@liquidsodanium
 
Six of one, a half dozen of the other, eh?

I’m glad that you’re free from Brussel’s retarded policies, but you’re still stuck with your own retarded policies!

@Sarsath  
I dunno, they sure seemed to have inspired plenty of fear in the major corporations that have either moved out of the UK or are in the process of doing so.

Britain chooses freedom over fear.

““We did it

@Background Pony #13E8  
I’m having trouble figuring out what position you’re arguing against exactly, because it doesn’t bear very much resemblance to the positions I’ve actually taken here.

@Background Pony #13E8  
EU was conceived and then founded (in the 1950s) by some politicians (not only Monnet, but also Schuman, Adenauer, and many others) mainly for two reasons: a “utopian” reason (politico-economic cooperation between states and peoples of Europe); and for a more pragmatic reason: the catastrophic failure of both the League of Nations (1920) and the Treaty of Versailles (1919) to prevent WWII in Europe.
 
The “insinuation about the US civil war” is not so forced as it might seem; some historians call the 1914-1945 period the ““European Civil War[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Civil_War). This period was already called the ““Second Thirty Years’ War[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Thirty_Years%27_War) by Churchill and de Gaulle, including: WWI (1914-18), Bolshevik Revolution (1917) followed by Russian civil war (1917-23) and other smaller civil wars in Italy and Germany (1919); Ukrainian–Soviet War (1917–21); Polish–Soviet War (1919–21); Spanish Civil War (1936–39); World War II (1939–45). These devastating wars (WWII alone caused 60 to 80 million deaths, for the most part Europeans) were caused mainly by the aggressive ideologic nationalism of the european states: Germany (the Mein Kampf’s ridiculous theories: the “jew conspiration” against Germany that would have caused the german defeat of 1918, and the theory of Lebensraum, theories that caused the war against Russia and the Holocaust); Italy (Mussolini’s rhetorical myth of the “mutilated victory”); and even France and UK (they imposed absurdly heavy conditions on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles.)
 
The founders of EU probably thought that some peace treaties (Potsdam Agreement, 1945; Paris Peace Treaties, 1947) wouldn’t have enough power to prevent another european war (as the Versailles Treaty showed in an exemplary way).  
Also, UK’s membership of EU has always been quite problematic afaik, even though they joined quite early (in 1973). Now, we will just have a more Franco-Germanocentric EU.

@Background Pony #13E8
 
*north and west africa

@TexasUberAlles
 
Regardless of the fact that he was the architect of this modern union, was its first president and its driving force for much of of its growth, yeah, he had no real effect at all. You might as well try and claim that de Gaulle wasn’t instrumental in the form of the post-war French republic.
 
But that’s all really a distraction from the main point (and if it will make you happy then I will gladly concede that monnet was not the sole architect of the union), which you conveniently ignored for most of this debate. Neither the EU nor its antecedents were founded to promote trade, but rather economic and political union. You seem to be labouring under the impression that political union is necessary to implement free trade, but the EU’s own protectionist policies easily counter that argument. The fact that it’s easy to get goods from Greece to London means little when the protectionist policies of the customs union those two countries are part of have been used to virtually destroy the economies of north africa.
 
And lets not forget that little insinuation of yours about the US civil war (another americanism that has no application to the situation here) as if the UK should be forced to remain in the union at gunpoint. If the EU did not expect that some member states might desire to leave at some point, then why does it provide a mechanism for them to do so in an orderly manner?
 
The truth is, you are viewing Europe as if it is a poor imitation of the United States. We are not the United States. We are not Americans. Your political intrigues are in no way applicable to the reality of life here, so please do stop judging us by your own prejudices about how the world works.

@Background Pony #13E8  
European Union was not a project conceived by a single person. There were several men from several european countries who thought about an european politico-economic Union, between the two wars or during WWII: Spinelli, De Gasperi, Adenauer, Churchill, Schuman… Monnet was just the first to actually propose a European (economic) union to the Allies in 1919 (but he had no success).  
But before 1919, there had already been other proposals for a united Europe: Giuseppe Mazzini founded the “Young Europe” organisation in 1834, which was an international association that promoted the idea of a united Europe; Victor Hugo made a speech about the necessity of a United States of Europe in 1849. (As TexasUberAlles suggested, we could go back to the Constitutio Antoniniana of 212 A.D., when the Roman emperor Caracalla gave Roman citizenship to all free men in the Roman Empire).

@Background Pony #13E8  
Well, what sort of “guy who was important to a process but didn’t exactly do it all by himself 70+ years before it happened and with several other preceding processes in between” analogy would you prefer? The EU did not spring fully-formed from the mind of Monnet like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, it was the culmination of an evolutionary process that was built upon earlier organizations, and was kindasorta dependent on the input of more people than just Monnet.

@TexasUberAlles
 
Again, the fact that you seem unable to comprehend the role Monnet played and can only filter it through Americanisms is demonstrative of your lack of understanding of this subject.

@Background Pony #13E8  
“Reading up on” Benjamin Franklin doesn’t exactly convey exhaustive knowledge of the founding of the United States; influential as he was in the formation of the ECSC and EU, Monnet was hardly the first or only person to advocate for peace through unity and/or interdependent commerce in Europe, hence my allusions to previous cross-European organizations.

@TexasUberAlles
 
All I can suggest is that you go and read up on Jean Monnet. You clearly have little knowledge of the history of the EU, or you’d not be making such absolute statements about its purpose that are absolutely wrong.

@Background Pony #13E8  
It was conceived by Jean Monnet during world war 1  
The number of factors involved in turning what should have been yet another pointless wurst-waving contest between France and ~Germany into the hyperbolic shitshow of The Great War is too vast for me to feel like argebargling about it under a funny joke image on a cartoon friendship horse booru, but I think you’re stretching the concept of “it was conceived by” so hard here that the other end is in a different time zone. How far back do want to go in trying to establish a philosophical start point for an organization that had a reasonably well defined actual start point, the Hanseatic League? The Isn’t, Isn’t, And Isn’t? Trajan’s Rome? The Cro Magnons?
 
Had it been implemented when he proposed it, world war 2 probably would never have happened  
Fairly certain there are at least a dozen Alt History short novels with that as their main deviation point, so… sure, okay. Has about as much likelihood/relevance as any other take one of the most speculated-upon eras in Human History.

@TexasUberAlles  
@TexasUberAlles  
These are quite accurate historical analysis, for a pony imageboard (if I may say so). Bravo Texas.

This image is blocked by your current filter - click here to display it anyway

your current filter.

 
Also in Italy, in order to approve a “Constitutional law” (a legal act that changes the Constitution), a “supermajority” of two thirds of the votes of both Houses of Parliament is required (in the second vote).
 
[Another fact: the Italian Constitution explicitly forbids any ‘abrogative referendum’ that is intended to invalidate an international treaty, like EU membership. This is because treaties are considered by this Constitution as written agreements that prevent war against other States. So, an “Italexit” approved by a Referendum is simply impossible with the current Constitution. This could sound strange: but you must consider that the current Constitution came into force in 1948, after the fall of Fascism. After all, Mussolini’s dictatorship was definitively confirmed by a Referendum: the ““Plebiscito[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_general_election,_1929) of 1929 (question: “Do you approve the list of deputies appointed by the Grand National Council of Fascism? Y/N”. Mussolini obtained 98% of “Yes”.)]
 
@Background Pony #13E8  
Right, but they both pursued the same goal (at least originally): “a kind of United States of Europe”, as Churchill said in 1946. The Council of Europe (EU states+other states) in fact created the European Court of Human Rights (1959), the international court that ensures the fundamental civic and political rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR); EU (1957) is the politico-economic organisation. (Turkey, a non-EU state but a possible future member, recently suspended the ECHR, because of Erdogan’s purges.)

@Background Pony #13E8
 
Also worth noting that I got the date of the EFTA’s founding wrong. That came in the early 60s.

@TexasUberAlles
 
In addition, the Council of Europe is not and never has been part of the European Union. It is an extremely influential human rights organisation but it is entirely separate from the EU and has been entirely separate from each of the EU’s antecedents.

@TexasUberAlles
 
No, I said it was conceived after world war 1. I was actually wrong. It was conceived by Jean Monnet during world war 1 and posited to the Allies in 1919, at which point it was rejected. It was a solution to the sociopolitical issues of the time - the criss-cross web of alliances and treaties between the individual nations of europe that dragged the entire continent into a war that should have been a border skirmish between Germany and France, and that should have ended in a year at most.
 
At that point France and Germany (and the other European powers) were more than capable of returning to war, as demonstrated in 1939. More generally, the european powers in the inter-war years were still tangled in the same web of treaties and agreements that had fomented the great war and it was that web, amongst other things, that dragged the entire continent into a second war in 1939. Monnet’s proposed solution would have replaced that web with a supranational organisation that did away with such things. Had it been implemented when he proposed it, world war 2 probably would never have happened.
 
However, the war did happen, and its immediate aftermath created a new paradigm in Europe. Unlike in the inter-war period, when Europe’s borders were strictly enforced even in the middle of a war, border controls were effectively ended and the institutions that enforced trade restrictions were essentially destroyed. Most of the economies of Europe were too busy rebuilding to bother with things like trade tariffs and protectionism and they would happily source their goods from whoever could produce them. Their economies began integrating through free trade at a remarkable pace, without the guiding hand of any superanational organisation. A free trade bloc built on that foundation would have been inevitable.
 
I did not say that the ECSC was based on trade, but trade dependencies. I suppose that’s a confusing way of terming it: better would be to say that it was based on directed regional integration (as the lede of wikipedia’s page puts it) by creating a customs union between its members. Within that union, member states would trade freely, but they would also be required to harmonise their industrial and trade practices by top-down direction. It was an answer to the 19th century paradigm of protectionism and trade treaties.
 
 
What you were describing earlier was a free trade zone, an entirely different beast, as I already explained.
 
However, unlike a free trade zone, the Union’s answer was to move that protectionism and those treaties out to the edge of the customs union, so in a real sense it didn’t change anything. It just made it bigger.

@Background Pony #13E8  
The EU was initially founded as the Coal and Steel Union  
That’s a… rather disingenuous way of framing it; both organizations may have ultimately shared some of the same sausagemaking equipment behind closed doors, but the Council of Europe predates the ECSC by two years, and Schuman didn’t issue his proposal for its founding until 1950, which is hardly “the aftermath of World War 1” in anything more than a “WWII was a really lousy sequel to an already bad movie” sense. Assuming that was a typo and you meant World War 2, there’s still a bit of a gap between Schuman’s assertion of “The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany” and your characterization of “preventing France and Germany from going to war”, which sounds more like a frankly science fiction level deviation from the reality of post-WWII Europe postulating that there was a chance in hell of France resuming armed conflict with the DDR and/or BRD as anything other than an American proxy to stop the Soviets from storming the Fulda Gap before there were enough A-bombs stockpiled to keep any dumbass plan like that from happening.
 
Saying that trade had “nothing to do” with the inception of an organization which explicitly stated that it was using trade as a tool to help prevent future conflict between traditional megadeath pissing match opponents just flat-out doesn’t make any sense, it’s like saying that nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the inception of Cold War MAD doctrine.

@TexasUberAlles
 
The EU was initially founded as the Coal and Steel Union, an institution conceived in the aftermath of World War 1 as a means of preventing France and Germany from going to war. It was largely obsolete by its founding, as the UNECE and the EFTA had both come into existence in the meantime and were busy driving many of the political and economic reforms for which the EU would later claim credit.
 
Trade was nothing to do with its inception, except in the sense of creating trade dependencies between its members with the idea that they would not be physically capable of warring with one another. Claiming after the fact that it’s about free trade ignores that it is not a free trade area but a customs union, one that has been very effective in implementing protectionist policies against - for example - African food producers for the better part of 20 years while allowing France to dump grain on the African markets at below cost, driving local producers out of business and creating a fairly big chunk of the economic migrant problem that the EU now faces.

@Silent Wing  
’‘I won’t be able to move around Europe easily’’  
That’s… actually a super big deal, not only for literally millions of individuals, but for the entire UK/EU economy. Nobody pays any attention to it because good lord people dearly love to forget History and then complain about having to repeat it, but the Full Faith And Credit Clause of the US Constitution is in all seriousness one of the primary things that kept the Union from falling apart like nearly every other popular revolution anywhere ever. Only people engaged in international commerce truly understand the ungodly madness of trying to move mixed freight across a dozen tiny independent nation-states, each with their own specific sets of rules and regulations and taxes and customs and this is literally the main reason why the EU was founded in the first place. A significant chunk of the United States decided to try doing away with that whole “united” thing once upon a time, and spoiler alert! Didn’t turn out so well for anyone involved.
 
Democracy gave everyone a voice and the majority of the population wanted to leave  
The main procedural point of the “REVOTE!!!” camp isn’t “let’s keep voting until the results are what I want them to be”– even if that does seem to be the main motivation– it’s that a policy which has the potential 100% guarantee of upending the entire European economy and having a serious impact on everyone in the UK shouldn’t have been decided by a simple majority vote, but held to a higher standard like 60% or 75% or whatever; if something is going to affect the entire nation and all its trading partners, it’s a big enough deal that you really should have more than just 36% or so of the population being the decision makers. An exemplar system is the one for amending the US Constitution, which requires a two thirds supermajority of both houses of Congress to put a proposed amendment up for a national vote, where it must be ratified by three quarters of the 50 state legislatures.
 
@Background Pony #6702  
Democracy has devolved to tyranny of the majority  
Only as far as public referenda like Brexit… and really, not even then– unless it’s in a country that mandates voting in national elections– since The People and The Electorate are two different things. In pretty much every republic in the world, what democracy has mostly devolved into (admittedly, to widely varying degrees) is a kind of neo-fascist “representative oligarchy”, where corporations and the super wealthy control most of the major plays that a nation makes by electioneering compliant representatives into office and then controlling those “elected” representatives through various means.

@CHEEKIBREEKISTASICEKA  
not you , im talking about whatever mod banned me….

@iamli3  
What did I do?

@iamli3  
Didn’t you read the data? There is a disparity of support between England and Wales, Scotland and North Ireland, and rightfully so because each region has its own geopolitics and policymaking.
 
Barring Metropolitan London, I have no issue with England and Wales’ position. But Scotland’s trading policy was one that was dependent on the EU, and when their independence referendum in 2014 was in favour to stay with the UK, it was because Scottish voters were sold to the idea the UK would guarantee them a place in the EU without needing to reapply for membership; if the pullout deal means trade barriers with the EU, Scotland would be forced to increase its dependence on domestic markets within the UK, which is expected to be volatile due to economic isolation. North Ireland is also heavily dependent on labour movement and trade with the Republic of Ireland, a member state of the EU; with the prospect of Ireland reestablishing border control with North Ireland and isolating it again, that’s no good for a region that is still crawling out of Protestant Unionist-Catholic Republican tensions.
 
To assume that the UK is “unanimous” in its vote is an incredibly simplistic worldview. Just because there is a 1.4 million vote difference doesn’t discount that 16 million stay against 17.4 million leave is a very substantial divide. I don’t have a problem with England and Wales leaving, but they also dragged Scotland and North Ireland along for the ride despite these regions’ electorates having reservations. It’s absurd double standards that Scotland and Northern Ireland have to be subservient to the politics of Westminster, while England and Wales could choose to leave the EU because they believe they were subservient to the politics of Brussels.