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.
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.
It's all NATO.
And even then, it's arguable whether they did a good job or put too much unneeded pressure to Russia.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Nobody is against freedom of movement of EU citizens.
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.
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.
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.
The British expats in Spain and Portugal are famous for learning the local language and culture.
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).
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.
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.
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...