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Comment by ovi256 | Hacker News Reader

It has always surprised me that the 'free world', NATO countries, developed countries (including Japan, Taiwan, Australia), however one wants to call them, do not have at least free trade, if not free movement of people and capital, between them.

A travesty, IMO. And a great loss making us all poorer. Not a patchwork of point-to-point free trade agreements, but several hub agreements that countries join, and, in time, the hubs agree to free trade between them too.

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I guess that's what the EU is trying to be.

The EU is specifically European - its in the name. Many of the arguments for the Eu that came up during Brexit were based on the importance of geographical proximity and shared culture.

> The EU is specifically European - its in the name.

I don't disagree, but by this standard North Korea is a democratic republic, and Turkey's membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is a bit odd.

The EU has also been pushing for free trade agreements, tho (the Canada one, mercosur, the abortive US one).

Yes,but it also does not want more than free trade with anyone outside Europe.

The politics of this is grindingly difficult; people think of "them and us", not "we're all together in three free world". Achieving free trade means either dismantling all the little market carve-outs that local politics relies on, or enshrining them in the collective (EU farming policy).

Imagine trying to integrate the politics of Japanese rice farming into the CAP.

The schengen zone is exactly this hub agreement isn't it?

IIRC schengen zone is about people, not about goods. There are like 10 almost overlaping zones. This is a map recently posted by amenghra:

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1tda6wl/european_in...

Even this one understates it; it’s missing the special customs zone with Turkey.

And from another comment, they should add Eurovision too :)

And there are the frontiers of Northern Ireland and Gibraltar.

Is Schen-zen a city in China?

Edit: The OP wrote 'schenzen' instead of 'schengen' before. That was the joke. Invisible now.

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