Irish tensions are resurfacing now too. A sticking point is the Irish/Northern Irish border. The government is being propped up by 10 fanatical, conservative unionist MPs (not the Tory kind) and have literally tanked what could have been significant EU progress.
Now the feeling is that the unions hold disproportionate power over the UK government and that doesn't play well with a fragile good Friday agreement.
Same story with Scotland. Now that NI potentially had single market access plus customs union, which those in power in NI didn't want, Scotland wants this too. Independence referendum was won based on "better together" and yet it seems they are now being dragged out of the EU against their will.
What a mess!
Not very ridiculous. The EU decision making process is a mess, and Germany controls the votes of many "proxy" states.
The main things people get annoyed with in the UK are parts of the single market agreement that we signed up to such as free movement of people and the inability to cut our own independent trade deals but that stuff was there from day one.
That is pretty much a bit of a special case, but I expect there exists a plethora of those special cases. Since Germany and France I believe have the most representatives (since they are the biggest countries) the thinking goes that they have more power than smaller countries such as mine.
The funny thing is that the UK is one of the biggest countries in EU in terms of population and thus have a lot of representatives in the EU parliament.
>Originally proposed by Winston Churchill and drafted mainly by British lawyers, the Convention was based on the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. ( https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/what-european-convent... )
The fact the individual countries are mostly sovereign and sign up to agreements is not that appreciated. Many have the idea that we can negotiate with Merkel/the EU and say give us free trade without free movement of people or we won't take your Mercedes and BMWs but they don't have the power to do that sort of deal. The EU trade agreements are what the 27 countries signed up to and they can't just go and change them after the event without getting everyone to sign up to a new agreement.
But it's ironic that Scotland got f'd over by England taking most of its petrol resources and Scotland got pretty much jack for it. So now their balance sheet may not qualify them for joining the EU alone, not dissimilar to how Greece probably wasn't but it wasn't caught in time because they cooked their books and banks looked the other way.
Not before the recent squeeze:
the Barnett formula already allows Scotland to sustain higher levels of per capita public spending relative to the rest of the UK, which is approximately equivalent to its disproportionately high annual contribution of tax revenues to the central UK Treasury from Oil production.
However Scotland's per capita spending growth, relative to the rest of the UK, has in recent years, been nominally reduced by the operation of the Barnett formula, in order to bring public spending levels into line with the UK average, in a phenomenon that had been dubbed the "Barnett Squeeze"
Due to once owning an overwhelming empire, I think a lot of people forget "British culture" is inherently "multicultural". A national British dish is chicken tikka masala, a curry, and nobody can tell if it was invented in India or the UK.
This highlights the ambiguity. There is no single multi-culture - it is an adjective that can apply to many distinct mixed cultures.
Some of the pushback is because some multicultures are better than others.
This photo is particularly striking:
https://i.redditmedia.com/2ZKJnNVW1-Mn41TE8dqXFMten1_L6gBZ7I...
Family eh?
How does it seem that?
I believe you mean that the "unionists hold disproportionate power". Your statement will, however, probably hold true after the next general election...
Productivity, wage growth in the UK is a problem. Is that going to get fixed by carrying on as we are? Should the workers not have more say?
I don't subscribe to the idea that what's best for the corporation and board of directors is what's best for everyone. Thats how we're operating. I think the next general election will change the record i.e what's best for workers, for the average person, for the sick and disabled, is ultimately best for the corporations. After all, a happy, healthy worker is a productive worker.
Data from Wikipedia.
WWWII deaths:
Russia: 20,000,000 to 27,000,000
UK and colonies: 450,900
USA: 419,400
WWII Military dead:
Russia: 8,668,000 to 11,400,00
UK and colonies: 383,700
USA: 407,300
At the time the population of the US was roughly 3X the UK, and the USSR was roughly 1.4X the US.
edit: I wondered, and found that about 25% of US casualties were in the Pacific theater. http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USA/ref/Casualties/Casualtie...
What terrible goddam war. Anyway, it's not like the Brits hid in a hole while the Americans saved everyone. No snarky comments at imaginary cocktail parties, please.
I thought this was going to be a joke about lend-lease!
Took bad Stalin felt like he needed to match that count during his subsequent extermination of "political enemies."
Or doubled...
1: http://www.ibtimes.com/how-many-people-did-joseph-stalin-kil...
A great example is the Battle of Kursk. A defining moment when Germany lose as offensive capabilities in the East. It was a decisive win for the USSR, but the casualty numbers are astounding.
German loses - ~54,000 deaths USSR loses - ~180,000 deaths
The USSR's plan was to invade the whole of Europe anyway (Stalin was preparing for it well before Operation Barbarossa started - you can look it up, they had the largest tank division in the world back in the 30s, well above Germany, and with much more powerful tanks that were obviously not going to be used for peaceful purposes).
So presenting them as "allied forces" has always felt amusing to me. They showed their true colors anyway right after Germany's defeat.
"The American delegate is here? Late as usual"
Keep them coming...I love dragging up the old jokes
That part. It was a long time ago.
I know a bunch of British people who've visited the continent, and the only place they could think of to visit was Normandy, Dunkirk or the Somme. Their entire mental framing of Europe is around the wars, and their grandparents or great-grandparents. And the poppies! Always with the poppies.
Insularity is real and many people, possibly a majority, outside the major metro areas are deeply incurious. The wars are the biggest semantic nodes in their heads associated with Europe, followed swiftly by something about bent bananas from Brussels.
Secondly it is a bit insulting to blithely state that anyone from a non-metropolitan area is some sort of country bumpkin thicko.
It's not even ignorance, per se; it's disinterest, combined with prejudice, in the literal sense of judged before the evidence.
The kids going to Ibiza are just visiting a sunny British resort with funny accents. I'd barely consider that abroad, for the amount of cultural adjustment it entails.
Secondly, I wouldn't even say British holiday making habits are especially different to those of other major European nations. If you want to paint a picture of the UK being uniquely backwards and insular then fine, but it doesn't seem to be based on anything outside snobbery and prejudice.
It is easy to claim that people you disagree with have all kinds of moral faults, but in doing so you become what you affect to criticise.
There's a review here: https://overland.org.au/2010/07/non-fiction-review-%E2%80%93...
The rest of Europe definitely seems to cling to nationalist illusions of some form or another, still.
Edit: I should note, an entire supranational governmental entity/trade alliance was put in place to ensure Europe moves on. It is now called the European Union. After WW2, a lot of effort went into making sure WW3 doesn't start in Europe. We'll see how that goes now that the EU seems to be struggling...
You'd be surprised.
Not only the didn't de-nazify their higher echelons for decades post-war (tons of the establishment, politicians, business and media moguls, etc, being the same pre/war Nazi elite and sympathizers), but they've never leaved that superiority mindset either.
Turkish immigrants have yet to be fully accepted and integrated there, except nominally -- after 50+ years.
The far-right wing party AfD scored a big hit these elections: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/24/german...
And that's the tip of the iceberg. E.g.
"More than 60% of the hate mail came from well-educated Germans, including university professors, according to their study, “The Language of Hostility Towards Jews in the 21st Century,” released earlier this year. Only 3% came from right-wing extremists."
https://forward.com/news/world/188764/german-hate-mail-comes...
There was a UK facist movement, and the Daily Mail newspaper(still going) ran the headline 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts', the blackshirts were the UK facists. It is a liberal joke to call them the 'Daily Heil' in return for this.
It just goes to demonstrate the absurdity of the idea of a country being good or bad. People are good or bad, not the rocks they stand on.
I don't know how close they were, but Hitler was clearly an admirer of the British Empire, and highly respected them (before the war broke out). He was led to believe that invasion of Poland would not cause France nor England to declare war on Germany (despite the existence of the alliances). Even after the war broke out, there were multiple cases where he tried to negotiate peace with the British Empire, but then Churchill was in power and was dead against the idea.
The scepticism of taking in the refugees is certainly politically "right" but not Nazi-level at all and many people that voted for the AfD party just did that out of protest.
The integration of the Turkish immigrants is another topic entirely; don't forget that mostly the most uneducated, rural people came.
The problems you talk about are different, and they are due to several factors, one of them being the fact that Germany never had a proper immigration law. It all started out of needs and this created differences in how migrants were treated: do you really want to compare the life of a Turkish migrant to the one of a Nigerian or Indian migrant? You simply can't. Because they don't have to follow the same rules. At least not in the past, not sure about nowadays.
Also, as for the integration. Seriously, this is a country that doesn't ask of you anything. Anything at all except that you of course speak a little the language. It offers everyone the same chances equally. Now, the main issue here is that in the past the greatest amount of immigrants were low educated people who didn't actually do anything to help their own kids become someone different, to study etc. The ones who did now are certainly in better positions. The so called 2nd and 3rd generation of migrants.
Regarding the anti-jews part, unfortunately that's something I can hardly understand. I simply don't get these people hating them, educated or not.
The superiority mindset in my opinion is due to the way they work and they are structured. It can often be confused with arrogance, I myself made such mistakes, but I think that this is simply the way many people think. Let's not forget that Germans used to have a highly hierarchical structure. And let's not forget that it's also thanks to that mentality that they were the first in all Europe to recover from the war. All other countries are still suffering from it, while they rolled up their sleeves and worked hard. I assume you are a foreigner like me. I suggest you to make some German friends who are open about this sort of topics, because not all people are, and ask them.
> And is it true that they were the first to recover?
Well, I can say for certain that after WW2 lots of people migrated from their countries to find "wealth", or simply an opportunity, in Germany, so, I'd say that maybe they were not the first, ok, but among the first ones, which says a lot about the country and how determined and good at planning these people used to be already 60-70 years ago. They were the ones who created the brand "made in Germany" without registering it anywhere, which the current generation abuses to make money (by producing in China...yeah). If you like that brand, then you must also understand that it comes with a price - and this is not necessarily openness, being easy, relaxed, laid back, etc.
I think we (nowadays) often make the mistake of underestimating the impact that culture has/had in the progress of a society, which is sad, because it's an important aspect of any society. Denying what and how something happened doesn't falsify it.
The Nazi-similes from brexit politicians is also a clear sign that someone has run out of _good_ arguments. Promise too much, and then when it is obvious that you can not deliver, the other part is Nazis.
Google "democracy Poland".
PS: yes I know, all anecdotal
I think we tend to forget that wars are started by governments, not people. People usually have no hatred for people beyond their borders. Hatred is created through politics and brainwashing.
There's a bunch of recent wars that had virtually no widespread popular support. Vietnam, Iraq, Syria... it does not seem to be a necessary condition anymore for any military action.
Still today, both side of the border, if someone attack that friendship either media or politician, they get flamed back into shutting up.
We know what our friendship is worth, but we didn't just have it one day, we built it.
That's why I think Japan attitude to ww2 is misguided.
People have "forgotten" about WW2 because of the terrible threat of the Cold War that ensued leading to half of Europe being under USSR occupation/control.