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Comment by INTPenis | Hacker News Reader

I'm Swedish and Croatian, I split my time between the two countries. So yeah, in the short term this is great.

But in the long term, any centralization of systems such as the EU, or NATO, is dangerous. Because if you consider that everything in the world is a system, and all systems have flaws, then global systems have global flaws and will be exploited on a global level.

We peasants just don't have the resources to monitor how the plutocrats of the world exploit the world's systems to remain in power over us.

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On the other hand, it's not like divided Europe has such a glorious and glamorous history filled with freedom and liberty. To what degree the EU improves on that in the long term (i.e. the next 50-100 years, proper long-term) is an open question, but I'm cautiously hopeful. The EU is a fairly "weak" power and individual member states retain a high degree of autonomy; it would be significantly harder to truly "exploit" the EU in the same way a country's parliament can be corrupted: chances are a significant number of member states would put a halt to it, and/or the EU would simply break up or split.

NATO doesn't really centralize power IMO; it's a very short and straight-forward treaty; the entire thing is 2 or 3 pages of text. NATO countries co-operate of course, but so do many non-NATO countries, and it's decided on a case-by-case basis by the countries themselves. There is no "NATO organisation" that can tell anyone to do anything. In practice, the US is the "leader" of NATO, but even their power is very limited in practice. You may recall that little kerfuffle in Iraq where half of NATO basically told the US to go fuck themselves and their stupid war (leading to hilarities such as "French fries" being rebranded as "freedom fries").

Europe has many prosperous countries that are well managed. It looks like small scale countries (let's say Finland, Estonia) can have better governance. With the right design, EU can be a benefit to all of them without centralizing too much. That's what I hope for. Avoid the inefficiency and corruption of bigger empire-like states, while using the size of the EU to be able to survive in the global market.

You say "centralization" but EU and NATO countries gain massive amounts of power and strength from banding together. Tiny Croatia has no hope of protecting itself militarily or economically compared to being in those institutions.

In each case countries are eager to join because they have so many benefits.

Your claims about plutocrats work in the opposite direction: corruption and influence is worse, and the rule of law is less effective when a country is smaller.

> But in the long term, any centralization of systems such as the EU, or NATO, is dangerous. Because if you consider that everything in the world is a system, and all systems have flaws, then global systems have global flaws and will be exploited on a global level.

I mean things weren't exactly great before the EU and NATO tied Europe together - 10s of millions killed in two world wars in just 30 years.

> We peasants just don't have the resources to monitor how the plutocrats of the world exploit the world's systems to remain in power over us.

This is an understandable concern but on their own small countries struggle to effectively regulate large multinational corporations with revenues comparable to a country's GDP. I fear our only real hope of keeping the plutocrats in check is to band together.

NATO is so dangerous. That's why Finland and Sweden so eager to join it.

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