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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

EU is leaning towards German-style management of regulating everything in excess. Most people in my country don't realize what is going on, there is only a minority that is making a bit of noise, but they are too few to be believed (we have a culture where the majority opinion is considered to be "right").

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It is not the amount of regulation I take issue with[1], but the scope. While I am strongly pro-EU, I am also strongly in favor of it being made up of countries that are more than just nominally sovereign and independent. Power is slowly being moved from national governments and to the EU, and I don't like this slow subversion of nations one bit.

[1] Not saying over-regulation isn't a problem, merely not my main concern.

Why don't you like it? Do you perceive rights being lost, or...?

Yes, I believe a government that is more local, and representing a community that has more in common, will be more reflective of the wishes of that community, and more responsive (and vulnerable!) to its criticism.

I find it somewhat insulting I even have to argue for this - this move of power further away is a change. It should be justified, instead of happening by default, while the former status quo of sovereign nations has to argue for its continued existence.

I buy that smaller democracies could work better in many ways, provided they enjoy a stable peace with their neighbors. If a nation of 10M people lets a decision be made by the EU, that means the electorate for that decision goes from 10M people to suddenly 500M people. Thus the decision is "further away", with the pitfalls you mention.

However, if you believe this, you must equally believe that growing a single nation's population from 10M to 500M has the exact same problems. So if you were from Belgium and it grew to 500M, you'd have to support a move to partition Belgium into 50 separate nations, for the same reason you're against the EU. Right?

> So if you were from Belgium and it grew to 500M, you'd have to support a move to partition Belgium into 50 separate nations, for the same reason you're against the EU [1]. Right?

Such as how the British empire partitioned into the US, Canada, Australia.., or how China and Japan became distinct countries despite a common origin? Yes. A shared identity can support a larger country (the inverse can be seen in the breakup of Yugoslavia), but not without limit.

> I buy that smaller democracies could work better in many ways

It's not just about size. It's about the simple and intuitively obvious idea that it matters who chooses your rulers. I find it both fascinating and frightening that people have been so trained into ignoring their instincts (evolved through millions of years of inter-group competition, but now casually dismissed as "irrational"), that this basic notion now needs arguing.

[1] A small correction: I am not against the EU - the opposite, I am strongly in favor of it, for the simple pragmatic reasons that it safeguards peace among the member states, and because the relatively small European countries would otherwise be picked off individually by larger geopolitical rivals. What I am against is the expansion of EU law into areas of law and life that can be perfectly adequately addressed by individual states themselves.

Not sure why you're getting downvotes, most of what you say makes sense. Although I'm not following that "it matters who chooses your rulers". To be very naive, as long as the set of voters includes me, my wishes will be at least proportionally represented, right? Is it just a matter of scale (i.e. 500M Europeans vs 10M Belgians) or is there something else at play for you? I was thinking that if it's just that Europeans as a whole are less tuned-in to Belgian issues, well, you could make the same argument for a given Belgian city like Antwerp or Charleroi, cities for which the majority of Belgian people aren't attuned into. Yet it's okay for the Belgian government to make decisions that affect Antwerp? Then why not let the EU make decisions that affect Belgium?

> To be very naive, as long as the set of voters includes me, my wishes will be at least proportionally represented, right?

How this fails is difficult to arrive at through theory. "Fortunately" we have examples from practice: Tibetan, Uyghur, and Hong Kong voters in China, Kurdish voters in Turkey, Kashmir voters in India [1], or Ukrainian voters under the Soviet union, to name a few.

People don't behave as atomic individuals, but as members of groups.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

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