Wednesday 3 June 2009

Joining The EU

It's election day tomorrow but not the good one, it's the EU one which nobody seems to care much about seeing as the Conservative Party will remove us from it the day David Cameron gets his hands on the number 10 front door keys.
It seems that my fellow Brits don't much care for closer ties with Europe and i am very much in the minority when i say that we should join Europe lock, stock and barrel.
What the anti-Europe brigade don't seem to understand is that the United States of Europe is going to happen, it is inevitable so we have a choice. We can become part of the process and have a voice in the decisions that shapes and defines who we are and what we are doing or we can stay outside and be swept along with what others decide in our absence.
The next century will be dominated by China and America and the voices of countries likes Britain will be ignored as inconsequential. Europe has to be in there swinging as an influential major player on the big decisions that effect us all from future conflicts to the Environment and that means us Europeans joining together to become a global force of 800 million people because the alternative is Britain becoming that small island off the Coast of the Superpower withering to a painful demise.
We can kid ourselves that we have the required influence to go it alone and compete with the three massive blocs of a billion Chinese, 250 million Americans and 750 million Europeans but any politician who bangs that drum is misleading the voters because we can't and we would only be cutting off our noses to spite our faces to try.
The choice is to stay outside and let the likes of France and Germany decide the direction and we join a decade down the line when everything has already been decided or we climb aboard now and have a say in the direction we want to steer it.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Lucy,

I agree that the Euro nations would be better off in the long run if they joined; however, even then due to disparate cultures, languages, and yes even geographical conditions there would be uneven distribution of capital and resources that would require a strong central government and a lot of administrative overhead. Economically the EU would still be at a disadvantage to the USA and maybe even China (though China has similar problems). This would give the EU a greater advantage over Russia which has mega geographic issues with transportation, distribution, and defense infrastructure.

Q

Falling on a bruise said...

I would use your own country as a template with each state being semi-autonomous and a President overseeing the whole shebang. I think the biggest problem is history and this habit of harking back to it to bash each other over the head.