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Ode to Joylessness So much for European unity:
Seven out of ten German voters would reject the euro if they were given the chance, a new poll has shown.
Maybe surprisingly, it is younger Germans that are the most eurosceptic, with 73 percent of 18-24 year olds saying they would reject the euro.
The poll also showed that French voters would reject the euro, but by a much more slender margin (approximately 51-49). This has provoked fears that French voters may use a referendum on the Constitution to voice their concerns about the euro.
Nothing surprising to me. The European Union is yesterday’s solution to the day before’s problem. It is a sullen, unloved political dinosaur fixed only by a combination of political inertia and the career-ambitions of a cossetted technocratic cadre. It is doomed.
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Perhaps the German voter have discovered that Euro is simply a conquest by treaty, with the benefits going to France.
“It is doomed”
Watching from across the pond as the EU inches closer and closer to a SuperState I’ve thought, at various milestones, “THIS time the people won’t stand for it.”. I’ve been mistaken each time.
I want to see a strong and vibrant Europe, with a boombing economy. I doubt I’ll ever see this as long as there is an EU.
My questions are:
1.) What will it take for people to realize this is a *very* bad idea?
2.) If it’s doomed, will it fail and cause a severe economic crisis in Europe, or will it just sort of fade away?
3.) What would be the proverbial ‘last straw’?
One concern I’ve had is, will the discontent of some nations over privileges granted to other nations eventually lead to war? In the EU, some nations are more equal than others. I can’t see the less equal nations tolerating this for very long.
… like a frog who never notices the water’s getting hotter…
In Britain, the socialists had to almost destroy the economy before there was an appetite for Thatcherism. Even then many blamed the fallout on her government rather than the failures of socialism.
In Europe, many of the problems faced across the the continent are directly or indirectly the fault of the EU. Most people seem to still be oblivious to the malign impact that this institution has on their everyday lives. It seems to me that things will have to get very much worse before they get better.
For once, a look at the bright side. Up to now, there has been no formal possibility for a Member State to withdraw from the EU. If you joined, you went up the river of no return, so to speak.
Ironically, if the European Constitution is approved as it stands, that possibility will be enshrined.
Article 59 of the draft constitution states (my italics):
1) “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the European Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.”
2) “A member state which decides to withdraw shall notify the European Council of its intention; the European Council shall examine that notification. In the light of the guidelines provided by the European Council, the Union shall negotiate and conclude an agreement with that state, setting out the arrangements for its withdrawal, taking account of the framework for its future relationship with the Union. That agreement on behalf of the Union shall be concluded by the Council, acting by a qualified majority, after obtaining the consent of the European parliament. The representative of the withdrawing member state shall not participate in Council or European Council decisions or discussions concerning it.”
3) “This Constitution shall cease to apply to the state in question from the date of entry into force of the withdrawal agreement or, failing that, two years after the notification referred to in paragraph 2, unless the European Council, in agreement with the member state concerned, decides to extend this period.”
4) “If a state which has withdrawn from the Union asks to rejoin, that request shall be subject to the procedure referred to in Article 1/57.”
Ideally, perhaps one could jettison the rest of the constitution and make do with Article 59 ….
Sounds like a good deal to me.
David Carr – Great headline!
That’s odd. Wasn’t someone posting here just the other day, telling us how much ‘soft support’ there was for the EU?
The truth is that there is considerable opposition to both the Euro and the EU, but it is extremely difficult for it to manifest electorally.
In the UK, if you wish to rid us of this parasitical organism, a vote for any of the three major parties is wasted – and the system is such that no small independent party stands a cat in hell’s chance of gaining office. In effect, it’s a lock out.
Thus does what Mr. Carr so accurately calls: the ‘cosseted technocratic cadre’ maintain its place at the gold-plated trough.
Things are bad in the UK, but the tide may be turning…
http://www.anglegrinderman.co.uk/
London drivers take note!
David,
You, for sure, are so disappointed that your no-initiative, peninsulised, hesitation-gangrened country -frightened by the very idea of dealing with its future (including massive islamicisation & astounding failure to fight terrorism, even in the UK !!!), plays no role either in Europe or in the USA -which it aims to be the 51st “state” of (maybe like Alaska or Hawaï).
The whole of your hazy “theory” stands only on the fact there’s a provisional stagnation in Europe. Economy is just a succession of cycles. Don’t worry: euro- & constitution-ratings will be close to 75% once everything is working at full régime.
Instead of hoping for the worst for your neighbours, you should perhaps look at the staggering & increasing % of British children living in absolute poverty that you can spot in the streets of all major cities of the UK.
Don’t worry: euro- & constitution-ratings will be close to 75% once everything is working at full régime.
Of course, this assumes that Eurosclerosis doesn’t prevent a breakout from the current stagnation. Only time will tell, of course, but economies that stagger under tax and regulatory burdens are less likely to mount good recoveries than those that do not.
What is odd, of course, is that the redistributive state and all those worker-friendly regulations were supposed to cushion, if not prevent, economic downturns. The fact that so many seem so dissatisfied would seem to indicate that redistribution and regulation have failed, would it not?
The current EU policies may well prove to be the worst of both worlds – failing to cushion the downturn, while preventing a recovery. Gee, who would have predicted that?
“staggering & increasing % of children living in absolute poverty in the UK”, Kodiak? What bizarre statistics have you been consulting? Don’t believe everything you see in The Guardian. Re such glorious constructions as “hesitation gangrened” I wonder if by any chance you are related to M. Antoine de Caunes, the delightful C4 TV presenter…
Of course, leaving this off skews things:
The poll was conducted for the British eurosceptic tabloid, the Daily Mail.
I’ll wait to see some more figures from a variety of polling agencies before passing any comment. Yes Prime Minister gave an excellent show on how you prepare poll results some time ago.
The EU experiment will create winners and losers. The winners will be the poorer members of the EU. The newer members from eastern Europe will be the biggest winners. The most prosperous members of western Europe will be the biggest losers.
How many years of relatively losing economically to the east will western Europe accept before they kill the EU experiment with economic protectionism? What happened to Ireland economically will happen to some extent to the eastern EU members. That will be a huge affront to the formerly prosperous members of western Europe. Sure, western Europe wants to the see eastern Europe prosperous. But not if it that is the result of job being transfered from rich to poor nations. And that will be the result of the EU free market and common currency. Unintended consequences tend to complicate the best laid plans of man.
Just a thought, but Kodiak’s posts read as though they’d been written in Swahili and run through Google or Babelfish. And just so he doesn’t jump in with a fatuous correction under the mistaken belief that he is being delightfully mischievous, let me add to “Swahili” – “or any other language that is not English”. This would explain all the turgid, florid malutilisation of the language. For example, ‘gangrenous hesitation’ could have been keyed in as ‘rotten waiting’ in his own language.
None of his sentences have the rhythms of French people speaking English or the grammatical errors due to faux amis that French speakers occasionally make in English. I believe Dissident Frogman also intuited that Kodiak is not French.
“Don’t worry: euro- & constitution-ratings will be close to 75% once everything is working at full régime.”
A wonderful fully working Euro “Régime” with ONLY 75% happiness rating -oh my- even at its best you feel that a quarter of Europeans will remain determined to change this Utopian plan we’re being saddled with – that’s a big chunk of unhappiness!…whatever happened to “Resistance is futile – You will be assimilated”? 😉
Kodiak, are those cracks I see appearing in Ye Olde ideology- I think you too are really starting to have doubts about the way the EU is heading!.
The EU experiment will create winners and losers. The winners will be the poorer members of the EU. The newer members from eastern Europe will be the biggest winners. The most prosperous members of western Europe will be the biggest losers.
Care to elaborate, Reid? It has always been my impression that the EU was a racket being run for the benefit of France and Germany, and that its “harmonization” requirements were a way of eliminating or reducing the competitive advantages that other European countries might have over the French and Germans.
Tony H,
Here is a BBC link to child poverty in the UK. You may also have a glance at this non-Guardian graph or even dive in this UNICEF report if you’ve got some time left.
Kodiak provides a ‘non-Guardian’ source….from the BBC and UNICEF!!!
David Carr – Oh, what a hoot! I don’t know what the tranzi UNICEF’s latest thinking is, but the BBC thinks “child poverty” is any child who has a parent (and it’s always ‘a’ parent) on welfare. The home will be paid for by other council tax payers, the garbage pickup will be paid for similarly, there will be a washing machine and dryer in the house, central heating (paid for with mysteriously sourced “credits”), the children will have a TV in their bedrooms and maybe a video recorder, too, and they will have designer trainers.
The only point where “poverty” will kick in is the mental poverty of their mothers who are too lazy to organise a meal once a day and who think “tea” means whatever the latest manipulative child-snack is which she couldn’t be bothered to resist in the supermarket. The poverty from which these children suffer is the mental poverty of their mothers who went through the comprehensive system without ever learning how to think or operate as adults.
Before anyone says it’s not the mothers’ fault – on one hand, yes it is. It is all their fault; not society’s. They are responsible. On the other hand, it is society’s fault because those mothers who got pregnant in their teens by boys whose names they never knew were dredged up through the comprehensive socialist system, the goals of which are dependency of the citizenry on the state.
What I don’t understand is how non-earners and drags on national economies are so desirable. Yes, they’re passive, but they cost money from a decreasing base of earners. Why are the socialists trying to make everyone into soma people. Who’s going to mind the store?
The BBC report linked by Kodiak seems to be about a decidedly dodgy study. The BBC reporter invites readers to believe that under the UN definition the UK has large numbers of people in absolute poverty, but if you read on a bit what the study actually found was something quite different.
The UN definition quoted is
“a lack of food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and access to benefits [!]”
Without getting into how ridiculous the last item is, the report’s authors then seem to have allowed respondents to define poverty as they see fit:
“He told BBC News Online they had asked people what the necessities of life were, and what income was needed to escape absolute poverty”
However the study’s author says:
“it was perfectly legitimate to look at what people thought indicated poverty, rather than look simply at income”
So that’s alright then. Without reading the report itself you can’t say for certain, but as reported, it’s junk, and it certainly doesn’t show what the headline suggests it does.
R.C. Dean wants elaboration on winners and losers. I am not an expert on the minute details of the EU. But aren’t the wages in eastern Europe vastly lower than in the prosperous western European nations? Will the harmonization also apply to labor wages? Some eastern nations also have very low tax rates relative to western Europe. Ireland is balking at raising it’s taxes. Why will eastern Europe be any different? In order for there to be harmonization of tax rates, don’t all nations have to agree? Why would poorer nations destroy their competitive advantage just to appease their wealthy neighbors?
Seems to me France and Germany entered the EU experiment thinking they would run the show. Now it appears that permanent political gridlock is more likely. It is just a matter of time before the wealthier nations try to adopt internal EU protectionism.
By my own reckoning I’m in “absolute poverty” I earn only xxK (work it out!) and I have about 14K stolen off me to encourage the unemployable to reproduce (see above).
Smash tax now to lift me out of the poverty of state slavery! Go on kodiak, give me a hand!
I have a theory bureaucracies are “organic” – that the EU is a bit like kudzu in Georgia: it will never go away and, while you can’t kill it, it’s certainly not detrimental for everyone even if a curse for many. In fact, if they can keep the shells moving fast enough, people like Neil Kinnock et ux and Chris Patten will be pulling your strings at your expense for years and years to come.
[If Kodiak is French, I’m a Tahitian aviator.]
David:
Kodiak provides a ‘non-Guardian’ source….from the BBC and UNICEF!!!
Let’s not forget that the same Kodiak, when challenged to endorse his claims on the “squashing” usage of “mercatique” over “marketing” in the business world, is able to come up with a link to the French social security website…
The creepy thing is that he is indeed utterly serious, of course.
Verity & Theodopoulos Pherecydes:
Glad to see I’m not the only one thinking Mr. K is usurping the French nationality.
Come to think of it, it sounds pretty sick. I mean, who would willingly impersonate a French? Unless your life depends on it, that is.
I was born such, so it’s different. I’m just bearing my cross.
Anyway, at the risk of repeating myself, the French weren’t consulted on the € funny money question.
I’m convinced they would have refused, and I guess the Bureaucraps knew (or at least feared) it at the time.
Poor Kodiak. This fellow comes here of his own free will and with the noble and express intention of strengthening every Anglo-Saxon in his or her prejudices about the tribe south of Bognor Regis and what do we do … challenge his integrity. Alright, the left’s done this for yonks when it doesn’t want to hear the facts (and when does it want to hear the facts?). But is that the sort of example libertarians should follow? If there was no Kodiak would the world – or, at least, Samizdata – be a happier place? If there was no Kodiak would these threads be any less intellectually threadbare? If there was no Kodiak would we have to invent him? Just be grateful that somebody probably has.
About Kodiak’s origin:
He could be Greek as far as I’m concerned, that doesn’t matter. Neither am I annoyed, like Verity, by his English. His English is good enough, and some of his phrases I outright like. For example “unilateralophaty” or “hesitation-gangrened country ” – isn’t this last one the theme of several postings here, about the hopelessness of the political parties in the UK ?
M. Kodiak:
Having given us statistics about child poverty in the UK, maybe you could compare those stats to those of France and Germany, calculated by the same people, by the same methodology ?
Jacob: thanks for your multilateral support. The comparisons involving Germany & France are available from page 5 on in the UNICEF report. Oh, & BTW (I know you’re not the one who blamed UNICEF to be a communist-owned organisation) why has ***Mrs Bush*** (yes: Laura not George) decided to come to Paris to re-integrate UNICEF (deserted by the USA for 18 years) & present apologies to France, in passing?
TDF: if my being French is a problem for you (which I fully understand given your mad dereliction), you may say I’m a Bling-blang-blong speaking Bling-blang-blong & living in Bling-blang-blong, provided Bling-blang-blong = either Frenchman or France or French. Na!
Verity: you speak like a lepéniste. Beurk !
To all: the worse is that sometimes poverty (in the UK) is harsher with “working” families (you know the definition of work in the UK is illegal in developped countries as France, Germany or even Spain & Italy) than with families on Welfare (aided by the State).
Kodoak,
“why has ***Mrs Bush*** (yes: Laura not George) decided to come to Paris to re-integrate UNICEF ”
I really don’t know why Bush has decided to re-join UNICEF; that’s not his only mistake, neither the worst one.
As to why he sent his wife – that’s easy: When there is some unpleasant social business that I can’t stomach I allways try to send my wife to releive me.
In England they send Prince Charles on such errands, but in the US they lack princes.
Kodiak – funny, I don’t recall any apologies by Mrs. Bush. Perhaps you could link to a transcript?