Belting thread this,if I did one on wholemeal thrush bread it would go down a storm.
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Has this stopped you emigrating?
I am outraged so I am staying put.
Put some meat on the bones Bazza otherwise we have nothing to debate upon, a link or some precis of what they are doing would help!!
The fact Denmark and Sweden are breaking their obligations by asking for passports is worth a discussion, the fact its being quietly swept under the carpet for supposed unity is another, this farce of a European Union can not end soon enough, we all still have National interests at heart and not European ones, how can we?
I see people like Barry getting worried about people crossing borders, etc, and I wonder if we’ve learned much at all. While I’ve sympathy for the idea of the EU as a de facto empire, those aren’t really the concerns enumerated by most people concerned about the EU.
They care about the negative and often small-time concerns, such as immigration, fears about social cohesion (even if they wouldn’t describe it as such) and the pressures that unchecked immigration place on an already straining system. There’s a lot of validity in that too; I just don’t really agree with the solutions. The EU, even in its current form, could do a lot more to recognise and help member states with the demand.
Europe has been a continent of empire for millennia. The number, composition and ownership of those empires change, but some of the most peaceful times the continent has experienced coincided with the existence of an empire in its golden age. We’re now seventy years without a general war in Europe. Undoubtedly, memories of recent destruction and Cold War tensions stiffened the resolve for peace, but I think the EU deserves a lot of credit for what it achieved, especially after 1989 in bridging a divided continent.
So yeah, it’s an empire, but one could argue that Europe needs an empire for stability. The last time the nation state thing was tried in the inter-war years, it resulted in too many countries having no security whatsoever. People tried to create empires anyway.
The EU isn’t perfect; the anti-democratic stuff needs sorting, but the general principle of being able to live, work and move freely anywhere in this continent is a fantastic achievement; unthinkable even during parts of my relatively short lifetime.
Hitchens reckons if you don’t run your own empire, you’re part of somebody else’s. I’d sooner throw in with the EU than become part of the US, Chinese or Saudi Arabia’s.
Europe is dying and no experiment of an illusion of a European Empire will hide that.
Its close you eyes, ears time and deny it is and say all in the garden is rosy or rosier than if we simply all traded with the World as that’s what we are going to do anyway.
According to that article you linked the Nordic Council have had open borders since 1945 which has now ended.
However this is probably easier to maintain as the Nordic countries have more in common with each other. Europe, as an empire, doesn’t really work because the main countries in it are too diverse and have strong identities. The EEC is probably where a Unites States of Europe should have stopped.
Where will the cheap labour come from though?
Interesting and horrific if true.