracy, let the elected politicians duke things out while trying to work towards the best interest of their people.

I mean this is international legislation we are talking about, trying to navigate the different laws and customs of each individual EU member. It's inherently goddamn complicated and it's probably for the best that we let the delegated politicians deal with it for the most part.

Or is it about the supposed "unelected bureaucrats in Europe telling us what to do!" Because that's another part that I find really fucking annoying about Eurosceptics who talk out of their ass: the complaint that EU makes things more complicated and creates more red tape, when there hasn't been any other project remotely as effective at reducing as much bureaucracy from the European continent as the European Union.

You hear these complaints of "They're wasting time on creating more red tape and banning curved bananas!"? Because that too is nonsense, to the point that there is an entire blog dedicated to debunking such Euromyths[0]. Here, I'll give you an explicit example of one that I investigated myself:

On the 29th of May 2014 the Telegraph[1], the Daily Mail[2], the Independent[3] all published virtually identical articles accusing the EU of being out to ban classic perfumes. The next day the Times (sorry, no link) did the same.

None of the articles mentioned a source (of course), but they turned out to be rewritten versions of a Reuters article from a day earlier[4], pulling paragraphs out of context and omitting key information. The actual proposal consisted of a ban on three ingredients, and an increase of the number of ingredients that have to be clearly labelled, because they have been shown to be significantly allergenic.

A special report by Reuters from 2012[5] actually discussed much stronger restrictions that the perfume industry feared for, in anticipation of a report on allergenic ingredients by the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety. Moreover, that 2012 article discussed how the perfume industry has already been changing many of its formulas for decades, and went on to explain how a new labelling regulation – enforced by the same proposed legislation – would force them to disclose many (allergenic) ingredients of their secret formulas. Among other things, this would make it harder for brands to get away with changing their formulas unnoticed.

By contrast, the 2014 Reuters article indicates that the final changes were fairly non-controversial, likely because the EU held a number of public consultations with the perfume industry between 2012 and 2014. In other words: the European Union had been transparent to and cooperative with the cosmetics industry in implementing changes to its perfume regulation.

Now here's the real kicker: when researching this, we discovered that the main legislation surrounding cosmetic products – Regulation 1223/2009 – replaced the old directive of over 3500 pages, which was patched with 55 amendments and full of incoherent terminology, with a single coherent regulation of about 200 pages, greatly reducing costs for the cosmetic industry. Not that anyone took notice of that. And before you blame that old 3500 page document on the EU, realise that that was basically all the separate national laws thrown together onto one heap of amendments - hardly the EU's fault. Read the press release here[6].

A 3500 page document! Mind you, that wasn't the fault of of the EU, that represented the underlying, incompatible laws of the various member countries. And the EU fixed that and simplified it to a universal 200 pages, applicable everywhere. Do you have any idea how much administration costs that saves across the continent?

And this happens again and again, and you never hear anyone talk of this.

[0] http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/euromyths-a-z-index/

[1] http://fashion.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/newsfeatures/TMG108620...

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2642389/Now-EU-rules...

[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/iconic-chane...

[4] http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-eu-perfume-idUKKBN0E30GE201...

[5] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-perfume-idUSBRE8BF0...

[6] http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-08-184_en.htm?locale...

The EU does have direct elections: See the European Parliament.

Yes, but that's just one body of the EU. The "lack direct elections" argument usually applies to how the EU is full of sub-groups that aren't directly elected. But like I said, I don't think that's necessarily bad.

>> "It wasn't nationalism which caused conflicts in Europe, it was a lack of democracy."

The Yugoslav wars were centred around nationalism. The Irish conflict, again was centred around nationalism and civil rights (you can't seriously think there wasn't democracy in Ireland?).

Obviously words are a lot cheaper than action, but it's at least a small consolation that the current Government, for all its varied faults, remains a pretty globalist and free-trade one (despite being responsible for one of the most protectionist and nationalist actions in the last century).

Which is to say that I don't think the nationalist right-wing will be mollified entirely by the exit negotiations. If the UK had the equivalent of a Front Nationale government leading Brexit right now I'd find that much more worrisome.

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