All depends on what an associate member is of course.
Because you simply wouldn't be offered the option of just deescalating your full membership to an associate membership. If you want to leave, you leave fully, and then in time we can discuss what happens next. Also, obviously an associate membership shouldn't feel more desirable than full integration if you're eligible to both. Indeed from the UK's perspective it would be exactly the opposite to what they wanted: free labor and movement but no representation.
Almost like many of the EU states were misled into their current situations.
"Being misled" is obviously nonsense that deserves no further comment.
Which many people inside the EU would observe seems completely consistent with EU behaviour.
Edit to add: "Being misled" would refer to the way the EU was sold to many participants in earlier decades as an economic union, and not an all encompassing political one, with it simply ratcheting that way. Whenever objections occurred referenda would simply be repeated until the populations complied. It's far from the exercise in democracy that proponents promote. (This is distinct from saying it is _all bad_).
Human cooperation does not mean misleading your compatriots into deals that you then ratchet up ever further until it becomes completely intolerable.
There are reasons that in the long run flexibility wins.
Mostly, like, the right to have, say, your own standards on chemical safety, tho. That is generally not something that most people would _want_; it basically just means you lose your job because import/export becomes, if not impossible, at least bureaucratically expensive enough that people will just buy from elsewhere.
Of course the set of countries and level of integration depends on whom you ask
I am of the view the UK should never have joined as a full member, and it would have been better to establish the two speed membership way back then, allowing France and Germany particularly to engage in further integration without mutual interference involving the UK.
Presumably by "half of the EU" you mean (sometimes) euro-sceptic states like Hungary or Poland? Well, these are not in EU because some illuminati/lizard people tricked them into joining and now won't allow them to leave, like some of their politicians would like you to believe, but because they enjoy billions of subsidies per year.
This was even a joke in the UK at the time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYqB0uTKlE
The Brits have a habit of only telling you the precise truth when they think you think they're joking.
This wasn’t intentional of the people who started the cogs turning, it was meant to be an empty gesture to get elected, no one expected it to actually pass.
It was a deliberate choice by his successors to pursue a hard Brexit. A softer Brexit was always possible and likely would have been more acceptable to the EU, as it would have had less financial impact and disruption to trade.
The referendum was triggered by a failed negotiation between Cameron and the EU in the first place.
It has pissed off the EU (understandably), pissed off his own supporters, and pissed off his enemies.
The outcome of the negotiations may have affected the course of the Leave and Remain campaigns, but it was not the trigger for the referendum itself.
People don't exactly feel they agreed to the Boriswave either, and now when I am back visiting the UK it's noticeably the most racist it's ever been, by a very significant distance.
I'm in Canada now and Canada has the same dynamics going on.
It was neither. They wanted freedom of movement that was only one way. In fact they didn't know what they wanted because they were sold a bill of goods when it came to Brexit.
Especially if it was a reciprocal right.
One part of the answer is that some are more open to out of EU immigration than others. A while ago that was Germany who got 1 million plus of refugees and economic immigrants from Syria , Afghanistan and other non European countries.
Now it seems that Spain is that willing to take immigrants and of course also provide them citizenship after 3-5 years. So you may end up with a disproportionate amount of immigrants that come from Europe but are not really European in terms of looks and behaviour. I really fail to see how EU will continue unless far right wins all over Europe and a common restrictive immigration policy is agreed.
Yeah… well, then the fun really begins doesn’t it.
But you know that the EU has this basically leftish centrist ideology of equality mixed in with the neoliberal profit-motive of the soft right. That it’s overt rationalism is politically neutralising rather than centrist, that is to say extreme positions either side do not flourish and are ridiculed as irrational, shouted down, and discarded even if they represent the views of several million people across the bloc. That continued ignorance and attempt at rationalising by a minority of career politicians in the face of an increasingly irrational and polarised base is feeding the right and pushing it into more extreme positions, because at least the right will represent and say what the EU refuses to.
People were poor, wages had hardly grown after years of austerity following the 2008 crash. A huge campaign pointed the finger squarely at the EU: they are taking our money, they are the reason you’re poor, you would be richer without them.
People believed them.
One of the effects of Brexit is that EU popular solidarity has noticeably improved while the UK has gone in the opposite direction. That says a lot about Brexit.
That's a bit of a stretch
Cameron was trying to reduce the scope of EU integration with the UK (esp freedom of movement), with the threat he didn't want to use of a referendum, the EU said no (as the other commenter explained partly to disincentivize others, but also because they thought he was bluffing and people would never vote to leave), so the referendum was held.
Restricting that is a tall ask, I wouldn't describe refusing that as being inflexible.
[1]: https://european-union.europa.eu/principles-countries-histor... "Freedom of movement gives citizens the right to move and reside freely within the Union."
Yes. Just the demographics has substantially thinned their numbers by now though.
> would likely be a different 17 million crazies voting No again.
Highly unlikely - and turnout on the other side would be dramatically improved. Had the vote been held again the following day, it's likely that the result would have been different. If it were held today, it would be a landslide towards rejoining with the original terms.
People actually know what they're voting for, instead of falling for make-believe horseshit about how much money could go into the NHS (but didn't) on the side of a bus, with a heavy dose of Russian propaganda on Facebook.
The ones that are persistent are "I'm going to vote for anarchy because politics does no good for me", "I'm racist and don't understand that this doesn't get rid of people I really want to get rid of but really want it to so whatever" and "I'm xenophobic and haven't accepted that there isn't a British Empire anymore".
There may be fringe cases around specific regulations, but those were the main three. People were voting for whatever they wanted Brexit to be, most of which is pure fantasy, not what it actually is, which is a clusterfuck of badness, and zero benefit to anyone.
I say this as someone _who was a member of the Conservative Party at the time_, though the fact that the candidate in my constituency since 2010 was Jacob Rees Mogg meant I have voted against them in every election since then.
This is ignorance or just plain bad faith. MEPs are not the main democratic mechanism of the EU, it's the national governments. This is on purpose, so that both national democracy and sovereignty can be maintained.
This is the typical of EU misinformation spouted by people who have a problem with the EU. Of course people can dislike the EU all they want, but people who constantly rail against it, with little or no basis in fact, I'll never know. It's not about the EU, it's some sort of bitter obsession or ideological idiocy. Somehow the EU means much more to them than they claim, otherwise they wouldn't spend so much energy complaining about it.
It’s not misinformation - it’s a very basic fact about the democratic mechanism we had for electing who represents us in the EU parliament which makes and votes on our laws. The opacity of this process and the general lack of enfranchisement in it is a major flaw but one that the EU was content with, because a simulation of a democratic process is good enough, better even, because it avoids the scrutiny and can be defended by people like you. It’s a basic fact that people did get off their arses and vote to leave in greater numbers than even bothered to be enfranchised in the elections for MEPs. You don’t have to bleat about it or invoke ignorance or bad faith because all you show up is your own bad faith to a fairly basic fact.
And it remains that people had never been given the chance to vote on whether they wanted to be governed by the EUs mechanisms. It got decided for people by politicians that it was in their interests that a trading block rapidly evolve into a super-national government. It was decided by those politicians how it operates and politicians the ones with the control over its integration, and what kicked off my comments in this thread, that it has a president who speaks for the whole of Europe who only they choose. When put to the actual people for the first and only time, they decided they weren’t into it for myriad of individual reasons that can’t be usefully modelled. And now as we’ve seen endless times in these threads, the response from Europe hasn’t been to go back to the drawing board, there is a general tone of traitorship and casting it as entirely British issue caused basically by racists and idiots, when it happened within the EU and was also an EU issue. Nowhere else in the EU would 17 million people making a very clear decision be called a gang of fuckn idiots.
You are assigning too much responsibility to the EU here and none to the other actors responsible for Brexit. It borders on propaganda, but I do not want to assume ill intent.
And Cameron, didnt he say he would guide UK no matter the result and then resigned when Brexit won?
Now the UK has managed to ramp up the tension dramatically, but without some easy foreign political bogeyman to blame. It's not going to end well either, but it's not clear exactly what the endgame is. This is why the Greens, Reform and Restore are suddenly things.
Come off it. Neither the referendum nor the referendum result were inevitabilities.
"Negotiate" ... is that what you call it?
David Cameron (and team) were the most inept bunch of wankers this country has had the misfortune of being represented by in living memory (in terms of medium/long-term real impact).
We had better terms than anyone in the EU and we still fucked it up.
The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
Also, the Brexit referendum was a campaign promise of David Cameron that was going to trigger if his conservative party won the 2015 general election. Sure, the relationship between EU and UK had strained over the years, but trying to pin this on the inflexibility of the EU feels a bit misdirected.
That is iff the renegotiations with Brussels failed, which they did.
> The UK renegotiation was a net loss for the EU, this Canada deal is a deal where both parties gain something.
V. hard to see what Canada gets out of it. All the roadblocks to Canadian trade with the EU today (especially around resources) are internal to Canada and have nothing at all to do with EU status.
Presumably under the proposed thing Canada would largely adopt EU regulations. This would make trade (particularly for small businesses) _far_ easier. See the UK for how difficult this can become if you're not in alignment; it's survivable for huge companies (though even some of them had trouble; for instance Marks and Spencers' stores in Ireland literally went empty for a while because they were insufficiently prepared), but if you're a small business importing a bunch of components from Europe and making a thing which is largely sold to Europe, there's a _massive_ difference in bureaucratic overhead between being in and out.
Even many Norwegian SMEs don't see direct sales to Europe as worth the overhead, and Norway's in the EEA, as close to the EU as you can get without actually being in it.
Canadian provinces do not agree with each other about trade regulations. They will not surrender this to the federal government, and they certainly won't to the EU.
Canada isn't actually a single market itself.
No. The Conservative party promised an EU membership referendum by 2017 in its 2015 manifesto. That was not conditional on a failure of renegotiations. Nor, indeed, did David Cameron even concede that the renegotiations had failed, so that can’t possibly have been his stated reason for calling the referendum.
You can check the summary of the manifesto at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2015-32302062, or page 30 (printed page number) of the original document at https://www.barnetconservatives.co.uk/sites/www.barnetconser....
Another clear indicator can be found in this article: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/10/david-camer.... Here, Cameron is directly quoted as saying:
> My policy is to hold a renegotiation and then a referendum. That is what we promised in the manifesto and then to abide by what the British public say.
So you can see that there was never any suggestion that the referendum would be called or not called depending on the outcome of the renegotiations.
Both of which Canada is ok with.
It’s what the newspapers report:
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/canada-alliance-eu-carney-2...
US publications as a whole, and especially those on the right consistently miss the mark on Canadian coverage.