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Comment by vince_refiti | Hacker News Reader

The European Union should be broken up.

When debating pro-against EU, we should never forget how pre-EU Europe looked like. We've been incredibly good at killing each other. I'd pick a huge beauracracy over arms races any day of the week.

Not only was Europe more violent then, but it was also hugely bureaucratic, probably more than today. You couldn't sell a product in more than one country without dealing with the bureaucracy of each of them independently. Today a company registered in Denmark can sell products in Sweden and Germany without having to register corporations in three separate countries. And they don't have to wait hours at the border to go through a customs checkpoint anymore either.

Don't they still subsidize their agricultural sector, and dump stuff on the international markets and hurt non-EU farmers? I consider that to be very uncompetitive.

The common agricultural policy is largely an ecological and humanitarian disaster. However, it's only one aspect of the EU, and most of the member states would have similar subsidies if they were outside the EU anyway. Even the anti-EU parties in European nations tend to favour maintaining the subsidies (e.g. UKIP policy is to maintain the single farm payment after an EU exit). The US isn't in the EU and still has a significant program of agricultural subsidies.

The USA subsidises its agricultural sector, I agree that the EU does do it more. But then Japan puts in more direct subsidy to its agricultural sector than the whole of the EU. Still, whatever your view on subsidies, it is a much better thing for people to be complaining about than Europe being on fire. Again.

Yes, although the US does exactly the same thing in different fields. Most countries have some sort of national protected agriculture.

It's not nearly as bad as it was when payout was still strictly by production. Nowadays, farmers are paid to let fields fall fallow so there's no insane overproduction, hence less market crashing abroad.

Some sort of CAP is a necessity: The point is to keep local farmers in business as to keep local production capacity (not necessarily production) alive so that when shit hits the fan when it comes to imports, Europeans won't starve.

Yes, there should be further fixes. But it's much better than in the past, and I think the fishing policy should be dealt with first.

I'm not sure I'd actually call the EU a "huge bureaucracy" - it has 33 thousand staff:

http://ec.europa.eu/civil_service/docs/hr_key_figures_en.pdf

That's about twice as much as the Scottish Government - which is for a much smaller population.

The bureaucracy is indirect; all the regulatory requirements are implemented nationally and handled by national staff. Or impose requirements on businesses that don't correspond to enforcement staff at all, like CE marking.

So you think that if the EU disbanded, there would be more wars (and/or arms-races) in Europe? Between which nations?

1. Yes.

2. Don't know - we're good at surprising people!

How enlightening.

My only bets are that this time Norway would be in the middle, they are sitting on a shitload of money, and Germany invades Poland, just for keeping traditions.

There are still arms races in Europe. They are just a lot quieter and are mostly battleship envy.

Yes, this often put forward as a case for why the EU is a good thing but the reality is we probably stopped killing each other because we finally had a war that was large enough to put many people off war for life.

Those who repeat the line that the EU prevented wars in Europe seem to forget what happened in the Balkans

Those who repeat the line that the EU prevented wars in Europe seem to forget what happened in the Balkans

They were not part of the EU. The reasoning is that if you form a union where there is a large amount of economical interdependence, you think twice about starting a conflict with other members of your union. The collapse of their economy means the collapse of your economy.

According to your reasoning, WW2 should not have existed at all, since it came on the heels of another devastating conflict.

If anything, it's the post WW1 that was taken as a lesson: instead of further afflicting the defeated, fomenting nationalism and isolationism, a more conciliatory path was taken.

The union has its warts and boils, but the fact that the member nations have been at peace between themselves for the longest time span ever is hard to attribute to other factors.

> "We've been incredibly good at killing each other."

No, what you mean is that Germans and Austrians (and only Germans and Austrians) have recently been rather fond of invading neighbouring countries and also genociding their own populations.

The other European countries, Balkans excepted, have actually got along rather well for the past 150 years.

So why should Holland, Belgium, France, Portugal, Sweden, Denmark and the others be erased as nation states? This is the way things are going.

You are only looking at recent history. And even that's not true. Italians invading Albania and Greece? Italians invading France? Soviets invading Finland, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania? Hungarians invading Romania and Czechoslovakia? Romanians invading the USSR? Soviets invading Hungary and Czechoslovakia?

And out of the list your have there, many of those "nation states" were too busy "genociding" their colonies in the last 150 years, to care about "genociding" their neighbors. And all of those were "genociding" their neighbors as well, before they got colonies.

Plus all those nation-states are too small on today's geopolitical arena. Only the "state" bit will be going away, the nations will be there, sitting nice and pretty as they do right now :)

All the countries with empires were proxy-warring it around the globe. The first and second world wars were wars of empire coming home.

Of all the different EU institutions the EP is one of the most democratic. Unfortunately they don't have a lot of influence.

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