Why the UK is in the EU

What people said

noirscape · 2025-09 · Reference

The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate. You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do. Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American". Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don

Read the original HN comment ↗

testdelacc1 · 2025-09 · Reference

I don’t find what either side is saying here very convincing. Anti-ID “it will change our relationship with the state, cause irreversible damage to our civil liberties and fail to deter illegal immigration”. They say it will lead to “frequent identity checks as we navigate our daily lives”. That last part isn’t true, for sure. I’ve lived in a country with a digital ID and you had to verify your identity a few times a year at most - submitting taxes, opening bank accounts etc. They’re exaggerating here. The pro-ID group is even less convincing, if that can be imagined. Tony Blair, former PM has been batting for this for ages - Digital ID is the Disruption the UK Desperately Needs ( [LINK] ). And it all sounds like snake oil to someone who is even a little tech inclined. He’s promising all kinds of things, like the UK will see dramatically higher growth. I’ve seen India before and after Aadhaar. It helped, but it didn’t fundamentally remake the economy. UPI did do that, but it’s not dependent on Aadhaar. And the government wants to show they’re cracking down on illegal immigration so this is an easy win. But it will take more than 5 years to roll out and by then the PM would be out of a job. Even if it could be rolled out to 70 million people in 2 years (that’s 100k people per day ), it wouldn’t have all these incredible benefits. As for illegal immigration, it would catch a few but not all. The technical issue is that while you can issue everyone an ID, it would take much, muc

Read the original HN comment ↗

alephnerd · 2024-10 · Reference

The impact of BRICS is really overstated, and is only really discussed on Reddit and HN (because Reddit). In action it's been blunted because of China and India's rivalry, with each country vetoing expansion of nations that are fully lopsided one way or the other. It's not different from the SCO or APEC in that sense. If you want to learn further about blunting in IR I highly recommend reading Rush Doshi and Oriana Skylar Mastro's research. Alternatively, this classic scene from "Yes Minister" also pretty much explains this strategy - [VIDEO]

Read the original HN comment ↗