i was pro-remain because i am pro-european. i have been educated that way, i am cosmopolitan, outlooking. i did part of a postgraduate degree on french literature. i have great affection for europe. but europe is not the EU and too many remainers, the most stalwart and emotional among them, couldn't seem to separate the two. separation from the EU, it turns out, isn't a rejection of european culture tout court.
reading the neoliberal triumphalism and 'that's progress, folks' rhetoric from technocratic eggheads such as yourself has given me a new view on the EU bureaucracy. it seems parasitical and befuddled by its own orthodoxies. i don't see any original thinking or creative solutions in the EU. we are going through a TV re-run of the economic crisis and you have the same broken solutions again which have caused the continent to spiral into right-wing populism. so now i'm more like agnostic, even though the indecision riles you. it is what it is.
i used to believe, broadly, that blocs were A Good Thing. that bargaining power needs to be scaled up to compete with the superpowers on the world stage. like you, i believed that sacrificing local autonomy and throwing farmers, workers, etc. into the gyre of a global system was the price to pay for entry into this world order. now i don't really care and think it's immaterial, either way. neither the US nor china are 'friends of the EU', the trading bloc will always come a dismal third at the global table; and in the meanwhile, individual states could probably find better ways to survive on the scraps from the table.
the EU is just as full of its own bluster as any nationalist movement. i am depressed by the brexiteers. they do not seem to be engaged with reality, burying themselves away in ww2-era kitsch. but i don't think the pan-european smooth-talkers are really reckoning with reality, either. the simple fact of the matter is, without merkel and rapidly approaching another widespread economic recession (if not a disaster-depression), the EU will be thrown into the doldrums. the post-merkel EU is not at all necessarily going to be the beacon of hope, economic prudence, and cool rationality that it has preferred to present itself as up to now. good luck selling those tough fiscal packages to the south when the people selling them are no longer united behind merkel-macron, and instead look like a bickering bunch of nationalists themselves.
the people with the most collective will to see the EU succeed are the formerly marginal and newer states with the least to contribute and the most to gain from it. the dutch and danes are fairly sick of it. large portions of germany are fairly sick of it. france has been in a state of nonstop social unrest and protest for years, mostly directed at macron the neolib-EU poster boy. the UK, mortal enemies as we now are, was a huge part of its lifeblood. we're gone and we're not going to pay the tab. the EU's leadership and will are evaporating.
tough times are ahead.
and remind me what the EU did for italy and spain when they were the early forerunners in the epidemic, again? there was almost zero collective will to do anything. about a pandemic. on their own doorstep. the response was so shabby and piss-poor that the EU offered an official apology to italy for leaving it on its own to struggle with a collapsing health system. so much for all that bonhomie, eh? is the EU's only form of 'crisis response' getting the rich northern banks to reluctantly loan money to devastated states long after the fact? no thanks.
Last edited by uziq (2020-05-16 03:34:57)