The Farce Goes On

[MrGongGong]

and a car CD player is no place really for big oratorios.....

they belong in landfill ?

[teamsaint]

they belong in landfill ?

well, although I wouldn't use it, I look forward to the day when my local Household Recycling Centre has one of its Skips labelled "Large Scale Choral Works".

There is potential in other genres too....

Edit, maybe they do abroad, perhaps thats how Brilliant fill up the last few CDs of their box sets ..

(Still love them though !)

[scottycelt]

Well, a year ago in Berlin, Angela Merkel made a speech to the Bundestag in which she said "No one should take it for granted that there will be peace and affluence in Europe in the next half century....If the euro fails, Europe fails."

While many people, not just "foaming-at-the-mouth rabid pro-Europeans" have given the EU credit for helping to preserve peace in Europe since the 1950s, it is the identification of the euro system with the whole European project - that if one fails, the rest fails - by recent European leaders that is so incomprehensible to some of us.

That's a much fairer point ..

However, Merkel is a politician ... she would say that, wouldn't she?

There are plenty of other pro-EU politicians who have taken a different view about the Euro ... in the UK that very pro-EU politician, David Owen, campaigned against the UK joining the single currency. He needn't have bothered as the UK wasn't in a fit state to join in any case. However the UK was rather unique in that it was prevented from joining by a notorious currency speculator. Other countries, even less fit than the UK, were allowed to join apparently unnoticed by that same (Greek) speculator.

One can be ardently pro-EU without necessarily demanding every member country joins the Euro.

In the true democratic tradition of the EU, such things must and will only be decided by the democratically-elected leaders of the separate member states!

[scottycelt]

In the discussions about whether an independent Scotland would automatically be part of the EU, or would have to apply to join, it's been said that new members have to join the Euro. Is that true, or not?

Have you been reading the Daily Mail again, Flossie ... ?

No, there is a democratic opt-out for 'new' members ... Sweden is an example ... even our Government Eurosceptics are now talking about taking advantage of various 'opt-outs'.

Don't mention all this to Simon, though ...

[Serial_Apologist]

In the past week Cameroon has been talking of renegotiating Britain's relationship to the Treaty of Rome when the time is right - which he adduces to be when present arrangements for the Eurozone collapse. Meanwhile rumbles in the Conservative Party about getting out of the EU altogether, when Britain's terms are rejected by the partners, are being reported in the media as reflected right at the top.

[Flosshilde]

Have you been reading the Daily Mail again, Flossie ... ?

No, there is a democratic opt-out for 'new' members ... Sweden is an example ... even our Government Eurosceptics are now talking about taking advantage of various 'opt-outs'.

Don't mention all this to Simon, though ...

So I can't use that as an excuse for voting 'No'?

[scottycelt]

So I can't use that as an excuse for voting 'No'?

You don't need an excuse, Floss ... just vote 'No' ... I'm sure you'll find yourself in the majority when the time comes.

[Flosshilde]

Oh dear - can't have that!

[Simon]

In the true democratic tradition of the EU, such things must and will only be decided by the democratically-elected leaders of the separate member states!

Ah, you mean like the referenda that go on and ignore the wishes of the people until they get the "right" result? Or the Commission decisions rushed through and (if they are lucky) rubberstamped by the representatives of the people whose names less than 10% of the people know? Or the Court decisions that override individual parliaments?

Whatever the EU is, an illustration of true democracy in practice is one of the things that it certainly is not!

[scottycelt]

Ah, you mean like the referenda that go on and ignore the wishes of the people until they get the "right" result? Or the Commission decisions rushed through and (if they are lucky) rubberstamped by the representatives of the people whose names less than 10% of the people know? Or the Court decisions that override individual parliaments?

Whatever the EU is, an illustration of true democracy in practice is one of the things that it certainly is not!

Well, the answer, Simon, is surely bleeding, blindingly obvious ...

Let any member state withdraw from the EU if and whenever it so wishes ... if the Government of that member state is defying the wishes of its electorate that is surely a matter for the member state and not the direct responsibility of the EU?

Even Michael Gove seems able to grasp that we have it in our power to withdraw from this wretched peace-loving organisation anytime we wish.

There isn't a problem ... of course we can vote to stop the world and disembark ... absolutely no problem whatsoever!

Let's just go for it, put two puny fingers up to our nearest neighbours, and the views of our closest ally the USA, and see what happens next, eh ... ?

Sorted ... !!!

[John Shelton]

Of course it could be that the imposition of extreme austerity measures by the EU troika in a number of Eurozone countries may in itself provoke civil wars in some of those countries: that is not far from the case in Greece now.

Although I disagree with its penultimate paragraph, I think this article accurately describes the damage arising from the flawed construction of the eurozone, and in particular in this quotation:

"The Nobel committee, warning this month that the break-up of the EU would lead to a return of "extremism and nationalism", passed over the rise of neo-nazism in Greece and mounting separatist forces in Spain and Belgium. It lauds the role of the EU in bringing democracy and human rights to post-communist countries, but says nothing of how the politics of xenophobia and antisemitism have returned in Hungary and other parts of post-communist Europe. Propping up the eurozone is fuelling the very evils the Nobel worthies tell us the EU was designed to prevent. The idea that without the euro the continent would be at war is mere hysteria."

It also passes over how the post-Soviet economic narrative in Eastern Europe (the aggressive, uncontrolled, triumph of the free market, the free for all dismantling of state ownership) has and is damaging people's lives in former Soviet-bloc countries (or ending them http://libcom.org/news/housing-activ...arsaw-08032011). In part this is what I was trying to get at in drawing a parallel between Fukuyama's "end of History" and the assumptions underlying the award of the peace prize to the EU; that both are abstractions that rely on a refusal of the present's connections with the past other than to laud a timeless present as that past's overcoming, and that effectively refuse to see the present as temporal, treating it as somehow timeless.

Similarly, attempting to talk about what is happening in Eastern Europe gets an immediate, blocking response, along the lines of ask people if they want the Soviet system back (or the celebrated monster Communism). The effect of this is again to make the present outside history because essentially rather than accidentally different. In the post-historical world these things aren't really happening (a feeling strengthened by the fact that many supporters of the imposition of extreme austerity measures in certain European countries appear to regard those countries as belonging on the margins, and only of interest in terms of their relation to the centre).

[french frank]

the assumptions underlying the award of the peace prize to the EU [...] refuse to see the present as temporal, treating it as somehow timeless.

Starting from the premise that most awards such as these (and the Man Booker, for the matter) are pretty pointless in terms of singling out an individual or organisation and placing them on a brief pedestal until next year, I don't really agree that there is considered to be a timeless rather than temporal element (the 1994 award to Arafat, Peres and Rabin would surely have disabused the Nobel Committee of that belief). I would agree that it's not the most obvious moment to be giving the award to the EU. A bit like the knighting of Sir Fred?

Similarly, attempting to talk about what is happening in Eastern Europe gets an immediate, blocking response, along the lines of ask people if they want the Soviet system back (or the celebrated monster Communism). The effect of this is again to make the present outside history because essentially rather than accidentally different. In the post-historical world these things aren't really happening (a feeling strengthened by the fact that many supporters of the imposition of extreme austerity measures in certain European countries appear to regard those countries as belonging on the margins, and only of interest in terms of their relation to the centre).

Yes, I have sympathy with that view. It's all very complex, particularly if you start to talk about the rise in nationalism. It has always been the nationalist groupings that were against the EU in the first place: UKIP and BNP here, and very recently the nationalists in Croatia where the referendum was in favour of joining in 2013.

The EU economic situation is the UK's writ large (and more troubling in having wider potential repercussions): two opposing strategies on austerity measures v. growth measures. Which boils down to rich v. poor. Which in turn is enough to clarify for most people which side they're on.

[DracoM]

There are numbers of regions in UK which would feel, not just a draught, but a veritable gale, if EU regional fund money was withdrawn.

Wonder how they'd vote?

[aeolium]

The EU economic situation is the UK's writ large (and more troubling in having wider potential repercussions): two opposing strategies on austerity measures v. growth measures. Which boils down to rich v. poor. Which in turn is enough to clarify for most people which side they're on.

The strange thing is though that there seem to be quite a few people who strongly oppose the austerity policies being applied in the UK and yet when it comes to the (far harsher and more damaging) similar policies being applied in a number of eurozone countries, especially Greece, seem to turn a blind eye, perhaps reluctant to levy any criticism at any policy emanating from the EU. Yet it seems hardly contestable to me that these policies are having an extremely severe impact on the social fabric of these countries (and more arguably may well not achieve the economic effect they are intended to).

Here is last night's Newsnight, with the leading item being a report by Paul Mason from Greece (starts about 2 minutes in). In it he mentions that a recent poll is giving the neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn 14% of support among the electorate. This for a party which AFAIK did not even contest the 2009 elections and polled 7% in the 2012 elections. There may be some sinister parallel with the growth of the Nazi party in the late 1920s and especially after the Great Depression when austerity policies were also applied: the Nazi party went from 2.6% of the vote in 1928 to 18.3% in 1930 and 37.3% in 1932. At that time also, the Communist party polled strongly with 13.1% of the vote in 1930 (compare with the rise of Syriza in Greece). It does seem as though the policies being imposed by the troika are not only bringing Greek society close to civil war or revolution but also polarising it between extremes.

[amateur51]

Starting from the premise that most awards such as these (and the Man Booker, for the matter) are pretty pointless in terms of singling out an individual or organisation and placing them on a brief pedestal until next year, I don't really agree that there is considered to be a timeless rather than temporal element (the 1994 award to Arafat, Peres and Rabin would surely have disabused the Nobel Committee of that belief). I would agree that it's not the most obvious moment to be giving the award to the EU... particularly if you start to talk about the rise in nationalism.

.

I would argue that, particularly for UK it is a propitious moment to raise the spectre of WWII and why the EU was set up because there is a goodly chunk, the chunk which probably most wants to leave EU, who don't have the historical perspective.

The EU is corrupt and costly, but no more so that most bureacracies of its scale, but its achievement of relative peace for so long has been worth every euro, in my view