Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kurtz79 | Hacker News Reader

A few weeks ago I was in Basel, Switzerland, which is uniquely positioned at the cross of the Swiss, German and French borders.

There are suburbs of the city that are in German and French territory: Basel trams and buses will get to either side, with no notice you are crossing a national border.

You can cross the Rhine from Weil am Rhein (Germany) to Huningue (France) through a footbridge, with the only thing marking the cross being a German and French flags side by side, on the French side of the river.

https://en.radreisen.at/data/thumbs/_data_pic_Frankreich_Reg...

No border, no checks, even normal police nowhere to be seen. 75 years ago (and pretty much over the course of their history) these two countries were at bitter war between themselves.

I cannot fathom why people would do anything that could cause returning to those times a possibility.

As flawed the EU is, it has been instrumental in ensuring decades of peace. The (partial but undoubtful) loss of sovereignity for individual members should be considered a fair price to pay.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

One difficulty in drawing a conclusion from your story is that Switzerland is not in the EU.

It wasn't in the wars either.

Sure, but the story is not inherently about the EU. It's about the free movement between neighbouring countries, which is something Leave campaigners are determined to stop as part of our withdrawal. Leaving could've been over relatively quickly if all we did was leave the EU but keep our place in the single market.

Switzerland accepts freedom of movement of goods, services, capital, and labour between itself and the EU - freedoms which the Brexit campaign promised to remove and freedoms which make this story possible.

Switzerland is a Schengen member, this means no passport control at borders, but the UK is not, this means passport control when flying from the Schengen area to the UK.

> I cannot fathom why people would do anything that could cause returning to those times a possibility

What has Brexit got to do with that?

Brexiteers frequently position it as the first domino in a cascade that will destroy the entire EU, and assert that this is a good thing.

To the extent that the failure of the EU leads to war?

It is not far fetched to imagine a situation where a hard Brexit results in extreme languish of imported food and staple goods into the UK. Austerity was hard enough on the poor - Imagine if food prices doubled or tripled due to tariffs and currency devaluation. Not to mention the land border in Ireland returning to skirmish with patrols and violence.

This is one of the claims that keeps undermining the Remain position.

The EU imposes high tariffs on food in order to protect French farming. This is well known and has been discussed for years, often in the context of "when will Europe stop making Africa poor by refusing to buy its food".

A big part of the argument for leaving the EU is that British farming is a lot more efficient, so doesn't need so much protection, so food prices could be lower after exit. Why would the government raise tariffs on food so high its own population starved? That would make no sense at all.

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