US voices concern over UK exit from EU

Trout, I see things from the opposite view.

The failings of international law in the past should tell you why it will fail in the future.

If you want peace, you won't get it through the EU. You'll get it through every nation maintaining its own robust military while engaging in trade.

No diplomatic alliances are needed -- only the principle of MAD.

 

Well, the formation of the EU was political project as well as an economic one. The idea was to buttress the potential for state actors within Europe to go to war with one another over resources. On the broader scale, the UN needs to be democratised too, Serfin', root and branch. Like I say, in my view, the notion that EU remains deferential to nation states is the major flaw that needs to be corrected and is one of the major causes as to why many people would rather us be isolated outside looking in.

In the UK, national schadenfruede at the problems of the Euro is almost universal across the political spectrum. How foolish, British media and politicians gloat, of those silly Europeans to undertake the biggest single economic step in the history of mankind! How wise we were to stay on the sidelines sneering!

I remain a committed internationalist. For me, nation states are potentially extremely dangerous entities. They have the power to co-erce, brutalise and even lawfully to kill their own citizens. They regulate economic, commercial and societal transactions. They wield such power that contest among internal political leaders for control of that power can erupt into violent civil war. And they control such physical resources that nation states can launch war on each other in order to annex those resources or access their benefits. A properly functioning EU limits these possibilities.

Murdoch's Sun newspaper derided Jaques Delor's with front page headlines 'Up Yours Delors'. Delors understood that the problem of the Euro is that a currency union is not really feasible without a fiscal union. He realized that the solution was a fiscal union. If we had listened to this guy decades ago, the EU wouldn't be in the mess it's currently in. But he was derided as a lunatic in our media when in truth he was a prophet. So the question I pose to Jack is why he thinks Murdoch ran with this headline in order to demean him?

To repeat, contrary to popular knee-jerk opinion, where the European Union has gone wrong is not that it has gone too far in integration, but that it has not gone nearly far enough.

Germany needs to be reined in because in effect it dictates policy within the Eurozone – in this case austerity policy – to everyone else. Democracy is now even more meaningless to the Greeks and Spaniards than it is to the rest of us.

But this is not a reason to abandon the project. On the contrary, it's a reason to reform it.

 

I think the erosion of national sovereignty is a far greater threat to the welfare of humanity than the periodic occurrence of war.

A one continent government is just one step closer to a one world government. That's the last thing humanity should be aiming for.

I believe the larger you make a government, the more it can brutalize its people. As with markets, a competition of governments is preferable to one government holding a monopoly.

A lack of a fiscal union isn't what has caused most of the mess. Most of it is directly a result of longstanding tax collection issues. If anything, that's more of a cultural problem around the Mediterranean than it is a banking problem.

The problems with Greece and Spain are best solved by Greece and Spain -- alone. Only they can actually fix their shadow economy problems. If they don't fix that, then you won't want to unify with them on much of anything, because the corruption appears to be rather vast in scope.

 

Europeans are always at each others throats. They need some sort of alliance to stop from killing each other.

 

Indeed.

 

The Germans are running the EU and they didn't have to lose one soldier. Genius.

 

I think Western Europe has evolved past that.

Now, the Balkans on the other hand....

 

Are you joking, loads of British would love to take Ireland back. Spain is always banging on about Gibraltar.

 

Scottish independence is just a bad idea, not least for the military.

 

Well, I don't see how the EU would be any better of an arrangement when you consider that uniting under one government just means corporations can plunder you without even a single shot being fired.

 

Surprisingly honest. Easily to be translated into: "The UK is the country within the EU that's most prone to lick our boots whatever nonsense the US are up to. Once they leave the EU, the EU will be less likely to continue to lick our boots than it is now, while we're left with a UK as a lapdog that is pretty insignificant on its own."

Coming to think of it this almost makes me like the idea of the UK leaving the EU. Might be a good riddance.

 

But at least they ain't killing each other for resources and dirt though.

 

It's kind of depressing if those are the only two options. No wonder Canada and Australia are more appealing to most immigration.

 

I know, but European nationalism is quite deadly. It's in their blood or something.

 

Corporations can plunder you whatever, probably even easier if your government is small and insignificant and easily blackmailed by "we're going abroad". I'm a little surprised that you as an US-American are so uncomfortable with the idea of federalism.

 

I understand the parallel, but the difference with the U.S. is that our states share a lot more in common both economically and culturally than European nations do.

Even if you compared Vermont to Mississippi, you would find a lot more in common between them than between Greece and Sweden.

That being said, I'd have to say that America is getting to be a bit too big for itself as it is. As the distance between the average citizen and the federal government grows greater and greater, more Americans long for greater decentralization of authority here.

It's never going to happen, but we'd be better off splitting up than staying as one country.

If anything, you can use us as an example of the dangers of uniting -- because once it truly happens, you can't really reverse it.

We even fought a very bloody war over it.

 

Serfin, ok I'll deal with each of your points in turn:

I'm sorry but the idea that the erosion of national sovereignty as conceptualized within the current state aparatus is a greater threat to humanity than war, is simply an absurdity.The EU was formed as a preventative to intra-state wars within Europe following the carnage that resulted from WW2.

A world government is PRECISELY what humanity should be aiming for.

Unbridled, unregulated capitalism administered at the national level where the EU succumbs to national sovereign interests as opposed to a regulated capitalism overseen at the European level using multilateral monetary and fiscal levers, is the PROBLEM not the solution to the difficulties the EU faces.

Monetary union is not possible without a fiscal union. The EU cannot function effectively with either one of the other in isolation....Ditto, the nations comprising PIGS.

The EU should be eliminating its deference to nation states. Executive power within the European Union needs to be removed completely from the nation states in the Council of Ministers, or Council of German Orders as it should be better known now.

The executive body of the European Union should rather be dependent on, and largely drawn from, a majority of the European Parliament. That parliament divides along ideological, not nationalistic lines and does provide a much broader range of representation of opinion than most national parliaments.

The question of subsidiarity and the balance of powers between a new democratic European government and national and regional governing bodies, should be the subject for a book not an article. But I would move virtually every power of a nation state either up or down. Fiscal policy, foreign policy and defence should all be exclusively at the European level.

The problems of the European Union multiplied when it adopted the philosophy of variable geometry, of inner and outer cores, of fast track and slow track members. For the single currency and single market to succeed, unity must be much tighter..

 

I guess, for me, it comes down to this.

I don't see why having just one world government would somehow solve the corporate issues mentioned.

If anything, having only one government to bribe makes it easier to game the system.

 

One bloody war in how many years?

I'm not Swedish, but German. But I've frequently got some Greek and Spanish blokes hanging round my bar. They like their beer as much as the next man. All in all I can spot no more significant cultural differences than I can spot between Prussian little me and a Bavarian.

Seriously: I think the right kind of one-world government with a federal system, a world-wide currency with world-wide minimum wages might solve quite a lot of our problems. To begin with companies wouldn't ship their production to China, because they'd have to pay the exact same wages and taxes but would need to pay extra for energy-wasting shipping. It's a far away dream.

 

Britain could become a ‘second-class’ member of the European Union under plans floated in Brussels yesterday. An influential group of European federalists, who want to see Brussels given even greater powers, is suggesting the UK is relegated to ‘associate member’ status. The move would see Britain remain part of the single market but freed from much of the social legislation and bureaucracy associated with full EU membership.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2255217/Brussels-plot-make-Britain-second-class-member-EU-denying-country-veto-MEP-seats.html

 

Ultimately, going beyond the EU, the problem the world faces is underscored by the logic that drives capitalism forward. This is the competitive logic which somehow needs to be tamed. In the absense of actually getting rid of the current system and replacing it with socialist democracy, the next best move is to aim for something that approximates to it existing WITHIN capitalism.

The biggest single geopolitical issue today is the overweening power of the US in a unipolar world and the problem of how it should be handled by all other nations. No political leader can be said to have satisfactorily resolved this problem.

The present world order has to be radically redrawn if we are to avoid WW3 or climate catastrophe. This means tackling the current US hegemony.

The institutions set up in the past 50 years to run the world in a democratic fashion are in fact deeply undemocratic. The UN General Assembly is dominated by the Security Council's five permanent members, who can veto whatever they don't like. If any attempt is made to remove their dominance, they can veto any attempt to remove their veto.

The International Monetary Fund and World Bank are dominated by the G8 nations, which hold 49% of the votes, though that suggests that if all the other 176 nations voted together, they could still overturn the richest nations. However, all major decisions require an 85% majority, so the US, which alone possesses 17% of the votes, can veto any significant resolution it wishes, even if the resolution is supported by every other single country.

The World Trade Organisation has an aura of democracy in that every nation belonging to it has one vote. However, before a new round of trade talks begins, the agenda is fixed by the "Quad" - the US, EU, Canada and Japan. Together with a small and variable number of poorer countries, they decide all the main business of the new trade round in a series of "Green Room" meetings. The WTO is therefore as exclusive as the UN, with the Green Room acting as the WTO's Security Council and the Quad its permanent membership.

The consequences of this system are clear for all to see. The US goes to war with Iraq without a second resolution in the Security Council, defying three of its permanent members and most of its temporary members.

The World Bank and IMF have become the bailiffs of the world economy, putting the whole burden of maintaining the balance of international trade on the poorest debtor nations. Sub-Saharan Africa paid twice the sum of its total debt in the form of interest between 1980 and 1996, yet still ended up owing three times more in 1996 than it did in 1980.

Equally, the WTO enforces free trade on weaker nations according to rules with which the richer countries, especially the US, do not comply. Debtor nations are required to remove barriers to trade and capital flows, to liberalise their banking systems, reduce government spending on everything except debt repayments, and privatise assets for sale to foreign investors. By contrast, the US, after the so-called Doha development round in 2001 aimed to liberalise trade and increase access to western markets, raised farm subsidies to its own farmers by 80%, thus massively cutting world prices and bankrupting tens of millions of farmers in the poor world.

The solution given the constraints capitalism poses it seems to me is not to tinker with the existing institutions but replace them wholesale. The key to this is a return to the brilliant innovative insight of John Maynard Keynes in 1943 in preparation for the Bretton Woods conference, which determined the postwar international economic architecture that has prevailed ever since.

Part 2 to follow.

 

Part 2

Keynes's idea was a new global bank called the International Clearing Union (ICU) with its own currency, the bancor. Every country would have an overdraft facility in its bancor account no more than half the average value of its trade over the previous five years. The system he devised gave a strong incentive to both deficit and surplus countries to clear their bancor accounts annually, ending up with neither a trade deficit nor a surplus.

Deficit countries would be charged interest on the overdraft, rising as the overdraft rose; they would have to reduce the value of their currency by up to 5% to promote exports and would have to prevent the export of capital. Keynes's innovation was to apply similar pressures to surplus countries too. Any such country with a bancor credit balance more than half its overdraft facility would be charged interest (or demurrage) at 10%. It would also have to raise the value of its currency and permit the export of capital. But if this was not enough and its credit balance at the end of the year exceeded its permitted overdraft, the surplus would be confiscated.

Keynes's system would, quite simply, maximise worldwide prosperity and level the power of nations. The ICU would entail no forced liberalisation, no penal conditions on the poorest countries, no engineered opportunities for predatory banks and multinational corporations, no squashing of democratic consent. But the obvious question remains: how can the rich nations, especially the US, be made to accept it?

It's relevant to bring the thesis of George Monbiot in his book The Age Of Concent ,from here on in. Monbiot's answer is to turn the instruments of rich nations' power against themselves. The poor world's debt to the commercial banks and IMF and World Bank, at some $2.5 trillion, is nearly twice the combined reserves of all the world's central banks. In effect, as Monbiot himself puts it, "the poor world owns the rich world's banks". But he is not recommending a mass default. Rather, he proposes that the indebted nations, which can never repay their debt, should demand a conditionality for their compliance - exactly as the rich nations do - namely the replacement of the institutions causing the problem (IMF and World Bank) by arrangements that automatically achieve a balancing of trade (the ICU). Blackmail, of course, but if well orchestrated it might just conceivably work.

He rounds off this central theme with two other radical proposals. One is that a Fair Trade Organisation (FTO) is needed to govern the rules of trade very differently from the market fundamentalists of the WTO. Following the precedent of the rich countries, which in nearly all cases (certainly in the case of the US) got rich initially through protectionism, the FTO would permit the poorest countries to defend infant industries with tariffs, other import restrictions and export subsidies. Foreign investors would be required to leave behind more wealth than they extract and to reimburse for any destruction, environmental or otherwise, that their trading produces. Rich nations would be required to remove all barriers to trade - tariffs, import restraints and perverse subsidies that keep out imports from poorer nations.

Again, what hope in hell is there of such a radical (and utopian) system beng accepted? Monbiot's reply is unequivocal: a fair trading system should be added to an ICU as a condition of refraining from a mass coordinated default.

Linked to this is Monbiot's final major proposal - a democratised UN General Assembly where votes are weighted by size of population and in accordance with a global democracy index, to incentivise high standards of governance. This restructured assembly would also take over the functions of the UN Security Council which, as Monbiot says, has already largely been sidelined by US actions over Iraq.

 

I agree with Trout on all of his points.

The EU makes sense; fiscally it has failed because it did not go far enough.

De Facto this is changing because Germany is backing most of the poorer countries' debt and deciding on what terms it does so.

However I imagine that France and Germany may be for a closed circle, constituting the stronger states, with the weaker ones separated out and then further circles of observers like England.

I think England will be relatively isolated then. But if that is what they want, it is OK for me.

 

Spot on.

This is, in practice, the end game, as much as there are those that will deny it.

You could even argue that we are already at least half way there, when you really consider it.

Tragic. Because, if ever they achieve their aims, that's it you know. You will never get back what they take or change. Never. Once they take from you, in any form, they will never return what they have taken, even if they say a thing is temp, it never is. All those anti constitutional concepts, like the NDAA act, the relentless campaign to control the internet, they will never scrap that now. They will only broaden it out, to control, to impose their will on you, as these things were always really designed to do. If they contrive to remove your 2nd amendment (whole or in part), they will never restore the rights back to you. They would ONLY go further, in time.

Because of ********s like Alex Jones (a disinformation agent, who has been busted on another thread), people would ridicule you for even suggesting an end game like a One World Gov. I believe that is why the like of Jones is there, btw, after all, if you want to convince the masses that talk of such a thing is absurd, get an absurd man to do the talking. That way, people will associate any talk of it and him with absurdity. Works better that outright censorship, you see.

But if you leave morons like that aside, this is where certain people want to take us. Less individuality. Erosion of decision making powers of a given country. The erosion of national borders. They have the facility in N American, to try something similar to the EU. The template is all there. North American Alliance, I believe it may be called. The idea to essentially class the US, Canada, and Mexico as one entity. It matters, all of these things. I did not grow up in a world of so many rules, regulations, and fear of Gov. Did you? I would imagine not. But, if you have children, or plan to, ask yourself this - do they not merit the same rights to enjoy the freedoms you did? The way things are headed, the legacy that will be left them is one of only an idea of what freedom is, as given to them by the state.

Their aim is to effectively collectively own the world. Divided up according to it's niche. For instance, S American would be used as the place to gain a lot of natural resources, the ME of course, that is where the oil is, and so on. However, even having achieved their goal, btw you would now all be slaves, and there is no use moving to another country, anyway, having done that, they would still invent bogeyman enemies, it could be anything you like. But they would need some sort of perpetual threat, imagined notwithstanding.

 

The Europhile strand within UK politics and their supporters are the inhibitors of progress and civilization. They are the bane of my life, Liebe.