Germany's army is barely functional.
What we need is a small, well trained and equipped, EU army and a disbanding of the national armies. It makes no sense that each EU member has their own army.
What we need is a small, well trained and equipped, EU army and a disbanding of the national armies. It makes no sense that each EU member has their own army.
I understand why someone who wants to create a "united states of europe" would want that, but why would the member countries ever agree to that?
In fact it lets 27 others co-decide on their economy, social policy, foreign policy, and so on, with some top dogs like Germany getting undue influence, the very top dogs individual countries fought hard to push back in two worlds wars...
So that the people of European nations would give up the sovereignty their ancestors and them fought hard to gain, for a bureaucratic federal scheme nobody asked for (it was built and promoted by bureaucrats and force-fed with promises, threats, and bribes) that prioritizes the top dogs (Germany, to a lesser degree France) to smaller countries detriment?
Well, Europeans powers fought twice among them in the 20th century. And in its beginning many said the exact same thing (there was even a popular book called "The Great Illusion" about how a great war in Europe is no longer conceivable, because peace and commerce). Similarly, after the collapse of the USSR a Japanese-American thinker smugly wrote about the 'End of history'. We saw how that turned out...
The main reason Europeans powers have stopped in-fighting in the latter part of the 20th century is because they were devastated by the previous wars, in the process of losing their colonial empires (and like Britain, France, etc) and so had their concerns elsewhere, e.g. France in "Indochina". Some were also under control (from USSR), and Germany was split into two and under US and USSR supervision. The power balance had shifted between the US and USSR, so there was little at stake for the European powers to fight, even if they had the might.
If more things get at stake, including after long and deep recessions, perceived or real threats to sovereignty, resources, etc, in a troubled climate-change-hit late 21st century, all bets are off.
>No, so that Europeans don't pay extra taxes for duplicate stuff.
The EU only makes sense if it's a shared political and cultural vision (which at the moment it's not).
If European countries want to avoid "extra taxes" and want to think of their economic interest, then should probably do the inverse, and split from the EU (keeping only the trade deals), so that they have their own local currency they can control, instead of a currency that's tuned to Germany's economy (or to some compromise that either hurts the weak economies or the strong ones).
If NATO didn’t exist though, the other guy is right: you want one military with one chain of command. The more fractured you guys are, the more ineffective any kind of unified military you create will be because you have to convince Frenchmen and Spaniards it is worth dying for Poles and Hungarians and vice versa.
It's as unelected as the US Supreme Court is - which means - technically unelected, but definitely reflective of the wishes of the electorate via the people they elect to populate it.
I think it's one of their greatest fears ( Russia, Turkey, USA)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/21/emmanuel-macro...