It’s a system in progress, and we need to be invested in its ideals (fair, just, democratic)
That being said, as somebody coming from east too and seeing clearly all the direct and indirect benefits of EU, its far from ideal. The whole concept of central planning resembles old east communist block when soviets forced down our throats whatever they pleased (we had to refuse Marshall's plan, they took all of our uranium reserves for free for which more appropriate term is stealing, and many many other cases) and that's an association many older people have knee-jerk reaction of.
I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences.
I’m a globalist and think nationalism and regionalism should be relics of the past and I keep getting put in the same box as nationalists because I am Euro-realist.
With this frame of mind I think the EU politicians are shit at building the foundations for a truly globalized civilization and the current system devalues entire areas of the continent both of natural resources as well as human resources.
It's not realism to believe the EU can't exist within or facilitate your idealised frame of reference (assuming it makes sense and is something people should want), it's just negativity.
> I wish people would stop attributing our attitude to nationalistic resurgences.
Quite frankly nationalistic resurgence is the #1 indicator for "euro realism", so this is a very reasonable stance to take.
As a citizen of the EU, I am arguing for the debureaucratization of institutions, for capital unlocking in proper ventures, nuclear energy, and the appropriate handling of countries from which human capital is departing faster than some war-torn ones. Frankly, I don't give a damn that some people might perceive this as 'negativity' on a forum when I have (hopefully) an entire life to live under this construct.
> Quite frankly nationalistic resurgence is the #1 indicator for "euro realism", so this is a very reasonable stance to take.
Quite frankly, if you're going to shove me, against evidence, in the nationalist insurgence "euro realism" and then claim it as a reasonable stance to take. I'm not sure where that leaves me in this debate. Argue with your constructed image of me all you want.
The Brexit debate seems to have polarised the whole issue into either you hate the EU and everything it stands for, or you think the EU is perfect and if it wasn't for these damn national governments then we could live in utopia.
Unfortunately my country is no longer part of this project, but I hope that pro-EU people take on board some of the valid criticism of the institution and make the necessary changes. Otherwise, what happened here will inevitably happen elsewhere.
That's a mischaracterization. "Most" would have accepted that there was (and is) room for improvement, but "terribly disfunctional" is an extreme term. The view that the whole institution had to be reinvented has always been a very English idea, based on the fact that some key policies (like agricultural support) benefited other countries over Britain. Most of the continent, much more pragmatically, always understood that the EU is fundamentally a set of compromises that will continue to expand. As such, it can look confusing from a distance, but once you unpack it, the compromises actually make sense (or are the only possible way towards cooperation among such different peoples). Britain benefited hugely from infrastructure support programs, for example.
The EU has always been kept together more by the sheer will of European middle-classes at large, than by this or that particular set of rules. National governments are in a constant state of tension with something that they see as a new competitor for the absolute power they enjoyed for centuries. This will likely continue to be the case for a very long time.
The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average.
Public polling has generally shown other countries - including Italy, Greece and France - have an approximately similar (or worse) opinion of the EU than we did. There's a significant chance that Sweden would have ended up having a referendum on membership if we hadn't, but how terribly it's gone for us has put off many of the eurosceptics elsewhere. During the worst of the Eurozone crisis, there were many who genuinely thought that the entire bloc would - or should - collapse.
I also think people here do understand it's a set of compromises. The question for many is whether the set of compromises has become too large and unwieldly. The common view of eurosceptics in the UK was that the scope had crept too far, and that we could gain most of the benefits through a normal trade agreement without having to compromise on aspects like agriculture, fisheries, immigration control and ceding control over national law and third party trade. I think so far this is not going well, but it's still an open question.
What you point out about Brits not understanding EU press is touching on an major issue a lot of people had with it: how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language, and can't understand each other's press? A common aspect of countries with poorly functioning democracies is they don't have a common culture or language. Whenever I've needed information about the EU, it's always been difficult to find because the EU websites are poor and the source material is often in French or another language that I can't understand.
I absolutely agree that the compromises are necessary for the EU to function in its current state. However, perhaps the EU scope has become too large given how disparate the members are? If your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA, does it really make sense to compromise by living on a boat in the Atlantic? Or is it better to just be friends instead...
The UK is the only country where significant chunks of the elites kept explicitly advocating for (and are now putting in practice) a future outside the bloc. I'm Italian, and with all the usual complaints about this or that policy, Italian elites have never seriously considered backtracking on the project - because they all realize that the European nation-state is dead meat in the age of continent-sized superpowers. Of course they'll bitch and moan that they can't currency-inflate their way out of economic crisis anymore, but that is it; once Eurozone institutions are tweaked to allow for more fiscal transfers across the Union, as it's slowly happening, there won't be any real reason to leave.
Same basically goes for French elites - with the last humiliation in Mali a painful reminder of their actual standing in this brave new world. The only country with a potential future outside the bloc is Germany, but they benefit from it so much in practice that it's never going to happen.
> how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language
This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Any decently-educated European is bilingual, these days, to a decent level.
It's more about insularity of the intellectual and political classes in this or that country. Probably because of the overabundance of cultural production coming from the US, the UK outside London is extremely insular. Pretty much any continental elite-person will consume The Economist and the Financial Times in addition to their local press; whereas the UK intellighentsia hardly every touches any continental press.
> f your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA
When the alternative is being overrun by Russian tanks and American F15, yes, the Atlantic island will have to do. We will all bitch and moan, sure, but we'll get on it.
Farage's influence was minimal until he managed to position himself as the leader of the British anti-EU movement, which as far as British political movements go, was as close to a grassroots movement as it gets. Few of the mainstream Conservative political elite were pushing for Brexit until it became increasingly apparent that they were losing votes to UKIP based on the anti-EU sentiment that had been boiling under the surface for the better part of half a century. The nature of our political and voting system is that the two major parties tend to try and placate the extremes to diminish their influence. There's a lot to dislike about how that system works, but historically that has resulted in a relatively stable political system. Once this discontent reached a certain level, Cameron decided to gamble the future of the country to save the Conservative party, thinking they'd easily walk the referendum and kill the grassroots opposition - but despite almost every major mainstream political influence being on the side of remain, leave won.
There is clearly a certain amount of Russian influence, dodgy money and disinformation that pushed us that direction, but honestly I think it's overstated. Without it, maybe it would have gone 52/48 the other way, but clearly it was going to be very close no matter what. The EU has never sat right with a lot of people across the entire political spectrum for many of the same reasons it's unpopular with both the left and right in other European countries. I suspect if France was to have a similar referendum, the results would be similarly uncomfortably close - even if Frexit ultimately lost.
Arguably the main difference between the UK and other European countries is our political mainstream tends to shift more to placate the extremes and stop them becoming a mainstream force in their own right. This is evident in how UKIP/BNP/BXP are now irrelevant again and have no representation, whereas AFD, SD, M5S, RN and others are still significant forces in European politics. I would bet money that if we had a different voting system, Brexit wouldn't have happened. Whether or not our voting system's trade-offs are the correct ones or not is certainly debatable (and I personally vote for voting reform at any opportunity), but our system has served us well throughout history and one must always be careful about changing something so fundamental to a successful democracy.
What also emboldens the UK is that despite no longer being an Empire, it still is a very powerful country in its own right. Irrespective of how much of that power we dumped by leaving the EU, we're still permanent members of the UNSC, members of G7, FVEY, somewhere between #5 and #7 in global GDP, one of the strongest militaries, one of maybe two or three global force projection blue water navies, one of five NPT designated nuclear weapon states, one of the top countries for education, business and media output, have one of the world's two global cities, etc. If Sweden had a similar level of global relevance, the equation there might be substantially different too.
Another reason other countries haven't left the EU is that the EU was intentionally designed to make it hard to leave. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the people who wrote those protocols have stated such. Obviously part of the point of the EU was to make us interdependent so we don't start killing each other again.
> This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English.
Not only is this a huge waste of time (and thus I would argue reduces the overall quality of the output of EU institutions - which is certainly extremely poor compared to UK government resources), the quality of those translations were often questionable. It was not uncommon for me and European friends to find pages where the pages would say something subtly different depending on what translation you were reading.
But I would argue that it's not just about EU institutions, but rather for it to be a strong union you need to have an understanding about the domestic policies, culture and general goings-on within the other countries within the union. The UK has almost no cultural overlap with somewhere like Romania, which makes it hard for British people to accept that level of immigration and integration. Imagine every US state had a different language. Even if they also all spoke English as a second language, it's hard to imagine that would be as strong of a union as it currently is.
And of course, many EU citizens speak other languages, but most commonly they speak their native language, intermediate English and then sometimes a tertiary regional language (e.g. Finns speaking Swedish). NW continental Europe tends to be a bit better, with places like Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland often being conversational in 3 or 4 languages, but that's not particularly representative of the whole EU. Europe is still very much a continent where people don't understand each other particularly well.
As for the UK intelligentsia not touching European press, bilingual ones certainly do - but in general, why would we? It obviously doesn't make sense to learn German to read BILD. Anything important gets translated into English, and between our own press and the rest of the English speaking world, we have access to more quality media and news than we could possibly hope to consume in our lifetimes. Such is the nature of natively speaking the world's dominant language: no other languages reach a critical level of importance that we generally ever bother to learn them well. Personally speaking, if I was to learn another language, it would be either Spanish or Mandarin, neither of which would probably help me out too much in European matters...
Most of the important discussions about EU are not held in English. I think a good part of the negative talk about EU in the English speaking sphere comes from English (Who have different needs than continental, or eastern Europe) talking with Americans (Who understand the EU even less).
A lot of the moderate, compromise analyzing discussions will not be perceptible in English, because it will be held in French, German, Italian, Spanish, etc...
how, exactly?
compared to UK government expenditure: the funding from EU programs are a rounding error
the block grant to Scotland in 2019/20 was £32 billion, whereas EU RDF was €1.8 billion for 2014-2020
or put another way: the UK block grant provides Scotland more than 128x more the EU funding over the same period
put another way: EU funding is 0.78% of that provided by the UK, which I think is fair to describe as a rounding error
additional points:
1. the RDF only exists because of Westminster: the UK government made it a condition when it joined the EEC in 1972
2. EU funds spent in the UK are funds from Westminster as the UK is (well, was, thankfully) a net contributor
(as a general observation: innumeracy amongst ultra-remainers seems to be very common)
Is it though? All you did was express this opinion, you didn't prove anything. Also, multiple different indicators can correlate spuriously.
Why should we stop? Where I live (NW Europe) this sentiment is almost exclusively echoed by members of the refreshed "neoconservative/nationalistic" right wing parties.
Other parties also have their qualms about government institutions, of course, but for different reasons and expressed with different attitudes.
Continuous support of Germany to autocrats is so widely known it even has a name, stabilocracy meaning that a country is ruled by an autocrat that is favourable to German and by extension EU business.
Most blatant support to that kind of leadership happens to be when the German PM and EU commissioners congratulated Serbia on its EU path often just days after some protest or antidemocratic measures done by the Serbian dictator. Or the support that Quinta gave to constitutional amendments which reinforced the control of the current regime over the judicial branch.
Most significant incident was definitely in 2012 when Serbia had tight elections on all levels including parliamentary and presidential elections. The problematic part was that German PM at the time congratulated the new president even before the polls were officially closed. I'm not saying that Germany is the EU but various EU commissioners were not much better over the years, praising Serbian EU path days after controversial anti-democratic actions by the government. Lately this has began to change but it's a little bit late, Serbian president consolidated power not unlike Orbán or Putin.
All this has contributed to lowest support for EU ascension among Serbian population in a generation.
As shown in Hungary for example, that democracy is still very fragile.
The goal of the EU is to remain a partner for now and see that democracy mature and stabilize. As can be seen that the main economic partners are from Europe.
But they are still very dependant on Russia ( more than average) for gas, for example.
What reasons / attitudes / sentiment are you referring to?
> [...] ineffectual administration [...]
Those two words are verbatim what our right-wing parties use to describe the EU as a whole, especially when arguing why we should do our own Brexit and leave the union because we are better on our own.
If this is another "dog whistle" argument, I think you need far more evidence before you smear another user what you assume their motivations are; It's possible to use terminology borrowed from right-wing parties, language is free to use - and ThalesX has explicitly stated their position.
Why should we stop? Where I live (NW Europe) this sentiment..
1. The "ex"-communist and neomarxist parties became enlightened democrats and the conservatives changed to nationalistic anti democrats.
2. Something changed within the EU, which made it a suitable environment for "ex"-communist and neomarxist to thrive in and reminded the conservatives what was it like to live under old communist regimes.
I think the number 2 is the right explanation. The news about undemocratic Poland, Hungary and occasional other eastern-southern countries is mostly spreading through leftist western media by activist reporters who take for granted what their leftist activist colleagues from eastern countries are feeding them. For a person who reads newspapers in both parts of Europe, that fact is painfully obvious. Throw in some leftist activist MPs (like Sophie in 't Veld) and good old geopolitical power struggles and the world quickly becomes black and white (us vs them).
Unfortunately the communist ideals are very much alive and well, especially in those countries where communism arose from within, without an external force.
Socialism, by definition, is democratic workers' control of the means of production. A socialist dictatorial state is therefore an oxymoron.
If the state itself is controlled by a violent maniac (Stalin, Mao, etc.), and the state owns and controls every aspect of society, including the means of production of course, then there is simply no logical connection to socialism.
The USSR and China claim(ed) they are are democratic and socialist states. The "democratic" part is obviously a lie, and was ever since the beginning, since Lenin stole the revolution - and everyone of course knows this. Why then do people believe the "socialist" part?
There was a running joke in communist countries on this subject too:
There was once an important communist dignitary who was treating a sick cow. After the cow died, he said: "What a shame, I had so many more ideas to try!".
This isn't a changing of goalposts, it is simply ignoring obvious lies and propaganda from a regime famous for its lack of regard for the truth.
The Soviets (factory committees) at best held some sway during the early days of the revolution, before Lenin seized power. By the time Stalin replaced Lenin they were long since just a propaganda tool, hollowed out of any democratic control whatsoever and turned to a simple bureaucratic management unit entirely controlled by the party hierarchy.
This is the 2nd post ignoring the fact that I have declared I am, in fact, not a member of such a group. Assuming that I'm lying, you'd be correct in holding your stance. Considering I am not lying, you are basically closing in the door to communication and possible expansions of subject matter from someone that's really not an extremist in any sense of the word.
That would make you de facto member even if you're not de iure member.
e: and based on Paradox of Tolerance, shutting down communication with anti-system efforts might be the only way. You can't be tolerant to intolerance, you can't be democratic to anti-democracy, etc.
I'm quite surprised that so many don't realize that there exists an entire category of people that are not radical, but do hold opinions on some reforms that should be taken, including the quote that started this conversation "our ineffectual administration".
Speaking of ineffectual administration - I think it might be hard for some people to grasp that any bureaucracy is going to look inefficient. The point of bureaucracy is to replace ad-hoc decision making with a repeatable, documented, audited and justifiable process. Ad-hoc "the dictator decides" is always going to be faster.
Different groups can support the same policies for entirely different, and mutually exclusive reasons.
That kind of gas-lighting should not have place on HN. That's unfair and dismissive generalization.
We, Europeans from west and east, center, north and south walked blind into privacy abuse. If awareness coincides with increase of nationalist movement in Europe and US, that is not a correlation.
There's also a noticeable increase in right wing terrorism, which appears to take place more in WE than EE ("measured by overall volume of right-wing terrorism, Germany and Italy, the two former World War II Axis powers, lead the way"), where most targets show that the substantial majority of right-wing terrorist attacks have been aimed at immigrants and Muslims [1]. Possible explanations include the displacement of people from conflict zones like Syria and Afghanistan, but also the fact that most migrants in Europe are economic migrants, which means that they go from less economically developed countries to more developed ones, thus from EE to WE, which is why the rise of nationalism is higher in WE than EE. This, of course, is but speculation on my part, especially since countries like Hungary, Poland and Czechia have behaved rather poorly in this respect, on par with Austria, Italy and the UK.
Plenty to discuss here and there's a lot of information available, but I doubt we can simply point to EE and consider the matter closed, since this seems to be a global phenomenon.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-36130006 [1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/countering-radical-right/we...
Speaking as an American (and a Swissman), the country that has done the most to undermine the EU has been Germany. First with austerity. Next by hyperventilating over nuclear. Then by implementing the results of said hyperventilation by vacillating over Russia. Almost pathologically, it has been Berlin putting its interests ahead of Europe that has caused Brussels’ stumbles.
If these issues weren’t blocked (nor the common defence and deposit insurance schemes) nationalism in Eastern Europe wouldn’t be as pressing.
This is seriously an uncool statement. Such generalisations, are both unethical and unfounded.