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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

Why? Joining up with a bloc that has so vastly different values between its members, with multiple points of internal chaos - Greece, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Poland, Sweden - raised against it. An army an an anthem that nobody asked for, when they just wanted a single market. A single nation able to admit anyone they like, who become citizens and therefore able to immigrate to any other nation - it's very clear there are many downsides of EU membership. Not just for the UK but for everyone else.

Keep in mind I was a Remain campaigner - you can find the submissions to HN back in 2016 if you check my post history.

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So could you name some of the disadvantages that no longer apply with this agreement?

we've taken back control!!1! /s

My post didn't mention the agreement. It was about leaving. The advantages of leaving are in the post you're replying to.

If you see the EU just as a trade relationship then of course there are some things that look out of place. But there are several other incentives for being part of a supranational arrangement such as the EU: safety in numbers (hi Russia), trade negotiation weight (Canada, China, Mercosur, .. ), standardisation power (DIN has become global status in some ways (think paper) and ISO is often led by EU)), rulesetting power (think GDPR, what other non-US legislation has such global impact on the internet?). Germany and France still have a small say on the global scale without the EU, but Slovakia or even Poland or Spain do not - as a single block they are less flexible but can bring their weight to bear.

Not to mention that still today a key narrative of EU membership is the EU as a peace project. After 2000+ years of unending war western Europe has not had a single border conflict since WW2. That's in large part due to the EU and it's predecessors.

A civil war disintegrated Yugoslavia. Is a conflict that created a border a border conflict?

I would suggest that aggressive expansionism eastwards from the EU (and NATO) has done more to create an issue with Russia and more to gift power to Putin than any other factor. It's been far from a peacemaker on the macro scale.

I would agree with the standards body part. Although I would question why you need a parliament, senate, executive, judiciary, foreign policy etc to act as a standards body and to implement a free trade area and free movement area.

If the EU had not expanded eastwards we would have the same issues as we do now.

Only 1000km westwards.

What safety in numbers? France helped both Britain and Argentina during the Falklands War [0].

The Dutch did give GCHQ strong hints about how to break Argentine encryption though [1].

The EU did nothing during the war in Yugoslavia, and nothing when Russia annexed Crimea.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17256975

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/18/maximator_euro_spy_al...

The EU did not exist in 1982. Its predecessor, the EEC, was more like a trade-bloc and lacked any sort of foreign-policy cooperation. The creation of the EU in 1993 was supposed to improve this state of things, and it did - in a lot of situations, the EU now speaks with one (bigger) voice. It might not be as loud as some would like (partially because the UK pushed hard to water down anything defence-related, for fear it would supercede the NATO setup they prefer), but it's there.

Similar considerations apply for the Balkan wars, that started before the EU existed.

On Ukraine: it's not like the US did anything either. Ukraine is not an EU member. The responsibility for guaranteeing Crimea's security, under the Budapest memorandum, sat squarely with the US and... the UK.

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