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Comment by derriz | Hacker News Reader

Well it's very incidental. The EU is a completely voluntary association. There are those that left freely and there are others who want to join and its powers and purpose is driven by treaties agreed by all members.

Being a colony of the British empire was nothing like this and the quote explains a justification for expansionist military imperial behaviour which has no analogue that I can see in the way the EU was formed.

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"The EU is a completely voluntary association."

Not for the members who accepted euro as a currency. There is literally no legal way out of the euro, it is meant to last forever. And a country leaving the EU, but staying in the eurozone as a full member is a completely unchartered territory.

Sovereign countries can exit anything they decide to, unless overpowered by force.

Now the question is: are you still a sovereign country if you pooled your currency with N other countries that exert a common decision power through a central bank over it?

Having power over your own currency, in good or bad, is a typical attribute of being sovereign. There are minor exceptions (like Kosovo adopting euro unilaterally), but they are very untypical.

Were you forced to do that, or was that a sovereign choice? The answer lies there.

I am not even sure if we agree on the question, much less answer.

Some sovereign choices in history have proven to be "Hotel California"-style: joining a scheme was a sovereign choice, but leaving it not so much.

An obvious example is the US which does not let the constituent states secede, even though they joined the Union voluntarily. In a similar vein, Scotland joined the UK voluntarily (though in serious economic crisis), but it cannot just leave on its own when it decides to.

The process of joining the euro has been constructed as one-way only. There are no legal mechanisms to get rid of this obligation once you join. Euro is intended to last forever.

It's a very common practice for economies to peg their sovereign currency to a trading partner; there are on the order of 66 countries pegged to the US Dollar, and 20-odd pegged to the euro.

If a country wanted to move off of the euro, it would be pretty easy to create a sovereign currency pegged to the euro 1:1 by the countries central bank. Then in the future they could simply unpeg (or change the rate) if that became advantageous.

"it would be pretty easy to create a sovereign currency pegged to the euro 1:1 by the countries central bank"

How will you protect the peg? If moving off the euro is taken as a sign of your weakness, defending the peg against the market shorting you will bleed your central bank dry.

It’s easy to put a ceiling on your country’s currency trading range. The Swiss did this. Whenever the franc got too high their central bank would sell however much was necessary to stabilize the price.

And they stopped doing that because it wasn't maintainable.

Of course it was maintainable. They stopped doing it because the situation in the EZ more or less stabilized.

The Swiss central bank can always sell as many Francs as they want at any price that is below current bids and that’s always the case when defending an upside limit. They’re never going to run out of Francs to sell because they can issue without any technical limit.

IIRC, this was effectively what happened with the U.K. on Black Wednesday: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday

EU members aren’t fully sovereign. Some sovereignty is surrendered when joining the EU:

> "The EU law has primacy over national law and all decisions by the European Court of Justice, including orders for interim measures, are binding on member states’ authorities and national courts,” chief spokesperson Eric Mamer said.

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-court-pola...

Also, a Eurozone country can’t abandon with Euro without leaving the EU.

The context here is comparing the the EU with the British Empire.

Statements like “The EU law has primacy over national law” make it pretty clear what it means to be a member of the EU.

Since you can exit, it's different.

Generally countries enter various nominally binding arrangements all the time, like ratifying UN treaties that are considered by courts to be part of national legislation etc. So "full sovereignty" in this sense is not so common.

(Also, EU law is drafted via a representational democracy system, so this use of power has an important quality of legitimacy that law handed down from the empire would lack)

The ability to leave doesn’t imply sovereignty.

There are non sovereign territories that have the right to become independent- but which are nonetheless non-sovereign.

Are you still a sovereign country when your currency is worth absolutely nothing and most internal transactions are done in a foreign currency? (case of several countries?)

"Having power over your own currency" is something not even the US has. Of course they're the hardest to push, but they don't have full control.

You're a sovereign country if you're able to sustain military control over your claimed territory. That's the only factor which really counts.

Of course you are. Unless somebody threatens to physically invade your country, your country can do whatever it wants. However there might obviously be trade/export/import sanctions etc.

Laws are only binding on sovereign states to the extent they choose to follow. Any Euro zone country could simply change their internal laws to adopt a different currency. The EU has no way to stop that, although they could potentially impose some sanctions.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted, it's exactly right. Poland agreed to adopt the Euro as one of the conditions of being accepted, and then the global financial crash happened and basically said you know what guys, we won't be doing that after all. If a country wants to stop using Euro they absolutely can - it was proposed as one of the solutions to the issue of Greek national debt, them going back to the lira, it didn't go through for many reasons but it definitely wasn't because "there's no legal way". There absolutely is.

The euro is based on a treaty, and that treaty has zero provisions for countries leaving it.

Maybe the best expression would be "there is no legally defined, binding procedure for leaving the euro". Which means that whoever tries this first must expect a wild ride with absolutely nothing to lean against.

Greece's own currency was the Drachma. The Lira belonged to Italy.

Lira is also the currency of Turkey. Perhaps that's what they were referring to.

Really, really doubt Greece was considering adopting the Turkish lira as currency.

Yes, sorry, my mistake.

Leaving the EU was impossible between the Treaty of Maastricht (1991) and the Treaty of Lisbon (2009).

So for the majority of the EUs existence, leaving was impossible.

A country can leave the EU, if the EU decides to allow it.

That doesn’t sounds like a voluntary association. That sounds a lot more like an empire/country/protectorate.

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