Comment by jeanjogr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeanjogr | Hacker News Reader

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There are three things.

First, being part of a larger whole may have material advantages that are not directly related to money or security. A good example is free travel between countries.

The second point is that people actually believe in their morals. That is not to say that all "moral" arguments are made in good faith - sometimes they are thinly veiled economic (or else) arguments. But people generally believe in their morals. If I - for instance - believe that people are endowed by their Creator of inalienable rights, I may favor institutions that support such rights, and the EU may be more effective at that that nation states. If I believe that all Europeans are brothers and should decide their fate together, I will favor a strong EU. I wager that the reasons most Americans believe that the US should not be split in different regions has very little to do with how much more or less money they would make if the US was to be divided. Don't quite recall Lincoln's speech on the GDP implications of the South secession. Morals matter.

Finally, not everything is zero sum. It is possible that everyone wins from the recovery fund, or that benefits for those that benefit are greater than the losses from those who lose.

I have found that free travel in the sense of going somewhere to live is done generally for economic purposes. I have done it and benefited from it myself multiple times. Some existing residents might complain about jobs going missing, others might invoke the benefits of diversity to the economy. Neither argument is right nor wrong, and all are based around personal perceptions of economics and national interest, with which economics correlate. National interest has multiple facets. One is the real ability of a country to exact influence over others, another is the wishes of its citizens and government.

I am not sure whether you are claiming that this exists, but having visited and lived in multiple places in the EU (including outside of the UK), I never felt that people had a sense of an EU-wide brotherhood. People are generally quite worried about that sort of thing for obvious reasons, and culture varies sufficiently over the EU to make such a thing difficult. When discussing the influence of people's morals over their arguments over national interests, you also have to consider the context of people's morals: which agents impose them (either explicitly or implicitly) and the motives behind their imposition. I don't mean to use the word "agent" in a necessarily negative tone. An agent could just be your mum. However, when you look at more powerful agents than your mum, such as the education system, Instafacetwit, newspapers and the law, people's morals start to gain a greener hue (in dollars).

Also I fully agree that a subset of players in the environment might all come out in the money.

There is a very common "going somewhere to live" in the EU that is not done for economic reasons, namely Erasmus where the motivation is a year of partying while ostensibly studying. Those Erasmus stints often turn into another move abroad for another non-economic reason: having met a partner from another EU member state while studying abroad.

Mobility in the EU from East to West may be done mainly for better job prospects, but there are definitely other reasons that people take advantage of free movement.

Yes, jumping university and country for a year to get paid by the EU for boozing and schmoozing has a definite draw for a lot of Europeans. Why shouldn't it? Foreigners are also at an advantage when it comes to finding a not necessarily long-term partner. I am slightly bitter about it though. I moved into a flat as a non-Erasmus person that later turned out to be the local Erasmus party destination during a period when I was much less into partying and more into studying. No partners were found from that pool.

I do remember having a lot of political discussions with them, though.

I never felt that people had a sense of an EU-wide brotherhood.

This is totally a thing. People identify as all kinds of things, and many people identify as Europeans. Hard to put a number on a feeling of identity, though, and hard to tell if it's increasing or decreasing.

I agree that it's hard to measure. The word "brotherhood" has certain connotations for me. The first result on Google for "European Brotherhood" confirmed my feelings, but maybe doesn't speak for the majority.

Well, you chose the word. I understood you to mean people having a common identity as a European, in addition to their many other identities (dad, poet, Belgian, whatever). Which I would say is a common thing.

If you were referring to membership of the neo nazi organisation/web shop European Brotherhood, which is a thing that apparently exists, I don't think you need to worry about pan-European-nationalism becoming a mass phenomenon (as opposed to separatist nationalism, which is and has always been a mass phenomenon).

I was referring to "If I believe that all Europeans are brothers" in the parent comment. I have not experienced that sentiment. I certainly never experienced pan-European nationalism until I came across that website.

I identified as a European, that has been taken away from me.

The immigration/refugee deal the EU made with Turkey made quite clear that morals don't matter as much as economy.

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