I have the solution to the EU not integrating further. We should found a new political party in each EU member state. A single issue party for joining the UK. Make the Brexit great again!
Missed opportunity to make GB G again
GBG party
-snip-
Though I might actually be wrong in my inclusion of "polling error" here. Regardless though, it's all a matter of intervals.
Of course, no one ever frames it as such.
I've nought to add except I thought it worth mentioning you changed my mind on that
Pretty sure that he didn't mention anything about using the hypothetical European military to police EU citizens.
I have never seen someone who desired to construct a hegemonic military force for reasons any more benign than internal security.
And your argument is that because you think it's possible, it's possible, no facts needed. It's pure metaphysical bullshit, in other words.
Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen turned an appliance factory into a battleground Wednesday for France's blue-collar vote, upstaging rival Emmanuel Macron with a surprise campaign stop at the plant threatened with closure.
Chaotic scenes followed as Macron, a pro-European Union centrist, sought to wrestle back the initiative by making his own, impromptu stop at the Whirlpool clothes-dryer plant in Amiens, spending over an hour in Le Pen's wake trying to reason with angry employees who asked why the former finance minister hadn't come there earlier.
The remarkable drama, broadcast live on French news channels, transformed the plant in northern France into a symbol of the diametrically opposed campaigns of Le Pen and Macron before their May 7 runoff election.
As Macron met elsewhere with the workers' union leaders, Le Pen displayed her political guile by grabbing the spotlight and popping up outside the factory itself. Surrounded by employees in bright-yellow hazard vests, she declared herself the workers' candidate and vowed that if elected, she would not let the factory close.
"We'll get you out of here," Le Pen said as she hugged a woman in the crowd outside the plant, its fences decorated with workers' banners. "I am the candidate of workers, the candidate of the French who don't want their jobs taken away."
Her wily campaign maneuver stole Macron's thunder and put him on the defensive. It prompted him to make his own trip to the factory a few hours later — which quickly looked like he had fallen into a trap set by Le Pen. Live TV coverage of his visit looked chaotic and potentially damaging, with people whistling, booing and chanting "Marine, president!" in the background.
"Why didn't you come before?" one woman asked.
"Save our jobs, Monsieur Macron!" yelled a man.
But Macron, appearing in a suit and tie amid the workers, held his ground. Where Le Pen's visit was short — with a few selfies, hugs, kisses and a quick speech to the cameras — Macron spent over an hour patiently, and at times passionately, explaining in often-heated exchanges that as president, he wouldn't be able to stop companies from laying off workers. The back and forth was shown live on Macron's Facebook page, signaling a desire not to let Le Pen hog the limelight.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/frances-le-pen-upstages-rival-macron-stop-factory-47026786
Tbh I need to just make a hella Jeff macro "I warned you about the complacency bro, I warned you and it keeps happening." It's possible because this is a contest and one must not be entirely short-sighted to forget that after this election, the victor has a country to govern - learn well from the example of are based Nige, who, losing general elections, was nevertheless capable with patience of delivering a winning referendum to leave the EU. Marine Le Pen's ambitions are considerably larger, and I am concerned her ambitions for France will bite off more than she can chew, yet I know for certain that if she is defeated today she and her successors will continue to be an emerging threat to the European Union. All else on why I have said all I have said I've given earlier, if you do not want to discuss it we need not tbh
Embrace the eu and bask in its sacred glory, m8
u were supposed to bring balance to the union, not destroy it
You know what, you're right about that. Macron's platform is populist, that promises change from the usual business, by marching towards the ideals of Europe at full speed instead of making compromises with the local saboteurs. France is ripe for such movement, which is why he won the election.
That would be more convincing if he was not a minister from the previous government who was a Rothschild banker promising tax cuts for corporations and power consolidation under the European Union who wishes to continue the previous government's open border policy. That's identical to all the previous neoliberal ministers... I have not known the French socialist government to be opposed to EU consolidation. Lmao @ 'local saboteurs', EU'll make a spylord of you yet
Trump was elected by uneducated people, not poor. Something that Europe has less problems with, being significantly more urbanized and all.
"Haha stupid poor people can't afford education, look how uneducated they are"
I don't know if the French government can solve this by subsidizing education, and by extension whether the EU can solve this through the same means, but it certainly would provide much benefits from increased productivity per person. Furthermore, better educated people usually have access to the tools to create better business, commerce or careers, and people who have stable and productive lives are usually content with the status quo if the status quo does not infringe upon their rights.
No single political upheaval has shaken the world—and by many measures, people are generally richer, healthier, better educated and living in less violent societies than ever before. But the world today is also far more divided between rich and poor than it was a quarter-century ago: The 10 wealthiest people on the planet collectively hold $505 billion, more than most countries produce every year, according to Forbes. There’s also an increased sense that the very rich buy political influence, perhaps more than ever. Increased migration has revealed how many in the West remain hostile to outsiders—from Syrian refugees to Polish or Honduran immigrants; champions of globalization had assumed that sort of animus had waned. And social media and information technology have accelerated our ability to form closed, like-minded groups—and to get very angry at one another in public without apparent consequence.
As defined, populism—ideas intended to give ordinary people what they want—seems beneficent. But is what the people want now as violent as their leaders’ rhetoric? And with insurgencies mounting from east and west to throw out the elites in cosmopolitan cities like Paris and Amsterdam, which side will prevail? —Matt McAllester
http://www.newsweek.com/2016/12/02/europe-right-wing-nationalism-populist-revolt-trump-putin-524119.html
One of the startling things I found was how the sense of injustice in regards to wealth in particular was and still is exceptionally relative - looking back at the Americans who protested on wall street, I was stunned by just how immensely wealthy the protesters were in comparison to the world. Yet that pales in comparison to the wealth possessed by the people to whom they were protesting against, wherein people find incredible distaste in their governments serving as viceroys on the payroll to wealthy plutocrats to whom ordinary people have no chance of ever reaching any human connection with, and will eternally arouse paranoia, envy and injustice for as long as the power discrepancy is so vast. Thus the never-ending revolts against elite classes, which if left untackled, will continue to outrage and mobilize vast numbers of disaffected people. To learn from Brexit, what use was a well-educated cosmopolitan, preaching the merits of Slovakian maids, foreign investments and French wines, to an unemployed fishmonger who had no conception of a financial portfolio?
Under these conditions Marxists and Nationalists thrive. It took 6 years for the UK parliament to be run by liberals, liberals and liberals, to conservatives, marxists and nationalists, but it took 15 years to get to that 6 years. As to how the French solve that, I wish them best of luck but I don't really know tbh, this is something Macron will need to make priority #1 to win, and if he wins.
It's telling that the first thing you think about is using an army to quell the people you don't like with physical force. Which is, actually, not what I was thinking about. A unified European army means that people from various countries get to know each other in person for a long period of time without the possibility of evading social interaction due to the rigid structure of an army, and nothing destroys irrational xenophobia and prejudices faster than that.
I posed a problem, that if the EU simply ignores the millions of Europeans who do not like the EU and oppose its centralization efforts, its efforts will merely increase the backlash. You answered that by saying the creation of a single EU army would solve this problem.
Ah, but it is I who is evil for asking why you think a single EU army would make its opposition disappear? That is very cheeky, I do not expect a Russian to be naive to the uses of military internal garrisoning duties, a military force is in its foremost purpose, a military force. But I do know what you mean, though you must understand there is a great cultural difference between Western conceptions of military and civilian life versus Eastern European (including Russia) or Chinese conceptions of military and civilian life. In the West, there are not millions of reservists which naturally reduces the impact the military has on civilian life, and while the military units of the Western nations allow people of all backgrounds to be socially mobile through meritocratic action, this is pretty much limited to tens of thousands of people per country out of populations of hundreds of millions of Europeans (with obvious exception to the USA, whose military is vast). The European Officer class having common camaraderie would in time stand a good chance of influencing the entire armed forces of Europe, yet would not be a meaningful dent in the population without a great expansion in recruitment from disaffected rural areas of Europe - it would do no good to simply take those already pro-EU and make them pro-EU, one must recruit those who are anti-EU and make them pro-EU, and do so on a meaningful scale. The Europeans are rather opposed to being drafted for obvious reasons (usually for reasons related to men with funny hats or mustaches), so perhaps you envisage a pan-national service or cadet organization? Such a thing would have a much larger reach of population, and be crucial in targeting the young Europeans who will consist of future decision makers and supporters alike. Enlist all 18 year olds into a branch of the armed euroforce
tm, deploy them in another corner of Yurop to that they are from for a year (or even just 3 months if lost productivity or budgeting is an issue), hey presto you make new Europeans. I suppose the issue therein lies in that Europeans are naturally predisposed towards opposing such a concept, and if one makes it voluntary, there would have to be great incentives involved otherwise it would only attract people who are already pro-EU. Thus I imagine it could work if it offered service in exchange for education scholarships, which would kill two birds with one stone, attracting Europeans from poorer backgrounds who would otherwise be excluded from education for economic reasons, and would also be the Europeans most likely to support Marxists or Nationalists.
NATO's very existence promotes a unified language and command structure. You can't exactly have a military force where there's a possibility of two officers speaking two different languages and not understanding each other, or a military force where two officers do not know which one is superior and which one should be subordinate.
Good luck telling the Eastern Europeans that the unified command structure will be divorced from the United States, and that they, with the support of Europeans who do not put money into their military, will stand alone against the Russian Federation. This is the first and greatest issue with a European army: You go from having one command structure, to two, one command structure with Americans, another without.
The "2% of spending" is not an official NATO rule, it's something USA invented in order to fuel its stupidly large military-industrial complex by finding new markets to sell its stuff to. Obviously, European countries has refused to do so, except for ones that are directly threatened by Russia. Then again, they would've done so anyway, after Ukrainian events.
"Europeans are freeloading on Britain, Canada and US in Afghanistan In a speech to European and American security experts and diplomats at the Wilton Park conference centre in Sussex, Mr Hutton will suggest that the reticence of some Nato members has left a small group of countries including Britain, the US and Canada to do an unfair share of the fighting and dying in Afghanistan.
He will say: "It isn't good enough to always look to the US for political, financial and military cover. And this imbalance will not be addressed by parcelling up Nato tasks - the 'hard' military ones for the US and a few others and the 'soft' diplomatic ones for the majority of Europeans."
- 2009. I suppose part of the reason why UK-EU military cooperation did not produce the camaraderie and love you suggested such experience would produce, was that such military cooperation was half-hearted and left the sacrifices to be made by everyone else. The story is the same
under Obama as it is
under Trump, provided Europe can equally share the costs of war in lives and materiel then a single armed force could potentially be able to meet both its internal and external security commitments without the USA's direct involvement, if it cannot, the divisions between the military and defenceless states of Europe will simply grow wider - patriots will naturally grow incensed when their fellows enter the grave while their neighbour did nothing to assist.
Thus I believe the single greatest issue facing a potential EU military force is simply getting all European nations to contribute. Language barriers are significant, but not insurmountable - there is a great European precedent to learn from, in that the Austrian Hapsburg Empire was able to organize and deploy its army effectively despite its vast multilingual nature. In order to thwart nationalism, it could deploy South Slavs in Italy, Italians in Hungary, Hungarians in the Balkans, Bohemians in Poland, Poles in Austria and Austrians in Bohemia. That is to say nothing of its mixed regiments! Thus the EU could respond to the issue of the official language being English by simply not having one sole official language, instead having a multiplicity of official languages. Interestingly as well, the Austro-Hungarian Army's only concern, was that its government allocated the barest minimum to its budget, requiring British subsidies to function - replace the former and latter with Europe and the USA, and we arrive to the modern the world.
Some... interesting story about, allegedly, a German soldier successfully posing as a Syrian refugee and being caught for preparing a terrorist attack.
What. How. Why.
To investigators’ astonishment, they found that the lieutenant, who was posted to a joint Franco-German unit in France, was also living some of the time as a Syrian asylum-seeker at a refugee shelter in Germany.
He first presented himself as an asylum-seeker in December 2015, in the midst of the influx of more than 1 million migrants who flooded into the country under Angela Merkel’s “open-door” refugee policy.
He was given a place to stay in a refugee shelter in the town of Giessen, near Frankfurt, and formally applied for asylum under a false name in January 2016.
Prosectors were at a loss to explain how he was able to register as a Syrian asylum-seeker despite the fact he speaks no Arabic and is not believed to be of Syrian origin. The authorities raised no suspicion at the time of his application.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/27/german-soldier-spent-year-posing-syrian-refugee-arrested-suspicion/
The Europeans have some of the worst security protocols in the world, that is to say, they don't use them. At this point I tell you, everything is possible in Europe, it is a marvelous place.
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