Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

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> It will not happen overnight but it does fuel nationalistic ideologies

Sadly those ideologies fuel themselves. This is in fact an attempt at a propaganda victory, in an electoral year, to try and stop the ultraright from conquering the French presidence next April.

> all I see is them concerning with offense, accusations and procrastinating issues

All you see is what the anglo press wants you to focus on. The Union is doing ok; they agreed some historical aid packages to help their most troubled economies, moving one step forward towards a real shared treasury; they changed rules to try and sort out the "Eastern problem" of Poland and Hungary, the impact of which we'll see in the next 5-10 years, particularly on refugee policies; they are slowly grinding down their internal tax havens, and fielding multiple attacks to the monopolistic FAANGs; and are slowly clarifying a constitutional setup that is not even 30 years old, and hence still very much in-progress. (There was a bit of a fumble on vaccines but, as we've seen this week, nobody really came out well of COVID response, and they are reaching a decent velocity now.) On Northern Ireland, their internal public opinion wants them to hold firm against UK trickery; this will generate some hate on the English press, but it's a problem entirely of England's own making (and yes, I use "England" on purpose here).

For something coordinating 400m people over a territory that's never been so united, the EU is doing incredibly well. 30 years after the American Revolution ended, the US was still very fragile internally and went to war with Britain and France; a lot of internal tensions were not solved until the US Civil War, 60 years after the US Constitution was ratified. The EU is not at war, hopefully we'll continue to settle our disputes around a table, and that's the real victory.

Marine le Pen doesn't give a shit what language the EU uses, that claim is a distraction. Her and others like her think France needs to care about the EU a whole lot less, and the EU should be much less important in France, so she's really the last kind of person who would expend political capital on such a thing.

BTW the EU sucks at peace and settling disputes. If it was good at the whole "peace in Europe" thing it wouldn't be constantly rolling boulders down the hill at the UK and Switzerland but rather, find ways to work amicably with them as productively as possible. It doesn't of course, it just threatens them and tries to force them into the EU's power structures regardless of popularity or the creation of resentment, which is exactly why the "ultra-right" as you put it (lol) is constantly gaining ground. Someone has to care what voters think, after all.

The point is precisely that LePen's platform claims the EU is a net negative because it ignores French interests. By pursuing the old Mitterrandist project of having an EU under French leadership, Macron is trying to negate that platform.

As for the "constantly rolling boulders", I think you're not being objective. Both Switzerland and Britain agreed on a set of rules decades ago, and are now reneging on them. Surely it's their responsibility to find solutions for the new problems they've created? And once solutions are agreed, surely they should implement them? The only answer from the Anglo press is "no, because everyone must accommodate us", which is frankly embarrassingly juvenile. Even inside the UK a lot of people don't agree with this English manoeuvreing, and absolutely everyone in Northern Ireland knew that the Brexiteers' promises were as unrealistic and unrealizable as they turned out to be. The attempt to unload responsibility for their own actions on a third party is like a child shouting "It wasn't me!" when caught with a hand in the jar and jam all over his face.

LePen is not going to change her opinion of the EU if it changes which language it uses because that's a surface level issue that doesn't affect any of the actual governance issues she or her voters care about.

Neither Switzerland nor Britain have ever reneged on anything. The problem is the exact opposite: Brussels has been changing, in big and important ways. The nature of the EU is that less and less is subject to veto over time, and the EU institutions never cared much what the treaties said anyway. Thus the "rules", such as they are, are constantly changing and often in ways that nobody agreed to.

Indeed the whole blowup with Switzerland is due exactly to that: the EU wants to keep changing the rules without getting the Swiss to agree and has been trying to force them to drop the previous separate bilateral agreements in favour of "dynamic alignment" i.e. accepting whatever the EU changes the rules to be at any time, without any pesky referendums.

And in the UK, a constant source of frustration in London is due to the impression that the UK argues against bad rules when they're being proposed but when passed it follows them, whereas other EU countries agree with the rules (easy) and then ignore them when they are inconvenient. See: Germany deciding that EU law isn't actually superior over their constitutional law, despite that being a supposedly inviolable aspect of EU membership. It's easy to find people who voted to stay in the EU (or EC as it was then), in the original Brexit referendum in the 70s, but who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum with a justification of "this isn't what I voted for back then, I was misled". The EU changed the rules of the game but people weren't consulted until much, much later.

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