The problem is , there are very few Europeans or EUans. There are French and Germans and Spanish etc; they all want their country first and sure open markets but their country first. That is how they vote (certainly these days). Most people do not feel EU unfortunately. Language is one thing: it is getting better but having language not unified (English, Spanish, Mandarin; pick one) is a massive and real issue keeping people's minds and efforts local instead of, at least EU wide. It is slowly getting better but the EU should made easier accessible and far higher funds for pan EU projects. Currently it is a serious pain to get access to EU funds and many just get eaten by the few massive consultancy corps who have dedicated teams going for any funding and tender in any locality and language.
As a EU citizen that moved to a different EU country: Yes please!
I constantly need a VPN as some services from my old country are geo-blocked. And when I forget to disable the VPN to my old country I can't visit certain sites from my current country. I need two phone numbers as some services require a phone number from the country they operate out of. I'm talking banking, classifieds, insurance, municipal. I can't use certain apps from my current country because I have to switch my account country but that disables apps from my old country.
And the best part, I can't vote for the national elections in my current country. Only for those in my old country. And it will be like that for the rest of my life. An example: I had to enable VPN to see the election results of my old country, the one I am eligible to vote in.
Please unify the EU so I don't have to deal with all of this.
Why should countries allow foreign influence - the voting in the most important elections in the country, by foreign citizens who didn't integrate enough to even get their citizenship?
Participating in local elections is often allowed.
In the case of these two countries dual citizenship is not allowed. So for the rest of my life I will not be able to vote here. This isn’t about “not integrating enough”.
If someone has been living and working in a country for a long time that should be enough to let them vote in national elections, regardless of what citizenship they have.
Not willing to change your citizenship is a sign of not integrating fully, in not being completely loyal to the country and to its citizens.
Imagine that both countries start a war between each other - who are you going to support? Whoever you choose does not matter, the fact remains that you would have to choose, legally speaking. Why should your current living country give the strongest possible leverage to an untegrated potential agent/supporter of the foreign country?
Highest privileges should be given to people who decided to be fully in, in both good and bad. You can't be allowed to only cherrypick the good stuff: "I want to vote, but I don't want to be drafted to be killed in a war".
Having people vote who don't live in the country has always struck me as weird. If you are some place else for say a year or even 10 years it seems a reasonable topic for debate but longer?? Never pay taxes either???
Often the rule is that one gets the vote in local elections after living for some time, but only citizens can vote in national elections (Parlament, President). This makes sense. If you want to fully participate in a society, you should integrate and become a citizen.
> Well written. I hope one day the united states of Europe is a real political entity, burying the stupidity that is fragmented national interests.
And I personally hope it won't. Seeing how things are going, I have no interest for my country to become a small province of the EU to be managed by some bureaucrats in Brussels who have never set foot in it.
Sharing intel and and resources why not? Becoming a vassal state of an EU federation no thanks.
The world is going back to zones of influence, and little fish will be eaten by big fishes. I'd rather that the big fish be the EU than Russia, even if it means giving up some national rights.
> The world is going back to zones of influence, and little fish will be eaten by big fishes
That has always been the case. I don't see how that would justify giving up our independence to become a province of a super state.
Secondly, using Russia a bogeyman to justify giving up our national rights is not a really convincing argument.
Russia hasn't been able to conquer a third of Ukraine in the last 3 years and it's economy is in shambles, yet we are supposed to believe that only a European super state can save us from it? That makes no sense.
But each to their own, those who want to give up their national rights, identities and shared cultural heritage should go ahead and integrate this super state and those who do not should be able to stay out of it.
I guess fundamentally we have a different view of what Europe should be.
It's more a risk management issue. A country that wants to do everything by itself (from food, to shovels, to cars, to computers) will not be the most efficient and will loose a lot. Before '90s communist countries were "proud" that everything was produced locally - except many things were breaking or bad quality or unavailable (not all, but many).
I would claim that today is a much better moment to switch than it was 20 years ago - much more open source options, so less overall costs.
I knew plenty of office workers managing just fine using OpenOffice 10-15 years ago.
Today people are much more reliant on real-time collaboration, polished cloud and mobile experiences. Fractionalized open source software has a harder time competing with this than file based boxed software workflows of the past.
Agree, Personally I consider these newer systems a curse as far as productivity goes, using a simple email/open-office combination never caused any issues with clients or suppliers in the last 20 years.
Coming from ex-USSR, I can assure you that shortages and shitty quality was not because of closed garden. But because of politics (and corruption) first. And lack of meritocratic natural selection.
Many factories were building crap or wrong stuff just because somebody high up in the Party found it convenient for some reason.
Yugoslavia didn't have centralized planning for products, one could even argue it had a meritocratic natural selection (sort of) and there still were shortages.
Maybe the EU as a whole could pull off being 'fully independent' but it would require way more collaboration between countries than what we currently have.
And, compared to USSR, Yugos production was much higher quality and shortages were much smaller.
EU could become fully independent by simply taxing imports. Designated collaboration between countries would just lead to inefficient central planning style stuff. Which is how many trans-Europe projects died
