EU is awarded the Nobel Peace prize

SeanW

oscarBravo wrote: »

I love how your argument against anything positive that the EU may have achieved is a sense of unshakeable certainty that all those positive things were inevitable anyway.

Considering some of the examples you have provided, like the ban on married women working, it's entirely appropriate.

It's particularly funny, in the context of two world wars, to announce that a continent that had just emerged from war could never conceivably embark on another one.

The factors that led to the first world war - alliances between empires, the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Germany were mostly all gone after 1918. Greece (from the Ottomans) and Finland (from the Russian Empire) had gained independence.

World War Two only came about becuase the victors of the Treaty of Versailles decided to utterly humiliate the German people and subject them to mind numbing austerity to pay a massive reparations bill, which is why their people went to the extremes of National Socialism. The victors of WWII knew better than to do that again, hence we had the Marshall Aid Plan, and American troops stayed behind in Europe to help with aftermath peacekeeping and rebuilding.

It is also the case that after 1945 all of Western Europe had a common enemy - the U.S.S.R. where the alliance of Atlantic area democracies under a loose coalition of NATO provided a strong deterrent against communist aggression, including a nuclear deterrent.

To credit the E.U. with any of this is highly questionable, to say the least.

You're basically blaming axe manufacturers for axe murders.

Great, so now the Greeks, in addition to everything else, are comparable to axe murderers. It seems they really have a friend in you. BTW if Acme Axe Company had an ideological reason for wanting everyone in Europe to own an axe, so they sent a marketing representative to the 26th Annual Convention of Glass-Eyed Psychopaths, questions would have to be asked.

Sure, Greece shouldn't have been allowed to join the Euro, but blaming the EU for being lied to by Greece instead of blaming Greece for lying is a bit of a farcical argument.

That's not what I'm saying, but your argument appears to be the exact opposite: that all in Eurocracy land were innocent little babes in the woods that were lied to by those horrible evil Greeks and noone could have forseen that putting Greece and Germany (with its cultures and economies so fundamentally different in every way) might not be a good idea.
Your view, if I understand it correctly, is that the desire of political elites to tie the European people together into a supra-national Euro-goslavia and nothing whatsoever to do with it, and carries no blame for Greeces' difficulties whatsoever, is both troubling and bizarre. And it makes no sense.

And you don't see any inherent contradiction between those statements.

It's very simple - at a national level, it's very easy to get rid of a useless government by electing a new one - radical changes in national parliaments are common.
Also if you have something like Switzerland, people can have a genuine say in how they are governed by having referenda on all sorts of things (there's that dreaded R word again that Eurocrats despise so much), so if the people want something different to that of the political class, the people win.

That's not so easy though when most of your laws are drafted by a Maoist in Brussels.

BTW when the Swiss people vote in a referendum, their results actually mean something, it's pretty much unheard of that the Swiss political class tells their people "that wasn't the right answer, go back and do it again" or worse bulldozes the result out of the way as the Eurocrats did with the European Constitution "Lisbon Treaty"

So your "unintended consequences" argument is predicated on the assumption that insurance companies will blindly stumble into a situation that leads to them paying out more?

That's what they tried to avoid by setting different rates for safer vs. more dangerous drivers. Now that this is no longer an option, insurance rates are going up for the safer drivers, and we have found out in Ireland, that is to be the only effect. Surely you cannot realistically call this a European success story?

Are you working on the assumption that not only am I too stupid to understand the law of unintended consequences, but all insurance companies are just as stupid?

I'm not saying you're stupid, rather than your apparent affinity for everything big/international government and meddlesome, may be blinding you to some of the downsides of those things.

Because that's a pretty strange assumption. So if I conclude that women are more expensive to employ, I can decide not to employ women? Or to pay them less for the same work?

That's an entirely different debate. Here, we have had a straightforward case of meddlesome Eurocrats deciding that common-sense based insurance evaluations were "discrimination." As an exclusive and sole result of that, insurance costs for statistically safe drivers is going up.

How on Earth can you defend that?

Scofflaw wrote: »

How did NATO actually achieve this?

Given what the commies were doing in the post-war era, it's a good bet NATO stopped the USSR from trying to crush Western Europe, starting with the Western parts of the city of Berlin.

oscarBravo

SeanW wrote: »

That's an entirely different debate.

Of course it is. In one case, people of one sex face a disadvantage compared to people of the other sex, because of the potential cost to a business. In the other case, people of one sex face a disadvantage compared to people of the other sex, because of the potential cost to a business.

How stupid of me to conflate them.

Here, we have had a straightforward case of meddlesome Eurocrats deciding that common-sense based insurance evaluations were "discrimination."

Heh, judges are meddlesome Eurocrats now.

Next thing you know, those meddling Eurocrats will be telling me that I can't make common-sense based hiring decisions because they're "discriminatory". Oh wait, that's completely different.

Scofflaw

SeanW wrote:

Scofflaw wrote:

How did NATO actually achieve this?

Given what the commies were doing in the post-war era, it's a good bet NATO stopped the USSR from trying to crush Western Europe, starting with the Western parts of the city of Berlin.

That's not actually an answer to the question - it's an answer to an entirely different question.

cordially,
Scofflaw

SeanW

Actually it sort of is: with the destruction of the British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian empires, and the post-WWI decisions having been recognised to be erroneous, the odds of the peoples of democratic nation states going out and skulling each other again was fairly remote.

The real threat to peace and democracy in Europe between 1945 and 1990 was Communism, in our case Stalinism (though Chairman Barrosos' much loved Maoism was worse) remained an active danger of destruction, annihalation and subjugation for all of our people throughout the lifetime of the Soviet Union and Communist Bloc.

The commies were little better bloodthirsty savages, hell-bent on world domination. NATO, including the military power of the United States, helped to contain them.

Of course it is. In one case, people of one sex face a disadvantage compared to people of the other sex, because of the potential cost to a business. In the other case, people of one sex face a disadvantage compared to people of the other sex, because of the potential cost to a business.

They're the same in theory, but with somewhat different peculiarities affecting both. I do not want to get this thread off topic by discussing those.

Speaking only for myself, as a man with a reasonable insurance rates because of my long history of safe driving, I have no desire to dump perhaps ~€50/year of my insurance costs onto some woman. It makes no sense to me, I have never felt "discriminated" against before now, I never asked for this ruling and I don't want it.

Scofflaw

SeanW wrote:

Actually it sort of is: with the destruction of the British, French, German, Ottoman, Russian empires, and the post-WWI decisions having been recognised to be erroneous, the odds of the peoples of democratic nation states going out and skulling each other again was fairly remote.

It's always interesting to see how unthinkable war between European nations has become, so much so that the role of post-war cooperation through the EU can be dismissed as no more than would have happened anyway, despite a greater than millennial record of intra-European conflict.

It implies that Europeans suddenly underwent a blinding flash of realisation - hey, this war thing is bad! - so that peace then required no further effort or organisation on their part. How it didn't happen after WW1, or the Franco-Prussian War, or indeed the Seven Years' War, is obviously a mystery.

amused,
Scofflaw

SeanW

The wars you mentioned were mostly if not all instigated by historical empires (not democratic nation-states), most of which were destroyed after World War 1, the rest (the Empires of Britain and France) thoroughly demolished after World War 2. The people of Europe had already decided after WWI that constantly skulling each other was not such a good idea, and WWII might never have started but for the decision to subjugate, humiliate and impoverish the German people at the Treaty of Versaille, a decision subsequently accepted to be a mistake. The Americans were heavily involved with the stabilisation of the post-war democratic nation-states of Europe who by this time had a common enemy in Stalinist Russia and the Communist Bloc, a threat to all free European people that was only contained by a trans-Atlantic military alliance.

Remind me again where the EU fits into all this?

RandomName2

Scofflaw wrote: »

It's always interesting to see how unthinkable war between European nations has become, so much so that the role of post-war cooperation through the EU can be dismissed as no more than would have happened anyway, despite a greater than millennial record of intra-European conflict.

It implies that Europeans suddenly underwent a blinding flash of realisation - hey, this war thing is bad! - so that peace then required no further effort or organisation on their part. How it didn't happen after WW1, or the Franco-Prussian War, or indeed the Seven Years' War, is obviously a mystery.

amused,
Scofflaw

For the last few hundred years there have been three major powers within Europe; the anglophone (United Kingdom exclusively), francophone (France) and germanophone (Hapsburgs/ Prussia).

There have also been two powers outside of Europe which have had a bearing on Europe, the Ottomans and Russia.

After WW2 the germanophone power was gone. Or, to be more exact, all of Prussia and the majority of traditional Hapsburg power was under the control of the USSR (with the exception of Berlin which was controlled by various powers).

Okay, so any war after WW2 would have to come from either France or the UK seeking to become dominant powers in Europe. First off, we can discount European integration as having stopped the UK in this ambition, as the UK was excluded from the ECSC and EEC until 1973.. by France of all nations!

So France, as the sole superpower on mainland Europe and only major power in the ECSC and ECC took over the rest of Europe, easily invading and incorporating the Benelux countries and the Bonn government, and subsequently managing to maintain a cordial relationship with Fascist Spain, the weak Italy, and the isolated Scandinavian countries. Historians tend to point out how the provisions set aside in the model of the ECSC and EEC failed to account for the speed at which France could conquer its neighbours, thereby avoiding any of the dangers posed to its war-production. Although the idealists of the late 40s and early 50s had hoped that economic integration would be a draw significant enough to stave off warfare, when opportunity for European hegemony presented itself, the pull was too great for the Fourth Republic to ignore. And thus the 3rd French Empire was born in the wake of the Five Week War.

Wait.. none of this happened. How could it? The powers in Europe after WW2 weren't France, UK and (half) Germany, it was Russia and the US. It is plain silly to look at the European theatre in any other way. And yes, war was a distinct possibility, from either east or west, but it would have been one of the superpowers (as ever) that would have instigated it.

The EU and the UN have ... helped ... in terms of peace. But to say that there has been peace because of either, or that the fact that America having over half a million military personnel in Europe at the height of the Cold War wasn't a more significant factor is.. very silly indeed.