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Comment by Sharlin | Hacker News Reader

>> Also, game theoretically it's of course more important to not make leaving (or threatening to leave) the union seem too lucrative.

Because you simply wouldn't be offered the option of just deescalating your full membership to an associate membership. If you want to leave, you leave fully, and then in time we can discuss what happens next. Also, obviously an associate membership shouldn't feel more desirable than full integration if you're eligible to both. Indeed from the UK's perspective it would be exactly the opposite to what they wanted: free labor and movement but no representation.

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This makes being involved as little as possible but no more far more attractive than being bound too tightly together though.

Almost like many of the EU states were misled into their current situations.

How so? Many EU states have benefited enormously from being on the receiving side of EU subsidies, which obviously would be out of the question without full integration. Norway, Iceland, and Switzerland have rejected membership, which essentially means that as EEA members they have to observe all the EU regulations and agreements when it comes to trade, without having any say about them. They have their reasons, but those reasons don't apply generally.

"Being misled" is obviously nonsense that deserves no further comment.

It literally privileges people in countries outside the EU by giving them more rights than those inside.

Which many people inside the EU would observe seems completely consistent with EU behaviour.

Edit to add: "Being misled" would refer to the way the EU was sold to many participants in earlier decades as an economic union, and not an all encompassing political one, with it simply ratcheting that way. Whenever objections occurred referenda would simply be repeated until the populations complied. It's far from the exercise in democracy that proponents promote. (This is distinct from saying it is _all bad_).

Your position seems so astonishingly alien that I don't even know how to start replying. It seems biased against the entire concept of how human cooperation works.

My position is hardly rare. Iceland didn't join at least partly because they were suspicious of intentions regarding fishing.

Human cooperation does not mean misleading your compatriots into deals that you then ratchet up ever further until it becomes completely intolerable.

There are reasons that in the long run flexibility wins.

> It literally privileges people in countries outside the EU by giving them more rights than those inside.

Mostly, like, the right to have, say, your own standards on chemical safety, tho. That is generally not something that most people would _want_; it basically just means you lose your job because import/export becomes, if not impossible, at least bureaucratically expensive enough that people will just buy from elsewhere.

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