THE EUROPEAN UNION

EU: what do you think of it? good or bad?

I'm a citizen of it but no longer reside within it. overall methinks it's good

discuss

it has a pretty flag though

seems a bit pointless to be honest.

the open borders within the european union is a really good thing. hooray!

other benefits like exchanging students and project donations are also good.

but the bureaucracy and the amount of management they try to put under their umbrella is just overwhelmingly absurd.

also the 'roaming presidency' thing...our country was a president of the european council for some time. we spent a load of tax-money, but still the whole thing semmed so virtualized by protocol...

The Euro is the real bad thing here.

I am also a citizen of it through decent. Having never set foot outside my country, I was allowed to live and work in the EU without restriction. Essentially I have the choice of living in 32 countries.

The idea is good economically. Businesses can sell their good to a bigger market. But then you need various regulations for that. Without those you have one country effectively disallowing import from another country via weird requirements. That happened in the 70s, before the EU got tough on that shit.

But to enforce regulations, including health and safety requirements, you need a bureaucracy. And so elected politicians: arseholes treating politics as if it were a team sport.

The EU having a single market also gives it greater leverage over China, US and various companies. See all the money it's gained off Microsoft via anti-monopoly laws. It's also effectively disallowed various mergers of US companies, two weapons companies if I recall (Halliburton?): they could merge, but they wouldn't be selling their shit here, making the merger infeasible.

From a personal point of view, I'd say it's good. I like being able to reside in whatever country. And having certain rights, too. (Although the UK manages to opt out of most of them...)

And some good things do come out of the EU, normally from the European Parliament (the other place, European Council, is just civil servants and ministers from member states). Reducing tariffs on mobile phones and making Sky Sports give terrestrial TV some football matches was good.

I also recall they made a statement saying Israel's action against Palestine was a crime against humanity, or similar words. And that's a fairly big precedent--it's way more than more Member States would say.

ezkerraldean, are you basque?

No, hes more big knickers.

he has more big knockers

In short: for Europe to have any meaningful political/economic power being a union is simply a necessity. Political and economic powers are strongly related to the size of the market. Plain and simple. The bigger the market, the stronger the poli-econimic power.

admittedly the idea of a european superstate does give me a massive hard-on. the nations of europe need to have massive balls to survive on the world stage alone, and uniting them all is the solution.

if you think about it, europe has not been as peaceful as it is today since the romans, and probably never before. everyone getting along much better is deffo something i'd attribute to european integration

  On 3/6/2011 at 7:34 PM, ThatSpanishGuy said:

ezkerraldean, are you basque?

i'm english living in canada lol

but yeah ezkerraldean is basque

I like the idea of member states working together, rather than one big superstate, so to speak.

Simply because, one shitty decision in one member state will only cause damage there, and to those who overly rely on that member state for whatever.

But a shitty idea Europe-wide affects us all.

That's difficult to resolve though. Cos, say with the Euro, it would be nice for a country to easily leave if it's fucking them.

But on the other hand, if member states leave every time their finance minister gets the willies, it'd fuck the Euro, for reasons not necessarily due to a problem with the Euro itself.

it's good and bad. Good for reasons of power and stability. Bad for reasons of political freedom and independence of mind. But then again when you are a small country your leaders and economy are more susceptible to foreign influence, so kind of nullifying that political freedom thing. But still the US didn't deter netherlandse from it's libreal drug laws, there was some leeway under that empire. But still unite europe, sure. Just be prepared for the gypsies, albanians and fat rich german and english retirees to come a knockin'.

It will transform current cultural norms. Not necessarily for the better. Also you already have to worry about the state failing, given the dictatorial and undemocratic way it rammed through the eu constitution. The whole thing seems to be turning into a power grab by corporations, over the public's right to collectively bargain etc. So that could lead to revolution.

And what mantra would galvanize the people perhaps the most. That this whole eu experiment has been the problem. And so back we go to nation states again. maybe ...

Before we got Euro, I could buy food for five days and pay around 25€. Today I pay around 55€ for the same amount of food.

The export policy of dairy products is such that our neighbouring Italy gets our fresh milk, while we get their milk (which is by far worse in quality) imported, because it has a lower price per liter. Our farmers are loosing their ability to sustain their farms.

Standardized economy, etc. (the 'Europe union-way' of doing stuff) lacks certain customized solutions that are specific for our area. And that applies to many other incoming countries now so eager to adopt the EU-way...

In the end all this effort to join the EU resulted only in a bigger market share for the established traders. All 'benefits' so praised before, are now of secondary nature, and are often neglected.

to name just a few...