Re:French election: Macron defeats Le Pen
by petre on Sunday May 07, 2017 @03:38PM
(#14287174)
Austria Hungary has failed. The Soviet Union has failed even though everybody in it was speaking Russian, which is not the case with the EU. The EU will fail if it continues like this, with massive centralization of power. The difference is that unlike Austria Hungary and the USSR, it does not have a standing army to back its power and member states will leave when economic crisis hits and it's no longer in their best interests to stay.
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> The EU will fail if it continues like this, with massive centralization of power.
I keep hearing this argument, but I've never heard any supporting arguments. What evidence is there that "sovereignty" is optimal at the administrative scale of modern-day nation-states and not EU-sized scales, or going the other direction, at provincial, city or district levels?
Re:French election: Macron defeats Le Pen
by dragonwriter on Sunday May 07, 2017 @04:05PM
(#14287308)
The EU, incidentally, is the scale of a large modern day nation-state. It's obviously a bigger scale then it's own constituent nation-states, but then so are China, India, Ruusia, and the USA.
The evidence is to be found in the study of monetary policy. Depending on your political inclination, I suggest a web search for late Thatcher speeches, or Varoufakis books. Ideally, both.
Thatcher only convinces me Manchester would have been better off as a city-state, setting it's own monetary policy instead of Thatcherism.
Germany was build out of different german speaking principalities. Germany was problematic in the 20th century but the problems were against its neighbours, not within.
And then there are those 13 ex-colonies, now 50, which dared to want an ever closer union. They had a civil war, yes, but since then secession seems to out of the picture.