Being a colony of the British empire was nothing like this and the quote explains a justification for expansionist military imperial behaviour which has no analogue that I can see in the way the EU was formed.
Not for the members who accepted euro as a currency. There is literally no legal way out of the euro, it is meant to last forever. And a country leaving the EU, but staying in the eurozone as a full member is a completely unchartered territory.
Maybe the best expression would be "there is no legally defined, binding procedure for leaving the euro". Which means that whoever tries this first must expect a wild ride with absolutely nothing to lean against.
Having power over your own currency, in good or bad, is a typical attribute of being sovereign. There are minor exceptions (like Kosovo adopting euro unilaterally), but they are very untypical.
If a country wanted to move off of the euro, it would be pretty easy to create a sovereign currency pegged to the euro 1:1 by the countries central bank. Then in the future they could simply unpeg (or change the rate) if that became advantageous.
> "The EU law has primacy over national law and all decisions by the European Court of Justice, including orders for interim measures, are binding on member states’ authorities and national courts,” chief spokesperson Eric Mamer said.
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/eu-court-pola...
Also, a Eurozone country can’t abandon with Euro without leaving the EU.
The context here is comparing the the EU with the British Empire.
Statements like “The EU law has primacy over national law” make it pretty clear what it means to be a member of the EU.
Generally countries enter various nominally binding arrangements all the time, like ratifying UN treaties that are considered by courts to be part of national legislation etc. So "full sovereignty" in this sense is not so common.
(Also, EU law is drafted via a representational democracy system, so this use of power has an important quality of legitimacy that law handed down from the empire would lack)
There are non sovereign territories that have the right to become independent- but which are nonetheless non-sovereign.
How will you protect the peg? If moving off the euro is taken as a sign of your weakness, defending the peg against the market shorting you will bleed your central bank dry.
The Swiss central bank can always sell as many Francs as they want at any price that is below current bids and that’s always the case when defending an upside limit. They’re never going to run out of Francs to sell because they can issue without any technical limit.
"Having power over your own currency" is something not even the US has. Of course they're the hardest to push, but they don't have full control.
Some sovereign choices in history have proven to be "Hotel California"-style: joining a scheme was a sovereign choice, but leaving it not so much.
An obvious example is the US which does not let the constituent states secede, even though they joined the Union voluntarily. In a similar vein, Scotland joined the UK voluntarily (though in serious economic crisis), but it cannot just leave on its own when it decides to.
The process of joining the euro has been constructed as one-way only. There are no legal mechanisms to get rid of this obligation once you join. Euro is intended to last forever.
So for the majority of the EUs existence, leaving was impossible.
A country can leave the EU, if the EU decides to allow it.
That doesn’t sounds like a voluntary association. That sounds a lot more like an empire/country/protectorate.
Some of them even start or own big political parties.
I can't blame 'em.
Of course there are huge differences between, say, Czechia and Moldova, but we were part of a single allied bloc controlled by a single power for two generations, so there are some similarities as well. You can see some of them until today in architecture etc.
And citizens from the DDR were actually called East Germans or Ossies.
Completely incomparable. Economic protectionism vs. invading, colonizing, and enslaving huge portions of the world.
Google does not invade or colonize anyone and yet their control over spread of information is probably better than whatever former great powers could boast.
In the same way, countries like Greece can be kicked around by troika without a single shot fired.
That is not a meaningful choice in my view. That is "standing with your back to a wall".
I believe that they are focussed on lifting their masses out of poverty.
He goes on to ask "what's your point?" which leads me to believe he knows how ridiculous his comparison is but is just making it in bad faith.
No, I wanted him to actually list some counterpoints, not just asking pointed questions without concrete points. You cannot answer a "Ha, have you heard of X?" question in any meaningful way.
I'm not going to pretend that person spoke in hieroglyphs, and if you are, then it's clear you are speaking from a place of bad faith. I've even spelled it out to you and you've refused to address the original person posing the question and instead brow beat on what you think you can get away with regarding nettiquette - the most uninteresting part of the conversation possible.
It's just a new regional power and some people hate that. The same kind of people who would've been against pretty much any country back when it was formed.
Just thinking their small city state was enough. Hell, they would've been against city states, against tribes unifying, just against any society beyond their own tribe/family.
Small minded fools who blame everything on someone else. Usually anti-vaccine and anti-science in general, suspicious of any smart person in the world who tries to save and help their worthless stupid lives.
Who does that for no apparent reason, right? Why is Bill Gates spending billions on fighting diseases? Is he insane? No, clearly he has an ulterior motive. Just dumb.
India is structured like the USA, a collection of states, with central and regional powers. But they are very much internally focused, and rarely venture into global politics. They don’t intend to colonize any other states, nor make any attempts at militarizing anything outside their borders.
I would find it hard to ever compare India to a British-like empire…
Also, for Indians, organizing into such a distributed state->central structure was the only way to survive after the British (an actual empire) had finished their colonial destruction. The Mughals violently acquired multiple regional monarchies, to be ruled by their monarchy.
So did the Romans for 500 years
> Of course, the EU empire works in a different way; economic hostility towards outsiders (high tariffs and compliance cost when importing anything), access to a big common market and a lot of subventions for the insiders. It might be the first attempt to build an empire on money only.
All of the states I listed do the same.
EU empire, my ass. Find something useful to do with your life.
This definitely looks like low-key imperialism, because the EU does not really have a reason to pay for an absurdly expensive Chinese-built highway in Montenegro, other than limiting influence of a competing power in that territory.
The Western Balkans and Turkey are the EU's immediate neighbors. Does the EU seek influence over what happens in such neighbors? No doubt. Does that count as imperialism? Not so clearly.
Russia is a major power, with the potential to be a major energy and military threat to the EU. Does the EU seek to drive the outcome of interactions with Russia? No doubt. Does that count as imperialism? No.
I'm not talking about tomorrow or next year. More on a timeline of 20-40 years when we start seeing more profound global upheavals. The nature of the EU will change too.
German NGO ships explicitly supported by German churches and German politicians move people from the shores of Africa, while half of Italian political scene wants to lock them up.
It is now 6 years since the great migration crisis of 2015. There is no EU-wide consensus on anything substantial in the asylum and migration policy. All the proposals have proven themselves unworkable.
the EU just does not have the cohesion to act like and empire and conquer anything. It’s more like a big market
us was formed roughly around the same time (+/- couple hundred years).
the states in the EU have a long history (thousands of years) and a long tradition of doing things their way.
i’m not ruling out the possibility but I think it’s highly unlikely
There is no "EU Empire" any more than the US is an empire composed of its states. The fact is that the EU is a political entity which confers (nominal) equality on its members. There's no colonial style relationship there at all. Nobody is being robbed of their rights except British people who can't use the ECJ anymore.
From a random Czech point of view, EU is the most relevant big entity involved in my life right now, so of course it is on my mind, especially when the ideas of moral purpose and historical necessity are explicitly mentioned. That is the tenor of the pro-EU argumentation, yes.
As far as colonial style relationships go ... once again: this is an economic empire built on money and thus the colonial style relationships are built on money as well. Just look at the internal flows of money within the Union. A lot of the total profit accrues to big holdings in a few countries.
But the EU is certainly an imperialist block in the purely economic sense as well, just like the US or Britain. After all, wealth is extracted towards the centre through the low wages of workers in the periphery (especially Eastern Europe).
Sadly the same can't be said for the single currency - which many Eastern European countries haven't yet joined. Greece is perhaps the main counterexample in that its GDP per capita is no higher compared to France than it was when it joined (its GDP dropped by a huge amount since the 2008 crisis.)
Imagine if something similar would have been possible in the Americas.
We’re much worse off than before 89 and the EU is a large part of the reason why. Another is the IMF.
Meanwhile Ukraine, which was not on the EU track and was about as rich as Poland in 1989, saw a much longer drop in GDP after 1989 and its GDP per capita is now just 1/3rd of Poland's.
It's difficult to imagine how Eastern European countries would have fared better had they not joined the EU.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2...