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Comment by Consultant32452 | Hacker News Reader

In my opinion the long term goal is to transition the EU (over the course of multiple human generations) into a single nation, similar to the way the United States operates. In that case, the conditions you described are an expected part of the process. In the US the states and local municipalities have different economic situations, different taxes, etc. And if our states broke off into 50 currencies, some would benefit while others would crumble.

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Your thoughts are on point imo. One must never forget the context of how the EU and it’s main political objective came to be: the culmination of centuries of small scale wars and two world wars within 30 years of each other.

Juncker - who is the only European politician who signed the Maastricht treaty in ‘92 still active today - reiterated at a 20 year commemoration mid January this year that for him, the European Fiscal Union remains an unconventional measure of politics for common peace.

Closer political union has been on the cards for a long time. Churchill post-WW2 (1948) said "Mutual aid in the economic field and joint military defence must inevitably be accompanied step by step with a parallel policy of closer political unity", and referred to a United States of Europe ("I was anxious at first lest the United States of America should view with hostility the idea of a United States of Europe"), with it being presented as a force for peace ("the German problem is to restore the economic life of Germany and revive the ancient fame of the German race without thereby exposing their neighbours and ourselves to any rebuilding or reassertion of their military power of which we still bear the scars. United Europe provides the only solution to this two-sided problem"). It's pre-EU, but clearly the ideas come from a similar place.

http://www.churchill-society-london.org.uk/WSCHague.html

And the phrase "United States of Europe", in turn, was coined a hundred years before Churchill. And the idea is older still.

Then again, it's also just a logical extension of the same process through which the most powerful European states today have formed themselves.

The motto is „a ever closer union“, although that does not necessarily see a nation state at the end, and it has become somewhat outdated...

What the US has, and the EU would need, are some mechanisms to level economic differences between the constituent states. Any federal US program effectively works as such, even though that is rarely acknowledged in the public discourse. As but one example: military spending is financed primarily by the economically strong and populous states, and disproportionately favors poorer states with defense contacts or military bases.

The EU has a few such mechanisms, some explicit (regional development funds), some less so (agriculture). But the total E.U. budget is rather tiny compared to the economy. Something like a common unemployment insurance would be best, mechanistically. Because it would automatically adjust to changing fortunes at the very local level without requiring constant political intervention and the accompanying bargaining. At present, such a policy is unlikely to find approval because of pervasive remaining mistrust („lazy Greeks taking our money“).

We should have two currencies, one slowly sinking in value and one slowly rising. Then a country should be able to choose internally to align itself with the Euro or the Orue, for internal trade, external trade and money value.

The EU already has a version of this. Some countries in the Eurozone are net recipients of EU money. Just like California is a net contributor and Mississippi a net recipient.

It can be argued that the Euro has certain structural issues, or that the wealth transfer is too big/small, but the EU demonstrates that you don't need to become one nation just to have wealth transfers.

But is the size of these wealth transfers comparable? I have the impression, maybe wrong (absolutely no data to confirm it, in fact) that wealth transfers within the EU are much lower than those that would take place between the regions of a single nation.

You're right. The wealth transfers are fairly small. The EU had a budget of €118 billion for 2016. There's only so much you can do with that money for 500 million people. Note that a large chunk of it goes back into the big countries as agricultural subsidies.

No, but does it matter? I'm pointing out that you structurally don't need a nation-state to do this. The EU isn't going to have some natural or legal tipping-point where the wealth transfer moves up or down by 0.1% and suddenly it structurally doesn't work.

You said that you don't need to be a nation state to have wealth transfers. And I agree, an in fact the EU has them.

But from a political and social point of view, while it's somehow easy to convince the citizens of a nation that they have to contribute from their own pockets to the common good, the situation is much harder in Europe. We are not a nation, we are culturally and linguistically different, we consider ourselves as separate entities. The euro is actually increasing reciprocal distrust. The whole EU political system is overly complicated (and, ironically, undemocratic) because it includes both a parliamentary democracy and a council of heads of states- because no European nation would trust decisions made by a shared parliament without having them vetted by their own national governments.

There should have been a major push in education to form citizens that would be at least able to understand each others- there wasn't, at least in part of the EU. Damn, we have major EU members that decide to wage wars on their own, it's inconceivable.

So how do you convince the citizens of rich, disciplined countries, to get money out of their pockets to heavily subsidize the citizens of other countries, speaking a different language, with autonomous armies, different legal systems, completely separate political class, very limited transfers of people across borders (and mainly in one direction, north)?

/rant :)

Most of your skepticism of inter-EU wealth transfers applies equally to intra-EU wealth transfers from metropolitan to rural areas.

I live in one of the wealthiest NUTS3[1] regions in the EU. Why should I be paying higher taxes to send someone's kid living in the boonies in my country to school? Let's just form a city-state instead. We even have a handy historical defensive wall we could resurrect for that purpose.

Of course most people would think that's absurd, but it's worth mentioning since this notion that you should subsidize your "countrymen" was once just as novel as the idea that the Dutch should subsidize the Greeks is to some today.

You're only taking this for granted for nation states because you grew up in the era of nation states. There's no intrinsic reason for why someone born in the EU area in 2100 wouldn't find the idea that you shouldn't engage in wealth transfers within that area as quaint as the idea that we should being going back to city-states is today.

I think if anything what the WTO, NAFTA, EU etc. show is that in the future the idea that you need to sign up for some "package deal" of a nation state for everything from tariffs to defense will be viewed as too monolithic.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Map_of_G...

> Most of your skepticism of inter-EU wealth transfers applies equally to intra-EU wealth transfers

I know very well the issue because it's been at the center of a bitter north- south dispute in Italy for decades. (the rich, productive north complains that too much money has been given to the south without appreciable results).

But in the national case the transfers are decided at national level, the regions have no say in it; if there are protests, a national police keeps order. The tax money is collected by state entities, and then redistributed to the regions. There have been pushes to partly change this, but there is also a strong cultural resistance because there is a sense of national unity, of shared history, cultural and family ties, and a historical foundational myth.

All this stuff is weak or non-existent for the EU as a community. It's not impossible in principle, it's simply not there now, and given all the differences- especially linguistic- it seems that it's going to take a long time and a lot of effort to create, provided that there is even the will to do so.

I don't think we fundamentally disagree. I agree that it's possible, it's just that there is going to be a lot of resistance along the way and that the national governments, which still hold the majority of the power in the EU and are still the intermediaries between their citizens and EU institutions, will be extremely cautious in implementing such a system without a complete support from their citizens.

Ah, 2100 is very, very far away. I'm not sure we can wait that long.

Even with Spanish and English, the US has a few issues. The EU has 23. Out of interest, after these 'multiple human generations' how many languages do you think the single nation will be speaking? You have an opinion. Fair enough but will it be a democratic decision to make the transition? One thinks of 2005, when on a turnout of 69% of French votes, 55% rejected the EU Treaty. It was accepted nevertheless.

The problem is that EU bureaucrats are too impatient to wait multiple generations, therefore they try to speed up the process by schemes like inviting few millions immigrants from Africa and Middle East and then forcing member states to take them, to undermine their national identity. Or try to enforce the same EU wide standards regarding controversial topics such as LGBT rights, abortion, etc. Which of course causes backlash, effectively being counterproductive.

Oh no, come on. And by the way, if things keep going like they have, we can't wait multiple generations. We have at most one decade to fix things before they explode.

I think that's an overly conspiratorial view. I agree with your analysis in part but I don't think the EU is doing these things deliberately to undermine, it's more that it's their philosophy (which IMO is counter to the interests of the average european).

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