Unite, but first, launch Orban into space, one-way-ticket kind-of way.
It’s hard to get them to agree on anything let alone actually coordinate real world actions together. You are going to be waiting a long time.
Sadly a lot of MEPs are in cahoots with Russia and hell bent on destroying the EU.
Cahoots is a strong word. They’re all ethnic nationalists who sympathize with the wave of anti-Muslim hysteria echoing through the continent.
But when push comes to shove, they’ll start shooting at one another over the border happily enough.
No, it isn’t a strong word at all. They are literally being paid by Putin. They exploit racism and bigotry, right wing populism, in their campaigns, but they aren’t necessarily doing that out of personal conviction.
or they just like money and power and ride the racism wave
Part of the problem is that - between mass media and the industrial exploitation of foreign workers - there’s enormous profit to be made in bigoted social policies.
The money feeds the media cycle. The media cycle generates economic growth for misery profiteers. You can blame this on The Russians if you like, as United Russia has cemented itself in the foundation of this cycle of misery. But (until very recently and even then still kinda) they’re bound up in the same web of systematized ethnic-nationalism as their neighbors.
The Saudis, the Turks, the Italians, the Israelis… vast economic empires are predicated on the profitability of hate.
reminder that the world did not enjoy it the last time Europeans were super powerful
Europe is the biggest provider of independence days !
But Europeans loved it
Yeah, they all hated each other and their internal beer hall brawl spilled out over the borders. It wasn’t that Europe was any kind of united force. Maybe it’s time. We’re fucked in the US, now.
Though I gotta admit it’s ironic AF that the Allies set up Germany with a far better constitution/Grundgesezt and government framework than our own Constitution which ended up essentially frozen because politics have gotten so bad that opening it up would have probably destroyed whatever good remained in it thanks to talibangelicals and corporate money.
I don’t think the world enjoys anyone being powerful
I’d rather see other powers collapse than Europe join this stupid game
Eh, power vacuums don’t last. You’re basically just asking for a Somalia situation where there’s n small powers continuously at war.
as if there aren’t any other options
World federation, superpowers, small powers. As far as I can tell it’s just a question of how big the blocs are. I don’t see how you move laterally to continuum that in any lasting way; humans are going to act like humans.
A unified world power, for instance through a competent UN that is achieved through diplomacy sound pretty okay.
“boys will be boys” excuse
I didn’t excuse anything. We’re shit. But, it’s the way things are.
Although, come to think of it, we’d probably just elect a world government if we weren’t shit anyway. Just to coordinate things as we’re being understanding and reasonable with each other.
In my uninformed understanding of humans and their history, unifications happen only in the face of crises and threats (and far from all the time, clearly). Maybe–hopefully–the world eventually makes common cause in order to stabilise the world as things spiral out of control in a few decades, but right now our species appears more concerned about whom gets to dictate what and how humans should live and behave like.
Not even most Europeans.
Europe is not the Germans.
This time you’ll get the Vikings, the Romans, the Conquistadors, the Spartans and the people who ruled the world by the cunning use of flags all teamed together.
Europe is not the Germans.
The English ran laps around the Germans in terms of human attrocity for centuries.
The French weren’t far behind.
Hey, don’t forget Belgium. They didn’t have much, but it’s quality over quantity!
The British imperialists genocided more people throughout their history than the Germans. Just that the Brits took their time with it. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch and Italians also have many million skeletons in their closet and the French massacred millions of people trying to gain independence after World War 2.
If you go to any place in the world outside of Europe there is a good chance that Europeans committed a massacre there to steal land and resources at some point in the past few hundred years.
But not now, now for the most part they’re all democratic countries.
You hang on to the past so hard and you get Gaza, India Pakistan war, the Middle East etc.
A country being democratic for some people has absolutely no indication of whether it is an imperialist threat to other countries.
Do you think the countries being invaded by the US or having their legitimate governments overthrown and fascist puppets installed care about the US being democratic on the inside? Do you think Pakistan is less threatened by India because it is a democratic country? Do you think the Serbian massacres in Bosnia were acceptable and the Kosovarians were welcoming the Serbian invaders because Serbia became democratic a few years earlier?
Also the Middle East like many post colonial areas in Africa are unstable precisely because the French and British democracies designed artificial countries in a way that will cause tensions by separating people such as the Kurdish people into many states and throwing together different people into single states. Continued military “interventions”, arming groups in proxy wars and other meddling certainly doesn’t help either. Take Libya for instance where France is helping the Haftar regime to continue waging war against the internationally recognized government alongside Russia, Wagner, the UAE and Egypt.
Take Libya for instance where France is helping the Haftar regime to continue waging war against the internationally recognized government alongside Russia, Wagner, the UAE and Egypt.
Pretty sure France is not there to be along with Russia and Wagner but because Russia and Wagner is there. Russia’s interest is to grow influence and cause issues to Europe.
France is there to get cheap Libyan oil from a warlord. If that means partnering with Wagner they are fine doing so.
If France was interested in challenging Russian influence they would support the internationally recognized government and help its fight against Haftar. You know, like how limiting Russian influence in Ukraine is done by helping Ukraine, not by helping Russia allied separatists in Luchansk.
France is there to get cheap Libyan oil from a warlord.
I will need more convincing on that. But I do see that France’s involment does have pretty bad optics - and maybe reasons. But because France is not the only one there, it sure isn’t something black and white.
And I wouldn’t draw comparisons to Ukraine as the Libya has unfortunately have had so much internal instability that is not comparable - though one could say something Euromaiden and the aftermath of it but that is still order of magnitudes different starting point.
So many good points in one post. People have to get off their high horse on democracy. My goto is every US president since WW2 is a war criminal. Do you think the people suffering war crimes care about democracy? It would be laughable if it wasnt infuriating.
Just to bolster your argument on the Middle East all anyone has to do is look at Sykes Picot. The whole middle east is just some brit in an office drawing squiggly lines, so that the west can extract as many resources from them as possible.
Its like people forgot the ottoman empire even existed and instead just get real racist with lines like “prone to war” “stuck in the past”. Bro the US is still creating nation states in the Arab world. Of course they are going to go to war, the west is standing on their neck.
.
Hi Americans!
They’re working on it
The top US export is oil.
If you want to do something, wean yourself off oil. Big push for solar, wind, and anything else that doesn’t rely on digging up bits of dinosaurs.
Electric vehicles, public transport, bikes, walking.
And as an added bonus, the world gets a little cleaner. Might be important, you know.
> In 2023, renewable energy represented 24.5% of energy consumed in the EU, up from 23.0% in 2022.
They’re working on it a lot faster than (most of) the rest of the world!
In 2022, renewable energy sources contributed 31% of the electricity used in Texas. Fucking Texas.
Get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
Don’t worry Texas is going to fix that. They’re getting ready to pass a bunch of laws that limit renewable energy usage in Texas.
The insane thing is that renewables has been increasingly more cost efficient and more ROI than fossils for a long time, especially in places like Texas. Wind and sun for days. Investments in tech and production pay off big time, and obviously keep paying off long-term.
It is just oil subsidies and profiteering holding almost all of society back for decades. But things can change.
One of the ironies of the Texas electricity grid - ERCOT - is how it accidentally created huge incentives for new solar and wind energy by trying to prop up the natural gas markets.
ERCOT operates via an auction system, wherein the electricity carriers put in bids for GWhs and producers meet those bids. When demand is low, electricity is very cheap - $10-25 MWh. But it rise rapidly during a heat wave, peaking at $3000 MWh in some instances. Gas plants don’t have any incentive to sell onto the grid at this point, so they turn themselves off until the price rises. But when a bunch of gas plants operate as a cartel, they can coordinate when they release electricity and drive up the price.
The problem is that the auction price is set on the last GWh sold but it applies to the entire sale of energy for the auction cycle. So if you’re selling continuously across the day, you can accidentally trip into a ahem windfall when gas producers surge the price.
Because green producers can’t really control how much they put out onto the grid, they’re at the mercy of the market. But if they know, in advance, that the gas companies are going to fuck with things, they can anticipate enormous profits during these strategic moments. And because wind/solar don’t need a supply chain like gas does, you can just keep building and building and building wherever you find opportune spots for harvesting (which Texas has in spades).
So the gas companies inadvertently kicked off a green energy boom by their periodic price spike scheme.
Renewable energy development being rapidly accelerated by gas companies price gouging with artificial scarcity… thereby causing Texas to move toward a post-scarcity energy economy… magnificent. What a strange world.
Weird map. The non-Union Balkan states and Norway are cut out, but Switzerland is filled in.
and UK
fuk switzerland, free riding mfers
Some of you European federalists seem keen to annex and rule to ensure a full and strong federation.
Switzerland spends a fraction of what their neighbors do on defense as a portion of GDP, which they get to do because of the benevolence of those neighbors. They’re “neutral” because they know that their neighbors are peaceful which they take full advantage of while contributing nothing. Of course their neutrality also conveniently allows them to harbor the money of the worst people and regimes in the world, going all the way back to Nazi Germany.
they’re not really the neutral banking country anymore. a lot of the money fled after they started freezing Russian accounts following the Ukraine invasion.
Which is why you would want the EU to enter undeclared war on Switzerland, invading the country and replacing their local government, killing and arresting anyone who would resist.
We have too many traitors like Orban in the EU. The work against us.
EU already absorbed Switzerland in this pic despite them not wanting it, so there’s that.
Switzerland is 100% dependent on the EU.
That’s not true.
They are completely landlocked by the EU and their Airspace.
Also most of their imports/exports go there.
They don’t even farm enough to sustain themselves. So yes, obviously it’s true
Landlocked does not mean dependent.
They also are not completely dependent which 100% means.
Last time I looked into imports and exports of countries Switserland was around 50-60%.
Of course it does mean that.
If the EU wants, they can fuck up Switzerland quite badly.
All they have to do is to close the borders and airspace.
The claim was “100% dependent” which is extremely incorrect.
Not a single country in the world is 100% dependent.
Furthermore, the threat of an attack does not imply dependence.
That phrasing was obviously hyperbole, since 100% dependence isn’t even a well-defined statement (you can not assign a simple percentage to degree of dependence). Using it as a point to argue against is misguided at best, disingenuous at worst. You should read it as “it is definitely dependent [to a high degree]” rather than “it is entirely dependent”.
I mean they mostly are, they’re approx. 50% dependent for agriculture, so if the EU were to block all borders and halt all exports to them the Swiss would become significantly skinnier than they were before.
No shame in that by the way, the Swiss also provide the EU with lots of stuff and services that are valuable.
Undid Brexit too already
No Iceland either 😔
Or Canada.
What? That hasn’t happened yet? Oh, sorry. That’s the problem with being from the, er, can’t say. Temporal prime directive and all that.
The almighty Nordic cock and balls
Norway should really check a doctor
Dang! Cannot unsee anymore
I can’t unsee Putin screaming at Poland at the balcans, seeing both goes together quite nicely
Power corrupts. No single country should be a global superpower
That’s fine, Europe is several countries.
So was the US. Technically the use of the word “state” implies it still is. What is the line between a bunch of states working together and them no longer being a bunch of separate countries?
You cannot compare the US’ setup to Europe’s. One is a nation that is still incredibly young and was sliced up like a cake for several territories that still are relatively homogenous in culture.
The other is a continent consisting of countries with very diverse cultures and thousands of years of history, who made a union to collaborate on certain political issues.
The two are not even close to being the same. Not even close.
I did not compare them. I asked where the line is between a bunch of countries working together in a union and that union being a new larger country.
The line is when all the countries agree to become one big country. Which will never happen in Europe. The US is different as it never got to be a bunch of individual countries with centuries long history (if we ignore the native americans’ old territories) before becoming the US. That development happened simultaneously while the country and its rules were formed. The concept of country was already well known at the time too, while Europe, like most of the world, figured that shit out slowly and over centuries.
This is why Europe will never become one country. The history is too ancient and the cultures run too deep. There is no way that I as a Dane would agree to become a citizen of United Europe where I lose my identity and history as a Dane and now have to build some new identity with other Europeans. We have many things in common, but we are not the same. The Soviet Union already experimented with this stuff, and it didn’t work out because the countries it forced to become part of a unified nation with the same identity, didn’t agree to it. It was forced and it was damaging to these countries’ identities.
I do not know a single European who would want to become one country and none of us would agree that the European Union’s setup is in any way similar to the US. It is not the same.
There is no way that I as a Dane would agree to become a citizen of United Europe where I lose my identity and history as a Dane and now have to build some new identity with other Europeans. We have many things in common, but we are not the same. […] It was forced and it was damaging to these countries’ identities.
This is an interesting line of arguments that parallels much of the rhetoric that came out of many British during Brexit. They felt the EU had started to dissolve their identity and was forcing policy that was bad for them that they had no representation in. Whether or not they were correct, or making those arguments in good faith, it once again points back to the line being quite blurry
I made a similar line of questioning recently in the anarchy Lemmy, after disagreeing to how anarchists usually approach why community is better than government. “when is a community so large it is no longer a community and it is a state” I think your focus on cultural identity is interesting given they use the same line of arguments to define community vs government. I also wonder if that line of thinking is dangerously close to the kind of thinking that creates isolationism and xenophobia.
Respectfully, I disagree with your reasoning. At no point have I said European countries want nothing to do with one another, just that we want to keep our own identity and sovereignty.
You are making a bunch of assumptions while completely ignoring the fact that European countries have the EU.
We are not isolationist nor are we xenophobic. We just want to keep our countries as they are.
It’s kinda like accusing someone of being anti apartment complex if they say no to move out of their family home that they have lived in for generations, and get an apartment in the complex instead. “Oh, maybe you’re racist because there might be people of different ethnicities in the complex? Or maybe you just hate having neighbours and want to isolate yourself from everybody in your silly little house?”
Or maybe I just have a greater emotional attachment to the house that was built by my great grandfather and I feel more at home in the house I have upkept and renovated myself than some apartment complex where every apartment has the same layout and there are rules as to how much I can modify mine.
Doesn’t mean that apartment complexes are a bad thing. Not at all. But if you already have a house with a garden that is yours and that you have a history with, why on earth would you want to give that up for an apartment in a complex that you don’t have any attachment to?
The only reason something like the US has worked out is because people willingly agreed to the setup and willingly left their old countries to build up something new.
Had the native Americans had the means to defend their lands, then I’m sure there would have been no US and instead a continent with old, independent countries that would hold on to their own traditions and cultures. There may have been a union similar to the EU, but that is not the same as them agreeing to become one big country. That is just collaboration and trying to have some agreements in place that ensures peace and trade between nations. The exact opposite of isolationism and xenophobia.
It’s a thin line indeed. Aren’t the countries in the UK closer to being actual countries than the US states?
Not really. All American States have the same level of inherent sovereignty. There are also a lot of federal programs that rely the individual states performing the work. States also maintain their own militaries under partial or complete state control.
In contrast, UK country sovereignty is a mixed bag, with the largest country in the UK without any devolved powers.
The US generally views American state sovereignty more in line with EU country sovereignty.
On the contrary, periods of imperial hegemony have been some of the more stable and peaceful episodes of human history. One of them is ending right now.
The stability isn’t much consolation to the slaves who die under empires
That’s fair. But history is an uninterrupted succession of empires. Good ones, bad ones, middling ones. It’s the human condition. The USA was an empire founded by enlightenment libertarians, so I’d say there’s a fair chance we’re going to look back on it fondly. Similarly, the EU, if ever it could pull itself together, has the potential to be as good an empire as we’ll ever get. IMO.
The USA was founded by slave owners and for a good chunk of its history anyone other than white male landowners were second-class citizens (and de facto still are). There are no good empires.
The human condition is malleable. A better world is possible. Indeed, sometimes it peaks out from the raging waters. Paradises built in hell, like Barcelona during the Civil War, prosper for a time and flounder. To believe that we cannot make something beautiful is to lack imagination.
Yeah. People like to complain about American warmongering, but the period between World Wars I and II was orders of magnitude more deadly.
The only way to enforce that, is to be a global superpower
You have to use more sticks …
Superpower is such a joke to call yourself. if russia is a superpower EU is superpower x100.
Why is the forsaken UK still on the map ?
'cause we know this relationship has its ups and downs but isn’t over yet
Right, like the UK is a sibling that you hated growing up, but as adults it’s not so bad and you know you’re going to be friends again once they go through their binge drinking phase.
Data from the general population https://github.com/twosheds2/wiki-eugraph
Still too close. The mistake of Brexit was taking such an important decision based on a slim majority, you need at least an absolute majority, 66%.
I would put it more that there should have been an agreement on what Brexit would be pursued. The pro-Brexit camp promoted all forms of Brexit while there wasn’t a good idea on how Brexit would be implemented.
The UK still hasn’t solved the trilemma.
Interesting. Are those poll results sampled amongst the general population, or something more specific like from the parliament ?
Waiting for the George Costanza move
Our island is full of idiots but I swear we can make this up to you
France, Germany and Italy are giving it a good go too. I think our position on Ukraine has made the UK a lot of friends in Europe. That and voting out the Tories.
The continent is full of idiots too. Their are no reasons for us to feel superior about this on this side of the pond.
Not only EU beurocrats are slow to process informations 😖
Switzerland and Liechtenstein are also not member states, and Estonia’s islands are not shown.
Scotland has islands on this map, but in a really weird way: all of the five biggest ones are missing, and I’m 95% sure that one of the two depicted is actually a peninsula that the map has chopped off from the mainland
Alternatively we can just assume Norway took the islands back
They bothered to remove the non-EU Balkan states and Norway, but filled up Switzerland. This map is just terrible.
Economically and culturally, Europe is already a superpower. Militarily it isn’t, and maybe that’s not a terrible thing. Politically, it just seems to have a bias for moving slowly and by consensus, although it responded quickly to COVID and the assault on Ukraine, so it can do what’s needed?
