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posted by mrpg on Friday October 06 2017, @02:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the nation-state-is-over dept.

Some of the great moments of history sneak up on businesspeople. Two years ago, Britain looked to be Europe's most economically rational country; now its companies seem to be rolling from one economic earthquake to another, with Brexit looking increasingly likely to be followed by the election of a near-Marxist prime minister, Jeremy Corbyn.

Looking back, two things stand out. First, there were some deep underlying "irrational" causes that business ignored, such as the pent-up anger against immigration and globalization. Second, there was a string of short-term political decisions that proved to be miscalculations. For decades, for example, attacking the European Union was a "free hit" for British politicians. If David Cameron had it to do over again, would he really have made the referendum on whether to stay in it a simple majority vote (or indeed called a vote at all)? Does Angela Merkel now regret giving Cameron so few concessions before the Brexit vote? Would the moderate Labour members of Parliament who helped Corbyn get on their party's leadership ballot in the name of political diversity really do that again?

Now, another rupture may be sneaking up on Europe, driven by a similar mixture of pent-up anger and short-term political maneuvering. This one is between the old West European democratic core of the EU, led by Merkel and increasingly by Emmanuel Macron, who are keen to integrate the euro zone, and the populist authoritarians of Eastern Europe, who dislike Brussels. This time the arguments are ones about political freedom and national sovereignty.

Eastern Europe's gripes are nothing a little anschluss couldn't cure.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by KiloByte on Friday October 06 2017, @02:57AM (4 children)

    by KiloByte (375) on Friday October 06 2017, @02:57AM (#577770)

    Poland and Turkey can't really be called democracies at the moment, and to a lesser extent Hungary as well.

    Both are suffering from a nasty semi-legal takeover. In Poland for example, the ruling party does tricks like: the Constitutional Tribunal would be able to stop them. So... they make an obviously illegal change to the Tribunal's membership and rules. That change is obviously immediately declared as unconstitutional. Such rulings are effective from the moment of being published in the Bill Journal; the Prime Minister handles such publishing. Except, there's no time limit to do so. Thus, the publication of the ruling is pending for two years already, yet the unconstitutional bill remains in effect.

    Then, having got rid of that pesky Constitution thingy, they take over the police, public prosecutors, judges, etc, using the same kind of tricks.

    The party is strongly national socialist -- but not in the caricature sense of "nazi" popular as an insult these days: their rhetoric is all about "the nation", "patriotism", reusing symbols from the past (ignoring objections of still living people who belonged to formations the party takes symbols from). They also do some extreme socialism: "banks bad", "debt collectors bad", "companies bad", "any economic initiative bad". They give handouts to their voting segments, carefully making sure no one uses such a handout to lift themselves up: to get "500+", if you earn even a penny above the threshold, you don't get 499 but 0 -- which led to many people requesting their employers to reduce their wages. The handouts are also immune to debt collection: their voters consider this protection from eeeevil banks, while the result is that a beneficient of the handout in question won't get a business loan.

    These handouts have taken basically every source of income the government could get. Thus, they've taken on debts (ignoring constitutional limits), did a change to VAT that caused returns to be processed with several months delay, liquidated retirement funds, and raided every reserve they could get their hands on. Thus, the handouts won't last, but the plan is to drag this out until the next election. By then, any legal avenues for dislodging the Party will be effectively closed.

    And they're raising a paramilitary army, that most experts declare to be completely useless against an external threat (even such as Russian "green men"), but with training that fits just perfectly pacifying their own population in case of protests.

    --
    Ceterum censeo systemd esse delendam.
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @03:41AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @03:41AM (#577787)

    A country can recover from all the bad things you listed.

    A country can not recover from taking in hordes of people who despise western civilization. The ruling party is at least blocking mass immigration, so there is still hope for the future.

    The ruling party thus deserves to rule, at least until a better one comes along.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday October 06 2017, @05:43AM (1 child)

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Friday October 06 2017, @05:43AM (#577829) Journal

      A country can not recover from taking in hordes of people who despise western civilization.

      At the moment is is predominantly those governments that dismantle Western civilization, under the disguise of protecting it.

      And more than 99% of the refugees don't despise Western civilization. It's just that the politicians like to generalize from the minority that does, because the resulting FUD helps them.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @02:37PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 06 2017, @02:37PM (#578021)

        The countries you mentioned have only recently threw off the shackles of oppression and are expressing sovereignty, why would they want to immediately jump back into a pool with people far away from them telling them what to do?

    • (Score: 2) by fritsd on Friday October 06 2017, @02:59PM

      by fritsd (4586) on Friday October 06 2017, @02:59PM (#578040) Journal

      Most of those people, if they despised western civilization, they would have just stayed at home. It would have been much easier.

      If you'd rather risk your and your family's life than stay in an islamo-fascist warzone, then there are (in general) reasons for that; i.e. maybe the risks for your family are a bit larger than your neighbours, because you're educated, or of the wrong tribe, or don't like your daughters wearing a tent outdoors, etc.

      If you'd rather live in central Sweden with its 6 months winter, where in the midwinter it is night at 15:00 and -20°C, than in sunny Eritrea or Herat or Homs, then it is probably not because you despise western civilization so much (unless, of course, you're some kind of masochist).

      You can't stop people at a border, if they'd rather DIE than stay on their side. Cf. die Mauer.