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Kaninchen
Guest
I admit to using it as a term for all Leave voters, especially as attitudes hardened after the Referendum.
Brits would much rather have a closer economic relationship with EU than US
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Kaninchen
Guest
I’m confident that they’ll be feeling well and truly gutted.
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Kaninchen
Guest
I lived in London a fair proportion of my life (so far) and look back on it now (not from that far away in distance but a world away in surroundings - the outer reaches of the London ‘solar’ system, sort of Neptune) and think just what a remarkable collection of villages it is.
In daily life, I hardly ever met people who spoke cockney (or mockney, for that matter), lot of ‘estuary’ though.
In daily life, I hardly ever met people who spoke cockney (or mockney, for that matter), lot of ‘estuary’ though.
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Kaninchen
Guest
I expect it’s happening to a lot of local accents - more and more ‘general London’, ‘general Birmingham’, ‘general Manchester’ etc.
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Theo520
Guest
Exactly, it’s perfectly natural to want a close economic relationship with their immediate neighbors, they just wanted more political freedom.
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Kaninchen
Guest
Kids have always adopted postures and language in order to fit in.
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Kaninchen
Guest
It’s part of negotiating one’s way through to adulthood and independence, the ones I feel sorry for are the ones who’ve permanently decorated their faces and hands. Having one’s children laugh at photographs that reveal awful 80s teenager hairstyles is one thing . . . .
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Ridgerunner
Guest
There may be one good explanation and several bad ones as to why it wasn’t possible for the EU to be about trade rather than about governance. I have yet to see any good ones.
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niceatheist
Guest
How is governance not integral to trade? Even if its just coming up with mutual tariff rules, that’s going to require legislation and judicial or quasi-judicial processes be aligned.Theo520:
There may be one good explanation and several bad ones as to why it wasn’t possible for the EU to be about trade rather than about governance. I have yet to see any good ones.
And once again we’re back to why the EU exists. Hint: It has a lot to do with a series of devastating wars over the entire Modern Period, including frequent bouts of violence between the Germany (in the forms of the Holy Roman Empire, then Prussia, and finally a united Germany) and France. You may be familiar with some of these conflicts; since they dominated the 20th century, but the acrimony predates that by a long long ways.
And let’s further state that probably the most famous Conservative statesman of them all, Winston Churchill, who is considered by some to be the Father of Europe, made it clear that the only way to prevent France and Germany going at each other and plunging Europe (and everyone else along with them) into another general conflict was an economically and politically united Europe.
“Yet all the while there is a remedy which, if it were generally and spontaneously adopted by the great majority of people in many lands, would as by a miracle transform the whole scene and would in a few years make all Europe, or the greater part of it, as free and happy as Switzerland is today. What is this sovereign remedy? It is to recreate the European fabric, or as much of it as we can, and to provide it with a structure under which it can dwell in peace, safety and freedom. We must build a kind of United States of Europe. In this way only will hundreds of millions of toilers be able to regain the simple joys and hopes which make life worth living. The process is simple. All that is needed is the resolve of hundreds of millions of men and women to do right instead of wrong and to gain as their reward blessing instead of cursing.”
- Churchill, September 19, 1946. University of Zurich
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Cathoholic
Guest
49% did not say only the EU and the question “both” was not asked.
Seems like an irrelevant poll to me.
Seems like an irrelevant poll to me.
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Ridgerunner
Guest
The U.S. and Canada have all sorts of trade agreements, but no central governance over both. It does not seem political integration is necessary to free trade.
Germany and France were eminently equipped to fight a war in 1914; less so but still formidible in 1939. Neither could do it on an effective scale now. Besides, being independent nations does not necessarily mean war inevitably happens; as with U.S. and Canada. Nor does political union guarantee against war, as with the u.S. Civil War.
I am still not seeing why political union is advantageous to any of the parties except possibly Germany, and maybe not even Germany.
In order to be frank, I will acknowledge that the laws of the U.S. and Canada, especially commercial laws, are nearly the same.
Germany and France were eminently equipped to fight a war in 1914; less so but still formidible in 1939. Neither could do it on an effective scale now. Besides, being independent nations does not necessarily mean war inevitably happens; as with U.S. and Canada. Nor does political union guarantee against war, as with the u.S. Civil War.
I am still not seeing why political union is advantageous to any of the parties except possibly Germany, and maybe not even Germany.
In order to be frank, I will acknowledge that the laws of the U.S. and Canada, especially commercial laws, are nearly the same.
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Vouthon
Guest
Political union affords judicially protected “rights” that no bilateral trade agreement between sovereign states can grant a person. As the European Court of Justice noted in the Grzelczyk [2001] case:
European citizens have fundamental freedoms across the expanse of the Union - freedom to live, work, settle down and study in 27 other countries without being treated any differently to a national in all the areas that count, because you’re a fellow EU citizen.
That can make a huge and positive difference to people’s lives. I have now lost these ‘rights’ - both political and economic - the remaining ones ceasing to apply to me on the 31st December this year. I feel disenfranchised.
Europe is also different in size to North America. We have far more people and a patchwork of nationalities bunched together in a much smaller landmass, with porous borders and potentially troublesome territorial gripes literally within a few miles or even hectares of one another. Many countries after World War II contained minority ethnic communities whose predominant cultural ties were often more with people in the neighbouring state, rather than in their own. You’ll find this anywhere from Northern Ireland (a sizeable minority shared their ethnocultural/national identity with the republican south more than with Britain) to the French Basque Country.
Political union eases all of these ethnic territorial tensions, by making folks on both sides of a now “erased” national border citizens of a larger Union with the freedom to move across it as they please and have regular social-economic-cultural interchange with their ‘compatriots’, as if they were a single country (even if they’re not).
Imagine what it was like in the days before political union: being hit by customs border after customs border and foreign exchange into a gazillion different national currencies. Finding yourself, say for work purposes, in a neighbouring state and having no entitlement to its state-funded healthcare if you happened to fall sick - well, the single European Health Insurance Card has solved that.
There’s no need for Europe to go back to this and unsurprisingly, outwith the island of Great Britain, no country on the continent actually wants to. European citizenship, which enables one to have a common Union-wide passport, remains massively popular. A poll from about 2 years ago:
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Theo520
Guest
But we got there without needing a unifying government for North America,
we learned from each other, we met and worked out our differences.
We can trade in spite of the US not going metric
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Vouthon
Guest
Let’s face it though, you did try quite a bit for a good couple of decades to unite the entirety of North America under one government based in Washington, until about 1871
Those expansionary dreams were thwarted by one simple fact: the then brute superpower status of the British Empire and the fact that, when it finally did become a Dominion in 1867 and finally a self-governing Dominion in 1931, Canada remained a constitutional monarchy - an absolute barrier to its admission to the American Republic, with its “no loyalty to any other foreign potentate” malarkey.
This created some real cultural differences between Canada and the US (fanned by this empire loyalist heritage, shared with the likes of New Zealand and Australia), in spite of their similarities otherwise due to common geography.
Had it not been for these two facts, had the British “let go” of Canada in the 19th century when the first “home rule” movement emerged in her parliament, I think its likely that the United States would have done to the Canadians what it did in 1898 to the Hawaiians.
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Cathoholic
Guest
Vouthon . . .
Those are just imperialistic people (by definition).
Every country has them.
You are conflating imperialists with unifiers.
That is not “unifying” Vouthon.
Those are just imperialistic people (by definition).
Every country has them.
You are conflating imperialists with unifiers.
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Vouthon
Guest
Before the mid-20th century, the majority of political unions were not entirely voluntary affairs, in the way that the EU today is (i.e. with countries being free to join and leave in accordance with their own constitutional procedures).
Prior to the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, the Kingdom of England imposed a trade embargo on Scotland (which had just been through the economic devastation of the Darien Adventure) and confiscated the assets of her citizens then domiciled in England under the “Alien Act 1705”:
But from this union, as coerced as it may have been, a single country did emerge that has persisted until today.
The initial American colonies were an exception because their nationhood emerged from a shared independence struggle.
Imperial annexation is a method of achieving “union”, which the United States itself exercised with Hawaii in 1898 and attempted with Canada. The result, in either case, would have been the same: the admission of the said country to the Union.
A morally improper and now mercifully illegal means, under international law, of ‘unification’ but historically common, unfortunately, whether overtly or indirectly.
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Regular_Atheist
Guest
I think it was a bit more widespread than just “some people.” A North American Union was a popular notion among a lot of American statesmen. It’s partly why Canada was made a dominion in 1867, as before it was just a loose collection of British colonies and would have been in a much worse position to avoid pressure from the USA.
I think the imperialist/colonialist ambitions of the early USA are often underemphasised, probably due to US opposition to imperialism (in the sense of literal empires, or colonialism) in the 20th century.
I think the imperialist/colonialist ambitions of the early USA are often underemphasised, probably due to US opposition to imperialism (in the sense of literal empires, or colonialism) in the 20th century.
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niceatheist
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The last war fought between Canada and the United States was the war of 1812, which ended as quickly as any 19th century war would, but the wars in Europe devastated an entire continent.
And part of the reason Germany and France have never come to blows is because the moves over the post-war period towards tighter integration. Creating economic and political interdependency was absolutely critical to peace. The fundamentals have not changed. Germany is still the most populous and economically powerful nation in Europe, and France still represents the liberal Western Europe.
Peace didn’t just magically take hold, it has taken an enormous amount of hard work, and the vision that Churchill propounded in 1946 is as true today as it was then. Frankly, I think the real problem here is that since the War of 1812, the only significant military confrontations on US soil have been between the Union and the Confederacy. And you know why things pulled together after the Civil War? It was because the US in a political and economic union. It’s little wonder Americans can’t imagine the point of the EU, they haven’t seen their home soil devastated by a long series of destructive conflagrations.
And really, how is the EU fundamentally any different than Rome’s historic view of a united Europe? There’s a reason that a series of Popes spent a good portion of the immediate-post Imperial period trying to figure out how to bring the kingdoms of Europe under one ruler. There’s a reason that Charlemagne was crowned Emperor of the Romans, and that the Church viewed his domains to be that of the historic Western Roman Empire.
And ultimately, why would Americans object to political union of Europe? Are they worried about competition?
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Cathoholic
Guest
Regular_Atheist telling an American about how widespread an idea was . . .
Well Regular_Atheist. It wasn’t “widespread” enough to invade Canada was it?
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Regular_Atheist
Guest
No, but I think that was due more to physical limitations than a lack of willingness. As Vouthon has described, other places were forcibly annexed by the USA.
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