Push has come to shove and has been shoving for nearly a decade. Europeans continue to be incapable. As a Canadian I wish they were not, but they are.
I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country.
And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in.
Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
If you live in the country you can vote. If you don’t live in the country you can’t vote. Simple.
No taxation without representation.
But the real joke has to be to vote for laws for others (not you) to be subjected to.
Representation without obligation (e.g. to be drafted) is even wilder.
Goes to show that voting based on a passport is silly.
Participating in local elections is often allowed.
If someone has been living and working in a country for a long time that should be enough to let them vote in national elections, regardless of what citizenship they have.
Not willing to change your citizenship is a sign of not integrating fully, in not being completely loyal to the country and to its citizens.
Imagine that both countries start a war between each other - who are you going to support? Whoever you choose does not matter, the fact remains that you would have to choose, legally speaking. Why should your current living country give the strongest possible leverage to an untegrated potential agent/supporter of the foreign country?
Highest privileges should be given to people who decided to be fully in, in both good and bad. You can't be allowed to only cherrypick the good stuff: "I want to vote, but I don't want to be drafted to be killed in a war".
And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.
Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
That has always been the case. I don't see how that would justify giving up our independence to become a province of a super state.
Secondly, using Russia a bogeyman to justify giving up our national rights is not a really convincing argument.
Russia hasn't been able to conquer a third of Ukraine in the last 3 years and it's economy is in shambles, yet we are supposed to believe that only a European super state can save us from it? That makes no sense.
But each to their own, those who want to give up their national rights, identities and shared cultural heritage should go ahead and integrate this super state and those who do not should be able to stay out of it.
I guess fundamentally we have a different view of what Europe should be.
I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.