Hacker News is full of people who are anti-Brexit. I see little understanding of the opposing point of view. I am quite happy to see Article 50 finally happen and will sum up why here. Take it or leave it.
18 months ago I was pro EU. Not strongly so, just because it was the status quo, in my mind was vaguely associated with co-operation and so I was for it by default.
Today I am pretty strongly eurosceptic. I think it's important for the UK to leave and if anything I'd like to see it collapse entirely. Europe would be stronger, more prosperous, more cooperative and freer if the EU were to die.
My reasoning goes like this. The EU is not simply a kind of really big working group for finding new ways to cooperate, as I had once tended to assume. It is a quasi-religious ideology with disturbing similarities to a cult. The people who control the EU and many European politicians don't simply see it as a way to foster collaboration and trade but rather as a way to replace existing European countries with a new country, one which would in my estimation be significantly worse than the countries we have now.
Calling the EU a cult may seem extreme, but to me it's not:
The EU and its supporters are not interested in debate on the future of Europe. The future is their intended future, and no other alternative futures are legitimised through recognition.
The EU does not provide any channel for people to reject or modify their plans. Its leaders consistently see referendums or politicians that are not blindly pro-EU as dangerous and if they occur anyway, often due to constitutional obligations, the results are simply ignored if they run counter to what the EU's leadership wants. The so-called Parliament cannot actually change anything about the EU itself (it is not a real Parliament) and is thus stuffed with yes men whose only reason for being there is ideological commitment to the vision itself (there are also a handful of no-men who got themselves voted in purely to try and slow it down, but they can't do anything and have no real power).
Indeed, we can safely assume that the new federal superstate the EU wants to build would not be a democracy. Given the EU's consistent lack of interest in actual, real democratic mechanisms, it is likely that if their plans succeed Europe's future looks pretty grim: something like the USSR of the 1980s. It is the avoidance of this fate that led me to vote out.
In common with many cults the EU deliberately tries to make leaving it as difficult as possible, through a variety of techniques such as insisting that the remaining cult members (who were of course previously supposedly loving friends and allies) shun the traitor and have nothing to do with them. Any sustained connection with members requires complete membership and suggesting it doesn't is an evil attempt to undermine the unity of the group.
The EU routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "Europe" when they mean "the EU". They do this to plant the idea that any rejection of their plans is actually a rejection of "Europe" and "Europeans", although it isn't. They also like to suggest that any rejection of the EU is dirty backwards looking "nationalism", although the EU has its own civil service, its own "parliament", its own borders, its own currency, its own courts, its own flag, its own national anthem and wants its own army. The reality is that the EU is a country-under-construction and the EU is a fundamentally nationalist project.
Finally, the most disturbing similarity of all is the fact that the modern EU is a project held together by fear. Its leadership happily and openly says so: President Hollande's memorable "there must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price" quote (on the topic of Brexit) being the most extreme example, but even today I read that Juncker is saying that there's no risk to the EU because the British "example" will show others what happens to countries that leave. They frequently imply that the alternative to the EU is World War 3. European leaders talk this way constantly, apparently either not realising or not caring that it makes them sound like some sort of Mafia.
There is no reason European cooperation must take place through such an organisation. Before the EU was formed in the early 1990s there were many parallel integration projects that were improving cooperation independently. The EU eventually absorbed them all, but if it were to collapse, the result would not be World War 3 or a dark age of hatred. It'd be a return to the days when deals and international bodies were set up independently and countries could independently assess which were working well and which were not, instead of an "all or nothing" arrangement that artificially ties trade and cooperation to an irreversible loss of local control.
Edit: -1 within a few minutes. What a surprise. Don't downvote if you disagree, you won't change anything that way. Reply and debate instead.
Second edit: Thanks for the replies. I would like to engage and continue the debate with you guys but HN has throttled me so I can no longer reply. I'll try following up tomorrow and see if the throttle has been lifted. (I'm starting to conclude HN is not a particularly good place to debate political issues for this sort of reason ...)
I read your entire rant and it's based on the sole idea that the EU is a cult, not a single quantifiable fact. This is the kind of judgement that leads to bad decisions. I think it's best we make this kind of decisions based on numbers rather than abstract thinking.
For the record, I want to understand why people voted "leave" but every time I try I end up reading something like this which doesn't get me closer, it just upsets me.
> Secret EU law making reached a high in 2016 that has only been matched once before, according to figures obtained by EUobserver ... according to figures provided by the parliament, not a single bill ended up in a second reading agreement in 2016, only the second time this has happened since EU parliament record keeping began in 2004
If you dig into that story you will find people (Brits) raising the trend towards secret law making as a problem way back in 2005. The EU said it'd improve, it didn't, it got worse. Only one other legislature in the world makes law in secret: North Korea.
> A recent survey by the Pew Research Centre found that only 38 per cent of France had a favourable view of the EU, marking an astonishing negative shift in attitudes towards Brussels since the 2009 financial crisis that has been mirrored to varying degrees all across Europe. A poll last month by Ipsos-MORI found that nearly half of voters in eight European Union countries want to be able to vote on whether to remain members of the bloc, with a third saying they would opt to leave, if given the choice.
That's a pretty large number of people wanting their own exit referendums. However, there appears to be no chance of them getting such a vote. European politicians tend to describe allowing people to vote on the EU as a "contagion", a "mistake", "populism" etc.
> learning more about the EU may be just as likely to lead people to have a negative view of the EU as a positive view ... in 2003 a team of researchers from University of Twente in the Netherlands concluded that, contrary to Inglehart’s thesis, the more voters understand about European democracy the less satisfied they become.
Summary: the idea that people can only disagree with the EU because they don't know the facts is not supported by the EU's own polling and studies.
The quotes and references to events I suppose you can Google for yourself. Are there other things you'd like me to provide data for?
I note that some people seem to think my post says things that are wild/extreme/unsubstantiated. But we're talking about the UK which just voted to leave despite all the warnings about how painful it's going to be. What I wrote above is not really considered an extreme POV in the UK, you can find op-eds with similar lines of reasoning in mainstream newspapers. And many of the things I refer to can be easily checked with a few minutes on a search engine, like the quotes from European politicians.
People who accuse the EU of wanting to be a United States of Europe are at least a decade out of date. Political power within the EU ultimately lies in the hands of individual national governments, not the EU structure as a whole (who's Jean-Claude Juncker again?).
After the failed EU constitution and the tribulations of the Lisbon Treaty, there has been absolutely no energy towards attempting any further federalization. Look at the response to the Greek sovereign debt crisis, or the ongoing migrant crisis. I doubt there will be any credible push towards "ever closer union" for at least another decade--and even then, it would still require at least the cooperation of major national governments.
Yes, it's possible for the rest of the EU to gang up on one country if they do a vote "wrongly" (cf., Ireland). However, Britain is one of the largest countries in the EU. If the French or German governments objected to a proposed treaty revision, it would be incapable of passing. And Cameron's "renegotiation" actually did get a similar guarantee in writing to apply to Britain.
It's also worth pointing out that you're asking to leave the EU at this point, which means you should expect to forfeit the benefits of being in the EU and should not expect to receive any more favorable treatment than other countries outside the EU (such as Canada) with respect to things like trade.
There is this trend in online postings that I've only noticed recently with Trump and Brexit. Accounts come with huge walls of texts that always start with "I used to be super pro-EU/hippy liberal" but then they did their own research and found out that EU are actually mafia that eats babies and liberals are all pedophiles - opinions which are so out of the mainstream line of thinking that it's quite clear that they've never shared pro-EU/liberal values in the first place.
Is this "I use to be like you but then I saw the light"-sort of post effective at persuading people?
Originally when the vote was announced I was pro staying in, but like the above, the more I looked on to how the EU is run, how decisions are made, the more I didn't like it.
I have no issues with immigration, I'm all for people settling in whatever country the like!
I'm pro leaving the EU because I do not agree with how it is run and the direction it is heading.
I was very similar, I started out quite strongly in favour of remaining, did quite a lot of research and ended up firmly stuck on the fence, with my only reasons to stay being any to avoid taking any economic damage
The EU is controlled by an informal body that doesn't exist on paper called the "Eurogroup". Decisions taken there, affect the entire continent. That group is tightly controlled by the German Finance Minister with his Hollander counterpart acting as a messenger. All other European Bodies hold literally no formal powers, while at the same time trying to somehow justify their existence.
I'd say that the UK would have a problem in the long run if the EU had any chance of reforming Brussels. I don't see how this can happen. The EU is disintegrating as we speak.
Regarding the anti-immigrant feeling of Britons. It's not just the UK. Greece has Nazis in parliament since 2010 or 2012 AFAIK. Anti-immigrant policies are enforced by socialist governments throughout Europe (Hollande, Merkel, etc.) as result of Brussel's austerity policy which led to a financial stagnation, but hey if it brings votes to the party. Far right parties already set the agenda in the EU, without being in power, because their positions are the ones that bring votes.
Picturing the EU as a nice place is misleading at best.
> Except, of course that all the Eurogroup does is feed suggestions into the Council of Ministers, which literally holds the formal powers.
Nope. That's what you might wanna believe. Finance Ministers are treated like total idiots - most of them are tbh. They have 10 minutes each to talk about the problems of their country and that's about it. While they are talking others are cheerfully blabbing about personal shit. After this happy exchange of opinions, the German FinMin passes a set of papers which other FinMins are forced to sign blindly, go home and say something along the lines "I know it sucks, but if we want to be part of the EU we need to sign this...". Every now and then the French and Italian FinMin try to express an alternative view but they get quickly spanked and sent home crying like babies.
You might find that acceptable. I don't. I am part of the majority apparently, so fasten your seatbelt 'cause the next couple of years we're going for a wild ride in Europe.
Yanis Varoufakis has talked extensively about it[1]. But the real evidence is the total lack of transcripts of a procedure that should be publicly available since it concerns European citizens directly. Since you seem to be so happy with the current state of the EU, could you explain to me why there is no transcript of what my FinMin said and what XYZ FinMin replied? Maybe you can enlight us.
You got this all wrong - the Council of Ministers has no power where it matters, on budget and policies, at all. It's just there to spoonfeed ppl who can't tell the difference between a symbol with nominal power (that's why you get Malta and Ireland to preside this group) vs a group with executive and decisional power (like the Eurogroup) who decides who's bank are going to be closed next (Ireland and Greece are pretty good examples).
The EU has many many problems. Of course. Many of the critcisms you level at it would be equally valid of any single political party without a competant opposition.
Currently the EU only really has visible 'opposition' in the form of (IMHO) petty nationalists who want their respective countries to leave, rather than from people who are quite happy to be part of the EU, but want it radically reformed, or changed in specific ways.
I was saddened that the UK voted to leave (I'm British, live in the UK, but grew up in Cyprus). And horrified by how the 'Brexit meanx Brexit' group are now pushing it through with very little discussion about what that could mean, or how Euroskepticsm could be rechanneled into something positive.
The idea of Europe-wide cooperation, freedom of travel/work, etc. isn't going away any time soon, and currently the vehicle it's embodied in is the EU. I deeply wish the UK government had said, "Right. So the referendum proves that enough of the country is very very unhappy with the status quo. Would leaving the EU fix that? Or is there a way we can change the EU, or our status in the EU, in such a way that the situation is better?"
Post Brexit, the UK has no voice into the EU governance, and it's very unlikely that the people with influence in the EU will lean in helpful directions to what the UK government(s) would like it to be.
I hope you're right, that we will return to much more ad-hoc co-operation, deals and many individual treaties and so on. I really really hope you're right.
But while the EU remains like it currently is, I suspect it's simply going to be awful for the UK for a very long time.
I guess it slightly depends on how grown up and generous the EU negotiators and leaders are. If they genuinely will look out for the British public (technially their citizens...) and their interests in this, then it may not be so bad. But the UK government is certainly perceived as being remarkably selfish and self-centered in the whole affair, which doesn't really fill me with confidence about the future of the UK.
I think if the EU had been really capable of improving itself in a big way the UK would not have voted to leave. Cameron tried that tack though and it blew up in his face. He toured the whole continent trying to put together a deal to address the concerns of British voters and the rest of Europe told him to stop being a crybaby and demanding special breaks, etc.
The EU was unwilling to budge at all because the idea the Brits might actually do it and the government might not ignore the vote was unthinkable to them. You could find quotes at the time along the lines of "we are so glad this whole British business is behind us" after they sent Cameron packing: the idea the vote might be lost simply didn't occur at all.
So he came home and told the country he'd got a great deal that solved people's problems. But it didn't and nobody believed him. It also killed the "we can stay in a reformed EU" argument dead.
There is no chance of constructively working with the EU. It believes in commanding, not compromising.
I agree the EU is undemocratic and ideologically driven and it disturbs me how many people here don't seem to either care or realize it.
I'm not opposed to an EU superstate in principle. A well-structured EU would probably be useful in balancing the rising power of China. But the state of political affairs in Europe is intolerable and I'd rather see the EU collapse than the current trajectory continue.
You have to remember there are layers of governance here. The EU is a conglomerate formed of democratic member states. The Commissioners are appointed by those individual governments (which have to be democratic, it's a requirement of EU membership, for some value of "democratic" anyway). They also have to be approved by the EU parliament.
So we have Commissioners who are appointed by elected governments (in much the same way that the UK government appoints ministers, that's one level of indirection away from the voters) and are approved by directly-elected MEPs (assuming that the UK's shambolic turnout rates for EU elections mean the MEPs are actually directly-elected, since most people don't seem very interested). So the Commission is, what, half a level of indirection away from the voters? And they're directed by the governments they represent to adopt certain positions and advocate for what is in their government's interest.
So, yeah. We don't directly elect the Commissioners, but we don't directly elect the Chancellor of the Exchequer either.
The EU might be the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a century later - a collection of nationalities and things that had been countries, bolted together by a trans-national government that nobody really is all that fond of or loyal to.
Like all analogies, it has flaws, but it might be an interesting perspective...
Sorry - you said 'take it or leave it' - which strongly implies that you weren't interested in debate.
> It is a quasi-religious ideology with disturbing similarities to a cult.... The EU and its supporters are not interested in debate on the future of Europe.
Given the huge amounts of time that are spent in the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers discussing exactly these issues, I'm going to assume that you simply don't follow European affairs that closely.
> The so-called Parliament cannot actually change anything about the EU itself (it is not a real Parliament) and is thus stuffed with yes men whose only reason for being there is ideological commitment to the vision itself
Oddly enough, yes for the most part the people who stand for EU parliament are those people who think that the EU is valuable and want to get it to work.
You say the EU Parliament is not a 'real' parliament - I presume you mean because it cannot propose legislation. But that is precisely because the people who framed the EU wanted to limit the extent to which the EU Parliament would remove power from national parliaments and nation states. The Parliament can ask the Executive (the Commission) to draft legislation for it to vote on and you can certainly argue that the Commission should be more subservient to the Parliament's wishes - but again, nation states have proved resistant to that idea. Perhaps you would like more power to reside in the Council of Ministers?
There are many potential ways here that the EU could be reformed, if nation states got their arses into gear and actually did it.
> Indeed, we can safely assume that the new federal superstate the EU wants to build would not be a democracy.
No, one cannot safely state that.
> Given the EU's consistent lack of interest in actual, real democratic mechanisms, it is likely that if their plans succeed Europe's future looks pretty grim: something like the USSR of the 1980s. It is the avoidance of this fate that led me to vote out.
This is pretty much all in your head. Yes, if all the member states got together and said 'You know what, lets steer ourselves towards a dystopian future' it could happen. There's nothing in the EU institutions that says that this is an inevitable or even likely outcome.
> In common with many cults the EU deliberately tries to make leaving it as difficult as possible, through a variety of techniques such as insisting that the remaining cult members (who were of course previously supposedly loving friends and allies) shun the traitor and have nothing to do with them. Any sustained connection with members requires complete membership and suggesting it doesn't is an evil attempt to undermine the unity of the group.
Again, you're just making stuff up. So far various EU folks have pointed out, reasonably enough that if you want to have the benefits of full access to the single market, the other aspects, such as free movement of labour have to follow.
> The EU routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "Europe" when they mean "the EU".
Or it's a verbal short hand. Let's try translating shall we?:
The United States of America routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "America" when they mean "The United States of America".
> They also like to suggest that any rejection of the EU is dirty backwards looking "nationalism"
Partly, no-doubt because a large proportion of the people who reject the EU do so due to backwards-looking nationalism.
I don't think your argument is particularly rational. The EU is flawed, the EU can be reformed by its members
18 months ago I was pro EU. Not strongly so, just because it was the status quo, in my mind was vaguely associated with co-operation and so I was for it by default.
Today I am pretty strongly eurosceptic. I think it's important for the UK to leave and if anything I'd like to see it collapse entirely. Europe would be stronger, more prosperous, more cooperative and freer if the EU were to die.
My reasoning goes like this. The EU is not simply a kind of really big working group for finding new ways to cooperate, as I had once tended to assume. It is a quasi-religious ideology with disturbing similarities to a cult. The people who control the EU and many European politicians don't simply see it as a way to foster collaboration and trade but rather as a way to replace existing European countries with a new country, one which would in my estimation be significantly worse than the countries we have now.
Calling the EU a cult may seem extreme, but to me it's not:
The EU and its supporters are not interested in debate on the future of Europe. The future is their intended future, and no other alternative futures are legitimised through recognition.
The EU does not provide any channel for people to reject or modify their plans. Its leaders consistently see referendums or politicians that are not blindly pro-EU as dangerous and if they occur anyway, often due to constitutional obligations, the results are simply ignored if they run counter to what the EU's leadership wants. The so-called Parliament cannot actually change anything about the EU itself (it is not a real Parliament) and is thus stuffed with yes men whose only reason for being there is ideological commitment to the vision itself (there are also a handful of no-men who got themselves voted in purely to try and slow it down, but they can't do anything and have no real power).
Indeed, we can safely assume that the new federal superstate the EU wants to build would not be a democracy. Given the EU's consistent lack of interest in actual, real democratic mechanisms, it is likely that if their plans succeed Europe's future looks pretty grim: something like the USSR of the 1980s. It is the avoidance of this fate that led me to vote out.
In common with many cults the EU deliberately tries to make leaving it as difficult as possible, through a variety of techniques such as insisting that the remaining cult members (who were of course previously supposedly loving friends and allies) shun the traitor and have nothing to do with them. Any sustained connection with members requires complete membership and suggesting it doesn't is an evil attempt to undermine the unity of the group.
The EU routinely abuses language in manipulative ways, for instance using the word "Europe" when they mean "the EU". They do this to plant the idea that any rejection of their plans is actually a rejection of "Europe" and "Europeans", although it isn't. They also like to suggest that any rejection of the EU is dirty backwards looking "nationalism", although the EU has its own civil service, its own "parliament", its own borders, its own currency, its own courts, its own flag, its own national anthem and wants its own army. The reality is that the EU is a country-under-construction and the EU is a fundamentally nationalist project.
Finally, the most disturbing similarity of all is the fact that the modern EU is a project held together by fear. Its leadership happily and openly says so: President Hollande's memorable "there must be a threat, there must be a risk, there must be a price" quote (on the topic of Brexit) being the most extreme example, but even today I read that Juncker is saying that there's no risk to the EU because the British "example" will show others what happens to countries that leave. They frequently imply that the alternative to the EU is World War 3. European leaders talk this way constantly, apparently either not realising or not caring that it makes them sound like some sort of Mafia.
There is no reason European cooperation must take place through such an organisation. Before the EU was formed in the early 1990s there were many parallel integration projects that were improving cooperation independently. The EU eventually absorbed them all, but if it were to collapse, the result would not be World War 3 or a dark age of hatred. It'd be a return to the days when deals and international bodies were set up independently and countries could independently assess which were working well and which were not, instead of an "all or nothing" arrangement that artificially ties trade and cooperation to an irreversible loss of local control.
Edit: -1 within a few minutes. What a surprise. Don't downvote if you disagree, you won't change anything that way. Reply and debate instead.
Second edit: Thanks for the replies. I would like to engage and continue the debate with you guys but HN has throttled me so I can no longer reply. I'll try following up tomorrow and see if the throttle has been lifted. (I'm starting to conclude HN is not a particularly good place to debate political issues for this sort of reason ...)