Remainers What do you think the EU will be like in the future ?

[lessworriedaboutthecat]

A genuine question for remain voters. What do you think the EU will be like in the future ?. Not short term but in the mid to long term say 10 to 50 years. What would you like it to be like and what do you think it will be like. I am interested in the answers and will refrain from arguing with people.

Ahhh. I'll bite as I live on mainland Europe. Probably divided-ish and squabbling and certainly with tensions but ultimately still absolutely in tune with the ideologies that created it in the first place. I work in a hugely diverse multinational company with very real discontent about Europe as it is right now and yet I don't know a single person who thinks leaving would be better.

I think what it looks like will depend to some extent on the nature of the external threat.

I recently read Philippe sands' brilliant cautionary book 'east-west street' - a personal history, told alongside the history of Nuremberg and the origins of 'genocide' and 'crimes against humanity'. He ends my reminding people just how vibrant, normal, shared and 'lived-in' his grandparents' town was, in the decades before all the Jews were murdered and he exhorts people - especially at the moment - to 'take nothing for granted'.

I think that fundamentally, most people on mainland Europe have long and entrenched institutional memories of collective suffering (that seem to have passed us by) but that remind them why the EU was brought into being in the first place. For all its faults, my bet is that this sense of deep rooted shared understanding will keep them together (maybe losing some eg the uk and Poland along the way), come what may.

I don't think the Eurozone will expand in the near future, if at all. However, I do think the EU has always seen the accession of the Eastern European countries as a long game. Initially, although they had to make many economic changes in order to fulfill the acquis communautaires, their economies were evidently much weaker than those of Germany, France, Benelux etc. The EU, for obvious reasons, wants stability, prosperity and peace across as wide an area as possible. Over the years, the Eastern members should strengthen their economies, as for example was seen in Spain, Portugal, Ireland. While these countries have had their storms to weather, structurally they are light years from where they were pre-EU accession.

I think the EU plays a long game and totally after is still strongly influenced by the fundamental principles that arose from the wars of the last century. I sometimes think that UK governments don't fully realise how deep the scars run, particularly in Germany, and how much the fear of conflict influences policy.

I also think Turkish accession is never going to happen, especially as they have lost their strongest advocate (the UK).

Of all the countries, Poland would seem to have most to lose, having been threatened by Germany and Russia in the past.

I can never quite understand western Europe's fear of Russia: I was looking up which wars the Russians had fought and with whom. For the 17th and 18th Century it seemed often to be Sweden, but Sweden at that time was a much more important European Power than now. Later their emphasis switched to the Ottoman Empire.

How much of this fear has been promulgated by the USA/NATO and their fear of Communism?

To be honest I don't get the fear of Russia either. Vladimir Putin's foreign policy is pretty much the same as all Russian leaders since Peter the Great. He is essentially a predictable and rational actor. Russia is no threat to the EU. Russia is just understandably concerned about the EU and Nato expanding to its borders which is understandable when you consider their history of being invaded by the Golden Horde, Napoleon and the Nazi's.

Thank you for the responses. Its not really changed my mind about voting leave. Based on the responses it seems like Britain will leave the EU along with possibly Poland and the other Visegrad countries who were under the impression they were joining the holy league. The rest of EU were continue along a path to ever closer union which virtually nobody in the UK really wants, while fighting the last centuries wars and ignoring the elephant in the room until its too late. Its best for Britain and for the EU in general if we just leave.

To my mind to survive as in literally survive the EU has two options, essentially a European Super state with all major decisions taken centrally by an unelected commission with limited parliamentary oversight with an EU army to secure its borders. Or the second options of a looser confederation of friendly nation states with freedom of goods and services and ease but not freedom of movement. Sadly its stuck between the two and is probably doomed.

OP you should read 'winter is coming - why Putin and the enemies of the free world should be stopped' by Garry Kasparov (2016) if you want a different (and troubling) perspective. Kasparov was a world chess champion but for years now has been a human rights campaigner. It's quite a polemical, argumentative book - Kasparov is very angry - but it is definitely worth reading - especially if you feel like a challenge to your own views!

The analysis here is very Eurocentric. Wealth and power are shifting East, what happens in China, the world's second largest economy is important too. They are above all concerned with stability, they don't want Brexit because it threatens to undermine the strength of the EU as a balancing force between Russia and the US in world geopolitics. All the signs are that they will shift to support the EU and regard post Brexit Britain (if it happens) as an increasing irrelevance. They have already shifted their focus to Germany. Of course their bubble might burst, but then by all existing economic models it should have done long ago and the tensions between Trump, if he survives which I doubt, on trade and North Korea might also result in a shock. Either way I think that global perspective is lacking in much of the thinking on Brexit, that is geopolitics, before we even get to trade......