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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

And that is precisely the issue with the EU.

I was always supportive of the spirit of the European Union and its ultimate objectives, but in its current state, it's a brutalized self-sabotaging entity that has disillusioned the general public to veer rightwards. And with furthermore technological lagging vis-a-vis China and the US, and the immigration crisis, not to mention the Russian Axis round the corner and the collective inaction of a number of EU states around that, and it's no wonder the EU is falling back into 3rd place.

And for some reason, the EU still thinks net uncontrolled refugee migration is good for their economics,their population and their electability, as is letting American private equity buy up large swathes of residential properties. Guess that's what you get when you let freeloaders who haven't worked a real job in their lives hold unelected positions of power.

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> it's a brutalized self-sabotaging entity that has disillusioned the general public to veer rightwards

It hasn’t, it only disillusioned those people (like the brits) who didn’t understand the purpose of the EU to begin with. The economic benefits were always considered secondary objectives, subordinated to the main principle of cooperation. This is public knowledge, it was made very clear in the foundational documents of the EU. And therefore the EU has indeed been very successful and its effect is unprecedented: since its inception, we are seeing the longest period ever recorded without a war between European countries.

The Brits perfectly understood one of the aims of the EU and always disagreed with it.

One of the aim is political integration and weakening of each member's sovereignty. The UK does not want this but was OK with the common market.

When the question of whether to join the EU, the brits were actually manipulated by their politicians, who presented the EU as an “economic” project. This perception never went away, so when the EU proceeded as it had intended from the beginning, the brits started to resist and realised they had been mislead. The EU stipulates very clearly that the common market and its potential economic benefits are simply a means to an end; that end is to get European countries to see each other as equals.

No, the end is to destroy national identities and cultures and we are seeing an increasing pushback against that.

I feel that if British concerns, including about immigration and free movement had been addressed Brexit and the current turmoil within the EU would have all been averted. This disconnect with the people's concerns is a key issue the EU has to face or be torn apart.

Germany suddenly deciding to reintroduce border controls is especially telling and highly ironic.

> No, the end is to destroy national identities and cultures

I was referring to the official position of the EU, which is verifiable in their public documents; I don’t care about far-right propaganda. People of course are free to care more about “cultural identity” (whatever it means in the 21st century), than about war. But it doesn’t change the fact that the EU has been successful in creating the longest period of continuous peace in the history of the continent. And this is what it intended from the beginning.

I think the formation of EU was irrelevant for peace.

It's all NATO.

And even then, it's arguable whether they did a good job or put too much unneeded pressure to Russia.

Nobody will declare war on their neighbour when they depend on them for food and other essential resources.

The EU addresses resource and cultural motivations.

NATO intimidates countries that already want to take resources from their neighbours.

NATO has its merit as well, but the EU is unarguably one of the main reasons why EU countries have not even begun to think about creating military conflict within member states since the 1950s.

I think the formation of EU was irrelevant for peace.

Disagree. Going from a bombed-out, stone-age hellscape to conflict-free and essentially borderless in just 47 years was a very impressive achievement. Unfortunately for the past several years we've been headed in the reverse direction.

I think throwing abuse like calling my previous comment "far right propaganda" is a case in point of how rotten the debate has become in Europe on any actual, serious issues, and especially on the possibility to express concerns.

To deny the very existence of cultural identities is also quite bizarre. Of course countries have their own cultural identies and this is in fact something absolutely key in the current political dynamics in Europe.

Your theory about EU intentionally destroying cultural identities, isn’t supported by any document published by the EU or any conference transcripts. No EU official has ever described this to be the goal. I’ve only heard about it in far right media. So as a matter of fact, it is far right propaganda.

If you want real cultural identities, build a time machine and travel back before airplanes, the internet and neoliberal finance rendered cultural divisions in western countries obsolete.

I see... Have a very nice day.

> Your theory about EU intentionally destroying cultural identities, isn’t supported by any document published by the EU or any conference transcripts.

You yourself state that the final objective of the EU has always been complete integration across all departments. I don't see how it's possible to retain individual cultural identities in that construct - either you'd have to compromise on representative democracy and equally distribute representation across all cultures, making the vote of a Croat valued more than that of a German, or you'd end up making the vote of the Bulgarian irrelevant against the vote of the French. This is kind of already the case in more closely integrated federations of a similar kind - India and Russia. Individual cultures are slowly being replaced across regions, as people are forced to learn Hindi and Russian to get a job or access some government benefits, in spite of the protests of their respective state governments.

> If you want real cultural identities, build a time machine and travel back before airplanes, the internet and neoliberal finance rendered cultural divisions in western countries obsolete.

Your arguments are precisely the kind of uneducated drivel that provide fuel to anti-EU sentiment

> This is kind of already the case in more closely integrated federations of a similar kind

And it is already the case in western countries. Learning english is more or less mandatory at this point, while democracy is being influenced by consumer culture and media, which are often produced by multinational corporations, financed through a global network of banks and distributed via the internet. But this has nothing to do with the EU, in fact it isn’t being intended by any single institution or organisation as an aim in itself. It’s a far bigger and frankly irreversible phenomenon that emerges from present conditions.

Germany is reintroducing border controls to stop immigration from OUTSIDE Europe. They aren't doing it to keep out the Dutch or Austrians.

Nobody is against freedom of movement of EU citizens.

Control of non-EU immigration is a concern that is not being addressed. In fact Germany's catastrophic open door policy in 2015 probably precipitated Brexit and is what coming back to bite them now.

But there has also been concerns about internal migration since 2004 when Eastern European countries joined. This is not only in the UK and is still the case now.

Eastern European migration only threatened local jobs, which ended up being a non-issue eventually, as mid-level jobs in all sectors move back to Eastern Europe. The one exception here is healthcare, where Eastern European professionalsbleave as soon as they get the chance to.

The current crop of unfettered non-EU migration is not only an employment threat but also a security threat and a threat to the entire concept of the European welfare state.

There is not enough internal immigration to cause any disruption to national identity.

Sure people have been complaining about criminals from poor eastern europe moving to wealthy countries but the numbers were never high enough to actually change the national identity. Internal transfers of hard working people were (and are) always cherished and we celebrated diversity as long as laws were respected.

Importing people from Africa and the Middle East in large numbers changed the face of Europe dramatically.

> There is not enough internal immigration to cause any disruption to national identity.

The British expats in Spain and Portugal are famous for learning the local language and culture.

> No, the end is to destroy national identities and cultures and we are seeing an increasing pushback against that.

The creation of a pan-European identity does not in anyway degrade from having a "British identity", as you can see in places like the USA with Texas.

Whilst net migration was above 0, this was mostly due to arrivals from outside the EU, as we can see from post-Brexit immigration figures, EU free movement has always been a two way street that many Brits took advantage of (those "expats" in Spain).

I think the EU project is partially trying to thread the needle of maintaining ethnostates without the nationalism. That is, maintain the culture/language/food without the periodic bouts of war/etc.

Neat idea, but is quite a challenge.

The US in general is different from even an imaginary future federal EU in that, as some say, "America is an idea". I know people who can trace their "American Heritage" back to pilgrims/boats, and others who naturalized in the last decade. No one aside from true nutcases really gives much thought to the difference. There is no legal distinction aside from naturalized citizens being unable to be President, is about it.

Most people I know have lived in multiple states, sometimes across completely different regions. People don't derive any strong identity to the state they were born or spent the most time in. Most people I know would just identify by the current state they live in.

There are of course regional differences, but you can move from one region to another and mostly drive the same car, eat the same food, wear the same clothes, buy the same products, shop the same stores, etc. This is a feature or bug depending on your perspective. I think we are sort of like a cultural Borg.

The plus side is the US quickly adapts and/or adopts aspects of the culture & cuisine of each wave of immigrants over time. You can get pho in random strip malls nowhere near a big city, and we'll adopt any holiday if it means more drinking, like say Cinco de Mayo.

> This is a feature or bug depending on your perspective

For businesses that don't rely on national pride of patriotism as part of their image, it's a massive feature.

The press vilified the EU in the UK for decades, at school I had one lesson in geography on how the EU worked and that was it. Wasn't covered in history or anything. It just all added up and the European identity never took hold in the UK outside center liberals.

> Germany suddenly deciding to reintroduce border controls is especially telling and highly ironic.

Well, I'm driving very often to Belgium via A4 and there are rarely any controls. A44 to Liege is more common but not A4. You could have always been stopped at the border, for whatever reason, even with free movement. It's not like they stop everyone at their border. By the way - from 16th of September for 6 months...

The EU has its problems.

No country in the EU would have been better off if the EU hadn’t been formed.

The only way the EU can be described in the economically apocalyptic way you are is if you don’t consider the alternatives at all.

Consider Greece, which is the poster child of the EU economic failures.

Outside the EU Greece would have completely collapsed. The only thing that gave it some sort of leverage to get out of a long standing mess was the fact that being part of the EU still gave it some credibility with lenders which gave it time to recover to whatever degree it has.

In a nutshell, the EU had a lot of problems but the pre-EU situation would have been significantly worse.

Outside the EU, Greece could devalue the Drachma.

> No country in the EU would have been better off if the EU hadn’t been formed.

EU, the economic union. Not the political union and the bureaucratic machine that tagged along.

> Outside the EU Greece would have completely collapsed. The only thing that gave it some sort of leverage to get out of a long standing mess was the fact that being part of the EU still gave it some credibility with lenders which gave it time to recover to whatever degree it has.

You give Greeks too little credit. Outside the EU, they could have devalued their currency, spurred investment from second-world countries (notably China) without answering to a preachy EU blocking them, etc. Greeks imo are some of the most hard-working people in the EU at the moment, perhaps even the most. The EU didn't give them the flexibility to adapt, so that Germany could maintain its supremacy.

From my impression of Germany I can tell you they would do the same suicide without the eu.

In my opinion, the problem is the people. The EU is going in the direction its going with the support of the people.

Every once-in-a-while you'll hear about how Europe is becoming less relevant, less competitive, and falling behind. Many reasons are pointed out: too many regulations, too much bureaucracy, too little investor funding, too little risk appetite etc. And then all of that is promptly ignored and we're back to

>but we need all of these regulations, otherwise we'll be like America!

and

>Europeans are actually better off!

Imo it's European people that defend all of these things, not just something unelected bureaucrats do.

I think its a gerontocracy issue.

Older European generations have negotiated for the current state of affairs which are nice for existing homeowners who are near and in retirement.

This is at the expense of the youth who have eye watering levels of youth unemployment, near 20% in many EU countries. It's 25% in Portugal (vs 6.5% overall) and was as high as 35% in the last decade. These levels make it hard for the next generation to build a career, savings and future for themselves.

Note US current unemployment rate is about 4% with youth unemployment being 9%. So US youth unemployment is ~2x overall while Portugal for example has youth unemployment at 4x the overall rate... much more skewed.

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