Hacker News Reader

Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

"ideology of moral purpose and historical necessity"

Incidentally, that sounds a lot like the ideology that sustains the existence of the EU now.

Of course, the EU empire works in a different way; economic hostility towards outsiders (high tariffs and compliance cost when importing anything), access to a big common market and a lot of subventions for the insiders. It might be the first attempt to build an empire on money only.

Edit: This seems to be a very controversial comment, swinging from 3 to -2 within mere minutes.

View on HN

Well it's very incidental. The EU is a completely voluntary association. There are those that left freely and there are others who want to join and its powers and purpose is driven by treaties agreed by all members.

Being a colony of the British empire was nothing like this and the quote explains a justification for expansionist military imperial behaviour which has no analogue that I can see in the way the EU was formed.

"The EU is a completely voluntary association."

Not for the members who accepted euro as a currency. There is literally no legal way out of the euro, it is meant to last forever. And a country leaving the EU, but staying in the eurozone as a full member is a completely unchartered territory.

Laws are only binding on sovereign states to the extent they choose to follow. Any Euro zone country could simply change their internal laws to adopt a different currency. The EU has no way to stop that, although they could potentially impose some sanctions.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, it's exactly right. Poland agreed to adopt the Euro as one of the conditions of being accepted, and then the global financial crash happened and basically said you know what guys, we won't be doing that after all. If a country wants to stop using Euro they absolutely can - it was proposed as one of the solutions to the issue of Greek national debt, them going back to the lira, it didn't go through for many reasons but it definitely wasn't because "there's no legal way". There absolutely is.

The euro is based on a treaty, and that treaty has zero provisions for countries leaving it.

Maybe the best expression would be "there is no legally defined, binding procedure for leaving the euro". Which means that whoever tries this first must expect a wild ride with absolutely nothing to lean against.

Greece's own currency was the Drachma. The Lira belonged to Italy.

Lira is also the currency of Turkey. Perhaps that's what they were referring to.

Really, really doubt Greece was considering adopting the Turkish lira as currency.

Yes, sorry, my mistake.

Sovereign countries can exit anything they decide to, unless overpowered by force.

Now the question is: are you still a sovereign country if you pooled your currency with N other countries that exert a common decision power through a central bank over it?

Having power over your own currency, in good or bad, is a typical attribute of being sovereign. There are minor exceptions (like Kosovo adopting euro unilaterally), but they are very untypical.

It's a very common practice for economies to peg their sovereign currency to a trading partner; there are on the order of 66 countries pegged to the US Dollar, and 20-odd pegged to the euro.

If a country wanted to move off of the euro, it would be pretty easy to create a sovereign currency pegged to the euro 1:1 by the countries central bank. Then in the future they could simply unpeg (or change the rate) if that became advantageous.

EU members aren’t fully sovereign. Some sovereignty is surrendered when joining the EU:

> "The EU law has primacy over national law and all decisions by the European Court of Justice, including orders for interim measures, are binding on member states’ authorities and national courts,” chief spokesperson Eric Mamer said.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-court-pola...

Also, a Eurozone country can’t abandon with Euro without leaving the EU.

The context here is comparing the the EU with the British Empire.

Statements like “The EU law has primacy over national law” make it pretty clear what it means to be a member of the EU.

Since you can exit, it's different.

Generally countries enter various nominally binding arrangements all the time, like ratifying UN treaties that are considered by courts to be part of national legislation etc. So "full sovereignty" in this sense is not so common.

(Also, EU law is drafted via a representational democracy system, so this use of power has an important quality of legitimacy that law handed down from the empire would lack)

The ability to leave doesn’t imply sovereignty.

There are non sovereign territories that have the right to become independent- but which are nonetheless non-sovereign.

"it would be pretty easy to create a sovereign currency pegged to the euro 1:1 by the countries central bank"

How will you protect the peg? If moving off the euro is taken as a sign of your weakness, defending the peg against the market shorting you will bleed your central bank dry.

IIRC, this was effectively what happened with the U.K. on Black Wednesday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

It’s easy to put a ceiling on your country’s currency trading range. The Swiss did this. Whenever the franc got too high their central bank would sell however much was necessary to stabilize the price.

And they stopped doing that because it wasn't maintainable.

Of course it was maintainable. They stopped doing it because the situation in the EZ more or less stabilized.

The Swiss central bank can always sell as many Francs as they want at any price that is below current bids and that’s always the case when defending an upside limit. They’re never going to run out of Francs to sell because they can issue without any technical limit.

Are you still a sovereign country when your currency is worth absolutely nothing and most internal transactions are done in a foreign currency? (case of several countries?)

"Having power over your own currency" is something not even the US has. Of course they're the hardest to push, but they don't have full control.

Were you forced to do that, or was that a sovereign choice? The answer lies there.

I am not even sure if we agree on the question, much less answer.

Some sovereign choices in history have proven to be "Hotel California"-style: joining a scheme was a sovereign choice, but leaving it not so much.

An obvious example is the US which does not let the constituent states secede, even though they joined the Union voluntarily. In a similar vein, Scotland joined the UK voluntarily (though in serious economic crisis), but it cannot just leave on its own when it decides to.

The process of joining the euro has been constructed as one-way only. There are no legal mechanisms to get rid of this obligation once you join. Euro is intended to last forever.

You're a sovereign country if you're able to sustain military control over your claimed territory. That's the only factor which really counts.

Of course you are. Unless somebody threatens to physically invade your country, your country can do whatever it wants. However there might obviously be trade/export/import sanctions etc.

Leaving the EU was impossible between the Treaty of Maastricht (1991) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009).

So for the majority of the EUs existence, leaving was impossible.

A country can leave the EU, if the EU decides to allow it.

That doesn’t sounds like a voluntary association. That sounds a lot more like an empire/country/protectorate.

I'd say almost all countries hold this view that what they do is justified by good intent, their higher moral values etc, whereas it doesn't apply to others. But it only becomes relevant if the country has actual power. The colonial Britain obviously had a lot of power so it's easy to find examples of "imperial delusions". The same is true for other countries today, or a union of countries. But the actual countries that are delusional change based on how much power they have at that time.

As long as "money" means "everyone's money" and not "money for oligarchs", then that's infinitely better than what nations and empires have historically been built on: ethnicity, religion, geography, tribal identity, etc. You basically described every modern nation since 1776, and explained the purpose of international trade agreements. Governments (ideally) exist to allow everyone to coexist and peacefully do business with each other and not hurt each other, and ideally the only points of contention are drawing the lines at which people are considering to be hurting one another. Ideally. In practice everyone falls short of course, but that's why ideals exist, to have goals to try to live up to.

Various oligarchs sucking from the subvention teat are absolutely everyday occurrence east of the Elbe. It seems to be a feature of the system.

Some of them even start or own big political parties.

Great Britain conquered other nations because of their ideology, that's completely different to the EU or which country did it conquer?

I do not see the EU even close as an empire. Are you perhaps British? Or Greek? The EU don't even have a common foreign policy or a cohesive monetary policy across its member countries. The EU is imo a protective "members only club" if you're in you get good deals if you're not then tough luck.

My guess he is Czech. I have heard similar sentiments from former East Bloc's.

I can't blame 'em.

I always find it surprising when people call Czech Republic or Poland "eastern block". Those two couldn't be possibly more central European if they tried. Czech Republic especially reaches only marginally more east than Germany, and I doubt you'd call Germans "eastern Europeans".

Historical reasons. For 40 years, the continent was split right in the middle. Back then, it was absolutely natural to speak about the Western Bloc and the Eastern Bloc, possibly with neutral Austria and Switzerland as the weird exceptions.

Of course there are huge differences between, say, Czechia and Moldova, but we were part of a single allied bloc controlled by a single power for two generations, so there are some similarities as well. You can see some of them until today in architecture etc.

I mean I'm Polish, and perhaps wrongly, but I have never thought about myself as Eastern European - for me that means Belarussians, Ukrainians, Romanians......for me "central European" is completely the right term for Poland, Slovakia and Czechia, but I understand it might not be the commonly accepted view.

I do not feel particularly Eastern either, but it is true that the former cohesion of Central Europe was broken into two by running completely different economic systems on parts of it. Bavaria, Czechia, Saxony and Austria used to be fairly tightly connected before 1945, now the differences between wealth of the formerly Western and formerly Eastern parts of the region are massive.

Eastern Bloc was about political alignment. And I said 'former'.

And citizens from the DDR were actually called East Germans or Ossies.

Which I find funny, maybe it's some form of Stockholm syndrome from the URSS days.

Obviously you are not a diplomat.

> economic hostility towards outsiders

Completely incomparable. Economic protectionism vs. invading, colonizing, and enslaving huge portions of the world.

Times have changed, methods have changed, too.

Google does not invade or colonize anyone and yet their control over spread of information is probably better than whatever former great powers could boast.

In the same way, countries like Greece can be kicked around by troika without a single shot fired.

In what sense was Greece kicked around? They could do whatever they wanted. But when they asked other countries for huge loans, naturally the lenders imposed some conditions to ensure repayment.

Greece was in a situation where it theoretically could do whatever it wanted, but practically most of the choices led to immediate chaotic bankruptcy and were even legally undefined. There was, for example, no legal way to reintroduce the drachma.

That is not a meaningful choice in my view. That is "standing with your back to a wall".

Yeah? Heard of the USA, China, India, Russia and pretty much any other regional and world power ever?

What makes you think India is building an empire?

I believe that they are focussed on lifting their masses out of poverty.

I think his point was demonstrating that the EU and militaristic and colonial empire of the former UK have very limited similarities other than they both represent entities with international economic power to some degree. A ridiculous notion in the context of history and reality.

He goes on to ask "what's your point?" which leads me to believe he knows how ridiculous his comparison is but is just making it in bad faith.

"making it in bad faith. "

No, I wanted him to actually list some counterpoints, not just asking pointed questions without concrete points. You cannot answer a "Ha, have you heard of X?" question in any meaningful way.

I keep seeing people claim there is no bad faith approach being made on their end on HN and instead flipping the accusation on another person and claiming their post is indecipherable, even when opposing person's argument is quite clear if even a small effort is taken to gleam meaning from it.

I'm not going to pretend that person spoke in hieroglyphs, and if you are, then it's clear you are speaking from a place of bad faith. I've even spelled it out to you and you've refused to address the original person posing the question and instead brow beat on what you think you can get away with regarding nettiquette - the most uninteresting part of the conversation possible.

You're misunderstanding me. The EU is no more of an empire than all of those nations.

It's just a new regional power and some people hate that. The same kind of people who would've been against pretty much any country back when it was formed.

Just thinking their small city state was enough. Hell, they would've been against city states, against tribes unifying, just against any society beyond their own tribe/family.

Small minded fools who blame everything on someone else. Usually anti-vaccine and anti-science in general, suspicious of any smart person in the world who tries to save and help their worthless stupid lives.

Who does that for no apparent reason, right? Why is Bill Gates spending billions on fighting diseases? Is he insane? No, clearly he has an ulterior motive. Just dumb.

Are we saying a country with 1.4bn people, 22 official languages, 5 major religions, over 100 ethnic groups isn’t an empire? Before the Raj, most of it was the Mughal Empire (1500-1800). Before that, the Delhi Sultanate, pretty definitely an empire (1200-1500). The only thing missing is the nomenclature.

How do you define an empire? Your definition is quite odd to me.

India is structured like the USA, a collection of states, with central and regional powers. But they are very much internally focused, and rarely venture into global politics. They don’t intend to colonize any other states, nor make any attempts at militarizing anything outside their borders.

I would find it hard to ever compare India to a British-like empire…

Do you believe it was an empire under the Mughals? If so, what's changed?

For starters, India now has a representative democracy? Empire usually means a monarchy.

Also, for Indians, organizing into such a distributed state->central structure was the only way to survive after the British (an actual empire) had finished their colonial destruction. The Mughals violently acquired multiple regional monarchies, to be ruled by their monarchy.

> India now has a representative democracy

So did the Romans for 500 years

It really seems to me that you’re arguing in bad faith, by making facetious statements with very little substance. I suggest you read up a bit more about these countries and their systems before we continue further, I don’t see much to be gained from this thread. Cheers!

There was no "India" before the British colonizers. So lets start from there.

Indeed I have. What is your point? Can you express yourself more clearly and without the passive-aggressive tone?

No, I don't argue with ridiculous shit.

> Of course, the EU empire works in a different way; economic hostility towards outsiders (high tariffs and compliance cost when importing anything), access to a big common market and a lot of subventions for the insiders. It might be the first attempt to build an empire on money only.

All of the states I listed do the same.

EU empire, my ass. Find something useful to do with your life.

I am no great fan of the EU, but the EU as a whole does not engage in much imperialism, besides that forced on it by the US.

Look at the Western Balkans. Russia, China, Turkey and the EU play a game of influence there, leading to some very weird spending. Given how the region usually works, bribes must be involved.

This definitely looks like low-key imperialism, because the EU does not really have a reason to pay for an absurdly expensive Chinese-built highway in Montenegro, other than limiting influence of a competing power in that territory.

"Very wierd spending" is not, in and of itself, imperialism.

The Western Balkans and Turkey are the EU's immediate neighbors. Does the EU seek influence over what happens in such neighbors? No doubt. Does that count as imperialism? Not so clearly.

Russia is a major power, with the potential to be a major energy and military threat to the EU. Does the EU seek to drive the outcome of interactions with Russia? No doubt. Does that count as imperialism? No.

The EU is an interesting creature. It's not exactly an empire, but it's not quite not an empire either (both when you look at intra-EU relations and relations with third countries), and it is definitely a club of many former imperial powers who get to collectively set global policy.

The British Empire was a pretty good go at building a money-focussed empire

True, but they willingly resorted to raw force if deemed necessary. I wonder if the EU is going to cross that Rubicon one day, too. There is a significant ideological penalty against it, because one of the founding ideas is that cooperation prevents wars.

As climate change affects more and more of Africa and the Middle East, we're going to see the EU drift towards more of a cohesive nation state by necessity. Just a few million refugees from Syria sparked a tide of far-right movements across Europe. Just wait 'til tens or hundreds of millions stand at the gates, representing an existential threat. It's almost an inevitability.

I'm not talking about tomorrow or next year. More on a timeline of 20-40 years when we start seeing more profound global upheavals. The nature of the EU will change too.

I don't think that German Greens and Orbán/Vox/Fratelli d'Italia are going to agree on the same approach to migration ever, even if millions stood at the gates. They are literally on the opposing sides of the spectrum.

German NGO ships explicitly supported by German churches and German politicians move people from the shores of Africa, while half of Italian political scene wants to lock them up.

It is now 6 years since the great migration crisis of 2015. There is no EU-wide consensus on anything substantial in the asylum and migration policy. All the proposals have proven themselves unworkable.

the EU is not an empire. and it’s members are loosely coupled at best. Look at what happened to the UK: they just got their toys and left.

the EU just does not have the cohesion to act like and empire and conquer anything. It’s more like a big market

So was the US once. All it takes is a big external or internal threat to get power centralized....

yes but no.

us was formed roughly around the same time (+/- couple hundred years).

the states in the EU have a long history (thousands of years) and a long tradition of doing things their way.

i’m not ruling out the possibility but I think it’s highly unlikely

Let's just hope it'll be done without a Civil War, then...

Every country resorts to force if it deems it necessary.

"Peace and prosperity from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Sahara to the Arctic Circle. A new Rome for a new age."

It tells me really quite a lot that your response to an article about the British empire is to bash Europe.

There is no "EU Empire" any more than the US is an empire composed of its states. The fact is that the EU is a political entity which confers (nominal) equality on its members. There's no colonial style relationship there at all. Nobody is being robbed of their rights except British people who can't use the ECJ anymore.

Have you mistaken me for a Brit? I am not and I never even visited Britain in my life.

From a random Czech point of view, EU is the most relevant big entity involved in my life right now, so of course it is on my mind, especially when the ideas of moral purpose and historical necessity are explicitly mentioned. That is the tenor of the pro-EU argumentation, yes.

As far as colonial style relationships go ... once again: this is an economic empire built on money and thus the colonial style relationships are built on money as well. Just look at the internal flows of money within the Union. A lot of the total profit accrues to big holdings in a few countries.

That’s certainly part of it.

But the EU is certainly an imperialist block in the purely economic sense as well, just like the US or Britain. After all, wealth is extracted towards the centre through the low wages of workers in the periphery (especially Eastern Europe).

The EU has always made substantial transfers from richer to poorer countries (though its budget is only about 1% of GDP.) Being in the EU has been pretty good for the Eastern European countries that joined, both purely financially and in securing their democracies, just as it was for Spain and Portugal which have made substantial progress in catching up with the likes of France and Italy since they joined in 1986.

Sadly the same can't be said for the single currency - which many Eastern European countries haven't yet joined. Greece is perhaps the main counterexample in that its GDP per capita is no higher compared to France than it was when it joined (its GDP dropped by a huge amount since the 2008 crisis.)

Imagine if something similar would have been possible in the Americas.

The transfers don’t even compare to how much our labour is exploited. The difference in wage for the same work is the main tool used for this. Another is forcing our countries into privatisation, deregulation and austerity.

We’re much worse off than before 89 and the EU is a large part of the reason why. Another is the IMF.

At least in GDP per capita terms, Poland has caught up with Portugal and Czechia has caught up with Spain.

Meanwhile Ukraine, which was not on the EU track and was about as rich as Poland in 1989, saw a much longer drop in GDP after 1989 and its GDP per capita is now just 1/3rd of Poland's.

It's difficult to imagine how Eastern European countries would have fared better had they not joined the EU.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com