I suppose that complexity involves international ties, and some voters realise that their jobs are dependent on internationalism, so they don’t want to vote for right-wing isolationism. But some people are happy to vote for isolationism anyway, because they want to reduce immigration in many cases. Who knows what the future holds, but I guess we now have four years of Trump leading the free world to find out.
I think that most western countries are converging on economic, taxation and liberal values that align.
Well illiberal leaders have been elected in the US, Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, and maybe more will follow… but yeah who knows.
Yeah fair enough. I wonder what will happen in the future. Maybe a federation will never happen, who knows.
Maybe it should be a federation… although that obviously won’t be realistic for years to come. And France and Germany alone are a way off from a majority if you have a representative parliament… France and Germany together is about 150 million people, but there are around 450 million people in the EU.
for military cooperation I think it might be good not to be too trigger happy
True. I guess maybe for some actions, a two-thirds majority of votes could be required. I dunno.
Majorities might produce bad decisions sometimes but the alternative is that you have leaders making decisions that the majority of people don’t like… which is arguably worse.
As for the veto, I wonder if the EU will dislike that sort of thing in the future, especially if greater EU co-operation is seen as necessary in order to compete with (and defend from) large powers like the US and China. If one country vetoes something that the majority of Europeans want, is that good? Maybe not.
Fair points. You’ve reminded me of what was said by Bonnie Greer on British TV the other night (she’s an American/British author, originally from Chicago). She was saying how Trump is just a transactional businessman who is only interested in what other parties (such as Europe) can do for him.
Yeah maybe the veto thing is a bit silly. Maybe these matters could be decided by a majority vote in the EU parliament.
Sure, I wouldn’t want US-style healthcare for Europe. I’m not saying Europe should copy everything that the US does, but imagine if European research (military or otherwise) came up with something as groundbreaking as the internet… that would be cool.
The US defence industry does pretty well though, given that it makes the world’s best military hardware. Although of course Boeing has had problems in recent years so I guess it’s not all great.
But yeah military and civilian benefits would of course both be good, I’m just saying that military research has produced stuff that also has civilian benefits.
Military R&D has created good technology though, like the internet, and GPS. Both of these obviously benefit civilians.
Also maybe Europe needs to be more serious about defence and military capabilities, especially if Trump weakens NATO. Macron said yesterday that Europe needs to stop being “herbivores” and start being “omnivores”, otherwise the world’s “carnivores” will push Europe around.
The strain on Ukraine is immense though, as the article states. Ukrainian men are told to fight. They’re being bundled into vehicles by military recruiters (it’s often vatniks making this point, but that source is a US-government-funded media company).
I would absolutely like for Russia to withdraw entirely from Ukraine, but surely the human cost needs to be taken into account. I don’t think Ukrainians should be forced to fight. And maybe potential soldiers would be more willing to fight if Western support was better than it currently is - Zelenskyy is always requesting more weapons and the West just drags its feet.
I would say that using TikTok at all is cringe, considering that China hates us in Europe
With a mathematically representative EU parliament then France and Germany shouldn’t be able to control anything by themselves because like you say, their combined population is less than half of the EU