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> a very English idea The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average. Public polling has generally shown other countries - i

> a very English idea The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average. Public polling has generally shown other countries - including Italy, Greece and France - have an approximately similar (or worse) opinion of the EU than we did. There's a significant chance that Sweden would have ended up having a referendum on membership if we hadn't, but how terribly it's gone for us has put off many of the eurosceptics elsewhere. During the worst of the Eurozone crisis, there were many who genuinely thought that the entire bloc would - or should - collapse. I also think people here do understand it's a set of compromises. The question for many is whether the set of compromises has become too large and unwieldly. The common view of eurosceptics in the UK was that the scope had crept too far, and that we could gain most of the benefits through a normal trade agreement without having to compromise on aspects like agriculture, fisheries, immigration control and ceding control over national law and third party trade. I think so far this is not going well, but it's still an open question. What you point out about Brits not understanding EU press is touching on an major issue a lot of people had with it: how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language, and can't understand each other's press? A common aspect of countries with poorly functioning democracies is they don't have a common culture or language. Whenever I've needed information about the EU, it's always been difficult to find because the EU websites are poor and the source material is often in French or another language that I can't understand. I absolutely agree that the compromises are necessary for the EU to function in its current state. However, perhaps the EU scope has become too large given how disparate the members are? If your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA, does it really make sense to compromise by living on a boat in the Atlantic? Or is it better to just be friends instead...

toyg 5y ago
> The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average. The UK is the only country where significant chunks of the elites kept explicitly advocating for (and are now putting in practice) a future outside the bloc. I'm Italian, and with all the usual complaints about this or that policy, Italian elites have never seriously considered backtracking on the project - because they all realize that the European nation-state is dead meat in the age of continent-sized superpowers. Of course they'll bitch and moan that they can't currency-inflate their way out of economic crisis anymore, but that is it; once Eurozone institutions are tweaked to allow for more fiscal transfers across the Union, as it's slowly happening, there won't be any real reason to leave. Same basically goes for French elites - with the last humiliation in Mali a painful reminder of their actual standing in this brave new world. The only country with a potential future outside the bloc is Germany, but they benefit from it so much in practice that it's never going to happen. > how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Any decently-educated European is bilingual, these days, to a decent level. It's more about insularity of the intellectual and political classes in this or that country. Probably because of the overabundance of cultural production coming from the US, the UK outside London is extremely insular. Pretty much any continental elite-person will consume The Economist and the Financial Times in addition to their local press; whereas the UK intellighentsia hardly every touches any continental press. > f your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA When the alternative is being overrun by Russian tanks and American F15, yes, the Atlantic island will have to do. We will all bitch and moan, sure, but we'll get on it.
- cameronh90 5y ago
  I don't think the UK is as far from other European countries as you think it is. Our elites, bar, historically, a small contingent of the conservative party, have always been _far_ more pro-EU than the population at large. Indeed, they still are - possibly about 3/4ths of parliament are Europhiles. Eurosceptics were typically political misfits and weirdos, like Farage, Corbyn, Banks, Gove, Wetherspoon and Cummings. BoJo only jumped on the Leave bandwagon as he's an opportunist. Nigel Farage seemingly made it his life goal to separate the UK from the EU and was fairly wealthy, but not even close to the kind of wealth you see on a day to day basis around London, let alone an elite. I personally know far wealthier, more politically connected "elite" pro-EU individuals than Farage. Most business leaders and elites in London, especially those in finance, were solidly pro-EU as their livelihoods were based on it. The EU is arguably the world's largest elite globalist capitalist organisation. Farage's influence was minimal until he managed to position himself as the leader of the British anti-EU movement, which as far as British political movements go, was as close to a grassroots movement as it gets. Few of the mainstream Conservative political elite were pushing for Brexit until it became increasingly apparent that they were losing votes to UKIP based on the anti-EU sentiment that had been boiling under the surface for the better part of half a century. The nature of our political and voting system is that the two major parties tend to try and placate the extremes to diminish their influence. There's a lot to dislike about how that system works, but historically that has resulted in a relatively stable political system. Once this discontent reached a certain level, Cameron decided to gamble the future of the country to save the Conservative party, thinking they'd easily walk the referendum and kill the grassroots opposition - but despite almost every major mainstream political influence being on the side of remain, leave won. There is clearly a certain amount of Russian influence, dodgy money and disinformation that pushed us that direction, but honestly I think it's overstated. Without it, maybe it would have gone 52/48 the other way, but clearly it was going to be very close no matter what. The EU has never sat right with a lot of people across the entire political spectrum for many of the same reasons it's unpopular with both the left and right in other European countries. I suspect if France was to have a similar referendum, the results would be similarly uncomfortably close - even if Frexit ultimately lost. Arguably the main difference between the UK and other European countries is our political mainstream tends to shift more to placate the extremes and stop them becoming a mainstream force in their own right. This is evident in how UKIP/BNP/BXP are now irrelevant again and have no representation, whereas AFD, SD, M5S, RN and others are still significant forces in European politics. I would bet money that if we had a different voting system, Brexit wouldn't have happened. Whether or not our voting system's trade-offs are the correct ones or not is certainly debatable (and I personally vote for voting reform at any opportunity), but our system has served us well throughout history and one must always be careful about changing something so fundamental to a successful democracy. What also emboldens the UK is that despite no longer being an Empire, it still is a very powerful country in its own right. Irrespective of how much of that power we dumped by leaving the EU, we're still permanent members of the UNSC, members of G7, FVEY, somewhere between #5 and #7 in global GDP, one of the strongest militaries, one of maybe two or three global force projection blue water navies, one of five NPT designated nuclear weapon states, one of the top countries for education, business and media output, have one of the world's two global cities, etc. If Sweden had a similar level of global relevance, the equation there might be substantially different too. Another reason other countries haven't left the EU is that the EU was intentionally designed to make it hard to leave. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the people who wrote those protocols have stated such. Obviously part of the point of the EU was to make us interdependent so we don't start killing each other again. > This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Not only is this a huge waste of time (and thus I would argue reduces the overall quality of the output of EU institutions - which is certainly extremely poor compared to UK government resources), the quality of those translations were often questionable. It was not uncommon for me and European friends to find pages where the pages would say something subtly different depending on what translation you were reading. But I would argue that it's not just about EU institutions, but rather for it to be a strong union you need to have an understanding about the domestic policies, culture and general goings-on within the other countries within the union. The UK has almost no cultural overlap with somewhere like Romania, which makes it hard for British people to accept that level of immigration and integration. Imagine every US state had a different language. Even if they also all spoke English as a second language, it's hard to imagine that would be as strong of a union as it currently is. And of course, many EU citizens speak other languages, but most commonly they speak their native language, intermediate English and then sometimes a tertiary regional language (e.g. Finns speaking Swedish). NW continental Europe tends to be a bit better, with places like Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland often being conversational in 3 or 4 languages, but that's not particularly representative of the whole EU. Europe is still very much a continent where people don't understand each other particularly well. As for the UK intelligentsia not touching European press, bilingual ones certainly do - but in general, why would we? It obviously doesn't make sense to learn German to read BILD. Anything important gets translated into English, and between our own press and the rest of the English speaking world, we have access to more quality media and news than we could possibly hope to consume in our lifetimes. Such is the nature of natively speaking the world's dominant language: no other languages reach a critical level of importance that we generally ever bother to learn them well. Personally speaking, if I was to learn another language, it would be either Spanish or Mandarin, neither of which would probably help me out too much in European matters...

toyg 5y ago

> The UK didn't even have the worst public opinion of the EU in Europe on average. The UK is the only country where significant chunks of the elites kept explicitly advocating for (and are now putting in practice) a future outside the bloc. I'm Italian, and with all the usual complaints about this or that policy, Italian elites have never seriously considered backtracking on the project - because they all realize that the European nation-state is dead meat in the age of continent-sized superpowers. Of course they'll bitch and moan that they can't currency-inflate their way out of economic crisis anymore, but that is it; once Eurozone institutions are tweaked to allow for more fiscal transfers across the Union, as it's slowly happening, there won't be any real reason to leave. Same basically goes for French elites - with the last humiliation in Mali a painful reminder of their actual standing in this brave new world. The only country with a potential future outside the bloc is Germany, but they benefit from it so much in practice that it's never going to happen. > how can a supranational institution taking over national government function be truly democratic if you don't even have a standard language This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Any decently-educated European is bilingual, these days, to a decent level. It's more about insularity of the intellectual and political classes in this or that country. Probably because of the overabundance of cultural production coming from the US, the UK outside London is extremely insular. Pretty much any continental elite-person will consume The Economist and the Financial Times in addition to their local press; whereas the UK intellighentsia hardly every touches any continental press. > f your partner desperately wants to live in Europe and you desperately want to live in the USA When the alternative is being overrun by Russian tanks and American F15, yes, the Atlantic island will have to do. We will all bitch and moan, sure, but we'll get on it.

cameronh90 5y ago
I don't think the UK is as far from other European countries as you think it is. Our elites, bar, historically, a small contingent of the conservative party, have always been _far_ more pro-EU than the population at large. Indeed, they still are - possibly about 3/4ths of parliament are Europhiles. Eurosceptics were typically political misfits and weirdos, like Farage, Corbyn, Banks, Gove, Wetherspoon and Cummings. BoJo only jumped on the Leave bandwagon as he's an opportunist. Nigel Farage seemingly made it his life goal to separate the UK from the EU and was fairly wealthy, but not even close to the kind of wealth you see on a day to day basis around London, let alone an elite. I personally know far wealthier, more politically connected "elite" pro-EU individuals than Farage. Most business leaders and elites in London, especially those in finance, were solidly pro-EU as their livelihoods were based on it. The EU is arguably the world's largest elite globalist capitalist organisation. Farage's influence was minimal until he managed to position himself as the leader of the British anti-EU movement, which as far as British political movements go, was as close to a grassroots movement as it gets. Few of the mainstream Conservative political elite were pushing for Brexit until it became increasingly apparent that they were losing votes to UKIP based on the anti-EU sentiment that had been boiling under the surface for the better part of half a century. The nature of our political and voting system is that the two major parties tend to try and placate the extremes to diminish their influence. There's a lot to dislike about how that system works, but historically that has resulted in a relatively stable political system. Once this discontent reached a certain level, Cameron decided to gamble the future of the country to save the Conservative party, thinking they'd easily walk the referendum and kill the grassroots opposition - but despite almost every major mainstream political influence being on the side of remain, leave won. There is clearly a certain amount of Russian influence, dodgy money and disinformation that pushed us that direction, but honestly I think it's overstated. Without it, maybe it would have gone 52/48 the other way, but clearly it was going to be very close no matter what. The EU has never sat right with a lot of people across the entire political spectrum for many of the same reasons it's unpopular with both the left and right in other European countries. I suspect if France was to have a similar referendum, the results would be similarly uncomfortably close - even if Frexit ultimately lost. Arguably the main difference between the UK and other European countries is our political mainstream tends to shift more to placate the extremes and stop them becoming a mainstream force in their own right. This is evident in how UKIP/BNP/BXP are now irrelevant again and have no representation, whereas AFD, SD, M5S, RN and others are still significant forces in European politics. I would bet money that if we had a different voting system, Brexit wouldn't have happened. Whether or not our voting system's trade-offs are the correct ones or not is certainly debatable (and I personally vote for voting reform at any opportunity), but our system has served us well throughout history and one must always be careful about changing something so fundamental to a successful democracy. What also emboldens the UK is that despite no longer being an Empire, it still is a very powerful country in its own right. Irrespective of how much of that power we dumped by leaving the EU, we're still permanent members of the UNSC, members of G7, FVEY, somewhere between #5 and #7 in global GDP, one of the strongest militaries, one of maybe two or three global force projection blue water navies, one of five NPT designated nuclear weapon states, one of the top countries for education, business and media output, have one of the world's two global cities, etc. If Sweden had a similar level of global relevance, the equation there might be substantially different too. Another reason other countries haven't left the EU is that the EU was intentionally designed to make it hard to leave. This isn't a conspiracy theory, the people who wrote those protocols have stated such. Obviously part of the point of the EU was to make us interdependent so we don't start killing each other again. > This is really a non-issue, EU institutions employ an army of translators and everything is available in any chosen lingo. The working lingua franca are effectively two, French and English. Not only is this a huge waste of time (and thus I would argue reduces the overall quality of the output of EU institutions - which is certainly extremely poor compared to UK government resources), the quality of those translations were often questionable. It was not uncommon for me and European friends to find pages where the pages would say something subtly different depending on what translation you were reading. But I would argue that it's not just about EU institutions, but rather for it to be a strong union you need to have an understanding about the domestic policies, culture and general goings-on within the other countries within the union. The UK has almost no cultural overlap with somewhere like Romania, which makes it hard for British people to accept that level of immigration and integration. Imagine every US state had a different language. Even if they also all spoke English as a second language, it's hard to imagine that would be as strong of a union as it currently is. And of course, many EU citizens speak other languages, but most commonly they speak their native language, intermediate English and then sometimes a tertiary regional language (e.g. Finns speaking Swedish). NW continental Europe tends to be a bit better, with places like Belgium, Netherlands, Switzerland often being conversational in 3 or 4 languages, but that's not particularly representative of the whole EU. Europe is still very much a continent where people don't understand each other particularly well. As for the UK intelligentsia not touching European press, bilingual ones certainly do - but in general, why would we? It obviously doesn't make sense to learn German to read BILD. Anything important gets translated into English, and between our own press and the rest of the English speaking world, we have access to more quality media and news than we could possibly hope to consume in our lifetimes. Such is the nature of natively speaking the world's dominant language: no other languages reach a critical level of importance that we generally ever bother to learn them well. Personally speaking, if I was to learn another language, it would be either Spanish or Mandarin, neither of which would probably help me out too much in European matters...