What the EU represents, folks, is the end of the nation states.
It is still in a transitional stage, but the inevitable outcome, (and the goal which isn't really being openly stated) is a one world government controlled by the international corporations.
Bladerunner, here we come![/QUOTE
Would you like to expand your theory for me, as I live in the UK
Economics is (currently )more powerful than every other aspect of a culture.
Economics is now how we organize our societies.
Give people the same international currency, break down the national borders such that investment can travel from one place to the other (seeking whatever local advantage that place offers investment -- while not allowing the workers the same opportunities, which is how it is done, right?) and we basically have a one world government
for the monied class.
The people meanwhile are still basically trapped in the archiac nation state which exists to sole dominate and control them,
but does not have the same control over the monied class.
Citizens are much like the serfs of Tsarist Russia, forever tied to the land, while the peers of that realm were free to live wherever they want.
The USA's trade laws are basically bankrupting our nation to be benefit of the monied class
of the world, but not to the benefit of
the workers of the world.
If you're rich enough, or if you're a immortal corporation, you owe alligance to no nation.
Don't like the local laws and taxes? The effect of your existance there has made a mess of things and now some investment in that nation is necessary to mitigate that mess you corporation helped make of things?
You move your CAPITAL to someplace that doesn't have expensive laws and taxes, even if
YOU BECAME RICH UNDER THE SOCIAL CONTRACT OF THE ORIGINAL NATION.
So if your money is international, and you are not forced to be part of the social contract of the nation where you originally made your pile, where is you REAL social/national alligiance?
It is to the corporation or (if you're wealthy enough) it's to yourself
only.
Citizens do not have the ability to move to seek advantages like money does. They are prisoners of that social contract.
If the UK gives up its currency, and it opens its borders, it won't JUST BE goods coming into the UK, it will be wealth of the UK wealth
going out.
Why?
Just as heat naturally travels toward the cold, soo too money naturally seeks to invest in places where money can purchase advantages without social obligations attached to those investments.
Why?
Because in those places that money buys more value, and weak governments will bend to the will of big investors. As we see happening in communist China an Russia, right now.
I believe that what the American master class is doing is basically destroying the United States by systematically sucking the money out of this nation and investing it elsewhere. (Atlas Shrugged, anyone?)
The current myth they're telling themselves is that nation states can do horrible things, but that corporations won't, and that's why what they're doing is, in the long run, moral.
So Agreements about the economy (like NAFTA and GATT) that are necessary for FREE TRADE inevitably ursupt local authority, overide local customs, and don't give a rat's ass about social contracts in those societies, either.
Eventually local authority is so beholden to pandering to internation money, that it become a minion of that capital class.
Government are, for better or worse, understandable social contracts.
Representational governments give citizens some measure of control over their leaders and that social contract.
Corporations do NOT really sign onto these social contracts, if they can pick and leave.
Corporations are basically fascistic systems, not represenational governments.
They have total control over their workers and if the workers don't like it? TOUGH SHIT. (this is why union busting is SO GOD DAMEND IMPORTANT TO THE MONIED CLASSES, BTW)
They owe nothing to the citizens or their workers, either.
They can and do make as much money as they can, and when things get rough in a nation, or the obligations of the social contract make it more expensive to exist there?
They can, and do, just leave, taking with them they wealth they created in the society they are now abandoning.