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Comment by kmonad | Hacker News Reader

Despite so much valid criticism about its inefficiencies, intransparencies, infighting, etc---in the grand scheme of things the EU really seems one of best governmental institutions for the "common people". At least relative to comparable institutions, it appears driven by an intention to do some good. Maybe I am wrong and it's not better, and maybe that's due to my media bias (though I try to read across different sources). However, the vaccine purchasing process, where despite the screw-ups, the EU showed a consideration for global affairs and global cooperation (unlike the US or the UK), or during Brexit, or indeed in the form of the many privacy protection, customer protection, xyz protection rules, the overall outcome of the EU's activities make me genuinely feel as if the people were playing an important part in their considerations.

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That's pretty much it. We Europeans like to whine about the EU, and there's a lot of things that need to be improved, but very few of us would be ready to go back to what it was like before.

> but very few of us would be ready to go back to what it was like before.

Laziness or faulty memory?

For starters, there's a lot of people who simply weren't born when their countries joined, and they simply don't know what it was like when you had to pay customs fees to bring stuff across that which is now internal EU borders, when you had to show a passport to cross European borders and so on.

As someone else posted, this is one of those "What have the Romans ever done for us" things.

Do you really want border controls, roaming charges, local currencies back? Sure, there are things the EU does terribly bad, but overall, I think it's a net positive.

I'm born in 1990, so I don't remember the time before the EU, but I've lived in five different EU/EEA countries with very limited bureaucracy. I can't imagine how difficult that would have been before.

I was born in the 70s. I remember the Iron Curtain and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. That is what the EU and predecessors were mindful of and aim never to go back to.

Man I fucking love EU for all the small things regular people don't see which affect especially us smaller countries like Croatia when we joined. All the standards we had to adopt and regulations and consumer protections which never would have happened otherwise. Fun fact: Croatia had a referendum whether people want to join or not but they specifically changed the law before the referendum because the interest was so low. They made it so that referendums can pass even if the turnout is under 50%. Then afterwards we had a huge swath of random referendums because of this so they changed the law back to pre EU referendum rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Croatian_European_Union_m...

yep. people don't really appreciate how important and groundbreaking this two-tier structure in Europe

the corporate world can much easier capture the political class of its homebase country versus a large and inhomogeneous collection of countries

this works as a two-sided knife: on the negative, not easy to scale businesses across Europe. that is a real problem. on the positive, poor regulation or governance doesn't travel far.

the challenge will be to keep the benefits while smoothing the negatves. I suspect its possible

> -in the grand scheme of things the EU really seems one of best governmental institutions for the "common people". At least relative to comparable institutions, it appears driven by an intention to do some good.

cherry picking the EU policies much? The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.

> The EU has shown again and again

"again and again" - yet you fail to cite a litany of actual examples?

Obvious one is the lack of a unified currency, many member states don't use the Euro. It's hard to think of Europe as a unified entity with a dozen different currencies at play.

> The EU has shown again and again they are completely incompetent to make a proper economic market in Europe, or even have semi-consistent regulations across the different borders.

Well yeah, that's because the EU is not a state, and it gets the powers that the member states want to delegate. The alternative would be the loss of sovereignty of the member states; do you think it would be better? Some things are consistent. Some others, when the tradeoff was deemed unacceptable, are not (think VAT and things like that).

This is a common talking point amongst Brexiteers. Either it is tyrannical and draconian, or it is ineffective and impotent. You cannot have both.

Anyway, the point is that it is still much better than if each country were doing its own thing and if we had trade wars within Europe like we used to before the EEC.

Pre- “EU” (except it wasn’t called the EU then) it took over 200 distinct endorsements (in those days they took the form of actual pieces of paper) to transport a 40ft cargo container by road from England to Italy. Before brexit it took 2 (both electronic now but comparable with the paper process before).

Today we’re back up to 16.

What a waste of everyone’s time.

Edit: easier to read link than the europa one: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-55887043 - in this case over 70 bits of paper for some fish

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