Behind Brexit and Globalism

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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These waves of unfocused nationalist anger are largely because globalism hadn’t yet figured out how to manage the old systems, and avoid adverse side effects of such things as manufacturing outsourcing and condensation of business into international mega-corporations. As with the 2008 financial crisis there is basically a huge vacuum in which new globalist paradigms in economics and politics are proving ineffective. The failures are basically the same failures they’ve always been, on the state and national levels, but now it’s seen as a failure of globalism since globalism has taken responsibility for just about everything.

The US financial system fucked up and in 2008 collapsed the markets, consequentially collapsing world markets due to massive global interconnection of economies. NATO fucked up with Eastern Europe and Putin, which has yet to fully explode but it will. China will increasingly work with Russia to form a regional currency stability against US and EU uncertainty. Meanwhile political failure in the US is crippling whole generations with student loan debts upwards of $50-100,000 a person, basically a capitalization of public good by the failure of politics to actually secure a reliable functioning education system, and a failure that is the primary driving force behind US economic woes today. The international capitalist investors and corporations move in and capitalize on these failures. It’s similar to what I wrote about the modern anti-tax oligarchy: the cumulative effect of numerous small detriments and consequences from a society that doesn’t believe in itself anymore, that has been politically gutted and is now owned by capitalist principle. In the same span that upper tax rates in the US (on multi millionaires and billionaires) plunged in half, rates on the third highest bracket of earners actually increased from 20 to 25%. Sales and property taxes have also gone through the roof, along with real inflation, all of it draining the economy and weakening the entire system, and all because of an essentially political failure. That political failure reflects a very low state of philosophical thinking in the general voting public. I see rising xenophobic nationalist reactive anger as basically a manifestation of this.

Humanity needs some kind of global systems, but it also needs the national and individual political will to regulate global systems against being overcome by pure capitalist principle. When globalism is run capitalistically we get all the negative consequences on the citizenry and economy, such as massive debt and austerity and unemployment in Europe, and student loans in the US, that drive reactive nationalistic outrage movements. Trump and other anti-politicians are capitalizing on this; only problem is, they are anti-politicians, they don’t believe in politics… And it is a lack of politics that had led to this very situation we are in. Are these reactive, fear-mongering, xenophobic nationalistic anti-politicians and demagogues really going to fix a problem caused by a lack of true political will? Again, politics is simply a manifestation of underlying philosophical realities and ideas, or rather, of the lack of them.

People in the US want to be saved from global capitalism, and they are turning to Trump, an international billionaire capitalist, to save them… yeah. Good luck. The real problem is just that people don’t want to think anymore; thinking is too difficult, quick emotional reaction and “outrage” is much simpler. The real answer is to improve the systems we have, with real politics which means with improved philosophies, not to scrap the entire project. If westerner civilization scraps the project of… western civilization… then what does it have left? Some power will always fill the global power vacuum, if western nations like US and UK want to suicide on the international scene then they will simply withdraw themselves from any kind of real influence in the world. But I can assure you then others will simply step in and take over than influence. Globalism isn’t going anywhere, these are simply battles over if the people of western nations have what it takes to remain the primary human civilizations on this planet, to exert main political and philosophical cultural power in the human species. The U.K. has now answered clearly: no, they do not. Cowardice and fear rule the day, evidenced by the fact that it was mostly old people who voted for the UK to exit. The best that this can do is force globalism (which, again, isn’t going anywhere) to find better forms and hopefully inspire new political (philosophical) will to shape globalism into something more truly human. But since the nationalists are non-political I won’t hold my breath for nationalism to birth a new movement of better more truly human politics.

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New world order stooge behind internationalism and globalism. You’re a pawn for a one world order and government whether you realize it or not. You’re a soldier for international bankers. Neo-liberals are so arrogant and naive.

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I agree that there is a local to national tier (let’s not forget state/provincial) linking up to the same hierarchical difficulties on the global level… but the problem isn’t as you described it.

It is one of two orders, that don’t fully overlap and may even become incompatible someday down the future:

  1. Group Feeling, as of Ibn Khaldun’s classical definition, not a Marxist class consciousness, but rather how we perceive ourselves as in certain groups, not in other groups.

  2. Security, primarily that of life and survival… but economics mixes and isn’t unrelated, thunk they share a lot of the same points of Genesis in the mind actually, which puts a stitch in pure Utilitarianism, as material benefits of a string economy doesn’t guarantee a passive population. It isn’t the economy stupid alone, it is the feeling people have of long term survival, for themselves and for others.

Should international mechanisms be salvaged as the best way forward?

Some, perhaps. Placed on the back burner for philosophical refinement. A great many, no. This is like saying the US should of rushed out and saved the concepts of Monarchy and Parliamentary Government upon winning the revolution… our alternative worked for us sufficiently. What we needed to add of the old system we later on did during the sober debates of the Federalist & Anti-Federalist disputes.

Right now, Europe is collapsing because of one person. Merkle. She lead Europe to the existentialist hell it is now squirming in. She got rid of Germany’s power independence, by closing all the nuclear power plants on some hair brained Green agenda… end result… complete independence on Russian gas, and Russia exploited it in invading Ukraine, knowing damn well German will never do anything to threatened it’s genocidal green energy.

Greece went down the drain, squeezed by her hand. Greece didn’t benigit in the sense of industrialization in joining the EU, EU was content to watch it swirl around the Communist drain, collect debts… the Grexit inspired the Brexit.

Most of Eastern Europe had to rapidly fortify their borders do the Merkle’s deeply selfish schemes to get as many refugees into Germany as possible to work in it’s factories, provide taxes for retirement pensions. It scares the shit out of the rest of Europe. Nobody feels they have control anymore, and it is all because of one crazy mad woman. EU doesn’t have the ability to assert enough changes upon Germany to do this, Germans hold too many advantages.

EU is collapsing for the very reasons the US abandoned the Articles of Confederation for the current constitution. We wanted to avoid this shit.

If Europe gives up on the EU, western civilization doesn’t collapse. It exists in England, Sweden, Russia, North America, South America, Australia and New Zealand, South Africa and left it’s imprint on a great many countries. As it is, it is a inherently fucked system.

For group identity, some (not even half, but some) is linguistic based, on interpreting territory.

Is it in, or is it out? If we put troops there to fight, is it defensive, or is it offensive? Do they share concepts with us? Do we speak alike? Is it ours, or is it “theirs”, and if it belongs to them, are we without a role or claim to it too?

It is about roles, and the roles in part come down to deposition and naming conventions. Our memories, our ability to deduce proper nouns. When times are good, security wise, nobody noticed the limitations or differences… everything is expansive. When scary times come, we start asserting who we are, what really matters, what is harming us, where our lay of the land really lays, the strong points and weak points of defence, where our survival lays.

We get a lot of silly racists on these forums, they come in two types… one is opposed to people of different race based solely off a single characteristic, like skin color… but you look at groups wanting succession, wanting to stay… they fail to play along with these very weak stereotypes, groups tend to mix on the two principles I listed above, not race, for group feeling on issues such as these. They only play the race card if they feel particularly aggrieved due to that particular characteristic. If so, it becomes overwhelming, if not, negligible. Germans in the US prior to WW2 were not singled out or oppressed, so felt completely fine invading Germany. Why? See above. Jews in Europe get annoyed and scared whenever liberals in Europe launch anti-semetic rants at Israel. Why? Experience… see WW2.

The other kind of racist we get are the ones who pretend purely top down, holistic measures in principle are enlightened, and anything that moves away from this is racist. It comes from a combination of isolation from minorities (not talking about token minorities brought into the elite through affirmative action) so they can’t hear what they are even really saying, and avoiding even majorities… it is ivory white castle elitism, abstract principles replace organic contact… organic contact which becomes labeled as racism… even though it is quite the opposite, it is people with differences through clashing at times, also forming unexpected bonds, which while technically holistic, doesn’t begin to match up with the expectations of these ivory leage thinkers who already labeled the good and bad, dotted the I’s and slashed the t’s on everything. The two systems do t match up because the organic growth uses lower levels of community interaction… stuff we developed the concepts and precidents long, long ago during the bronze to middle ages regarding how we should come together or grow apart. These aren’t issues covered in the upper tier of modern statecraft anymore…

When Europe comes back together, it will be because of this organic growth. Similar growth Winston Churchill saw when he stopped talking about a English Empire, and looked instead at English Speaking lands. A new and better, more secure Europe will arise from this. One where a Merkle (and yes, it obviously was Merkle) who started pushing people out purely for German national gains. This breakup might not be whole, something calked the EU may survive and thrive, but it will force a lot of historians and philosophers to pause and recheck their ideologies, and their rhetoric to the other side. Will the farthest left (here in America Kropotkin and UPF) ever stop knee jerk lambasting everyone who doesn’t agree with them as being racist… quickly looking (ironically, so fucking racist this reaction) at poll numbers, notice it is mostly people of X group with instantly presumed low educations and therefore unqualified to think, speak, or act against their superior, progressive clique’s outlook.

It is a remarkably backwards approach to trying to navigate “democracy”, by having to alienate everyone, make them out to being heathens and idiots, just to protect the losing group’s ego. I predict the long term survival of any such group to be firmly on the decline.

Both forms of racism need countered. Organic, real growth will need pushed. England gas do.e real growth with aspects of the EU… they will rush quicker to shore this up. Every state does this. EU did offer some similar judicial and legal concepts that the UK and other states will retain. As each state leaves, many of these aspects will remain, or near equivalents. In time, something better will likely arise.

It isn’t over for Europe, just the EU, and Germany. They have a lot of hell to pay for Merkle’s sins. It couldn’t of happened like this without her. Shows just how weak the EU was to resist her, she will be the gravitating point most historians will have to point to for the EU’s decline and dismemberment. All Europe got in return was cell after cell after cell of terrorist attacks for decades to come.

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order out of randomness is the model of the Universe… so the least humans attempt to control the outcomes, the more peace.

exactly why the world is moving toward utterly destructive chaos.

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These nationalist votes aren’t about any of the real problems and issues. It’s basically misguided and selfish fear. Similar to the motives for joining a religion and going to church.

To address real problems of globalization you need to actually… address them. Literally, directly, within politics and existing systems as much as possible. Politics is a sham because it has deferred almost absolutely to capital relations. Yes there are real problem, in EU and US, but these must be met in real ways. The ECB and Germany is a huge problem financially, Greece is just an obvious example of this, you can’t just shift around costs and indebt entire nations, enforce austerity against the will of the people, sell off national assets by the billions to private interests, and expect the people aren’t going to get pissed.

The U.K. vote isn’t the start of a new anti-globalist movement; it is a wake up call for Europe and globalism generally, that there are limits to refusing to realistically deal with actual problems that do exist. But all these people (mostly old people) in Britain voting to give up and leave has nothing to do with that, this effect of forcing realism and a need for better solutions on globalism is just incidental and not even intended, which means that most likely there will be very little progress at all. Idiots like Trump are simply taking advantage of idiotic voters. But “the people” would always like to be taken advantage of and join an emotional movement than actually commit themselves to understanding the real issues and finding ways within politics of helping solve them.

It’s a false dichotomy of us vs. them: globalist vs nationalist is a fallacy of excluded middle, the truth is in the grey area. Admitting that there is huge corruption and problems in high-level national and international politics isn’t the same as simply giving up and going home; because I can assure you, those corruption and problems aren’t going away simply because 52% of the voting populace means to bury their heads in the sand.

This guy isn’t going to save you:

6

i agree with the op.

i think the message is of independance more than us wanting division. what does it take to own your own borders and trade without that meaning immigration quotas? trade should just be trade, there is no need for further re-distribution of people than increased mobility already denotes. if it wasn’t such a big thing to ask, then we’d know it isn’t an agenda, but clearly it is.

i still wanted the bitch even with her claws [i wanted us to stay in]. :slight_smile:

i fear the emotion in europe will turn against us, not to mention they will be competition for all the cities traders. strange because i didn’t think it would make much difference - yesterday.

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I disagree entirely that this is irrational, and a result of nationalist anger. It was a last chance to cut losses and they took it, thank god. The EU was effectively like a cancer, austerity like chemo. Both together kept destroying, hollowing out the continent. Brexit means for the first time after WWII the question of sovereignty, thus of democracy, is relevant again, along with the matter of economic sanity.

The EU, if that hasn’t been made abundantly clear, was entirely illogical in its setup. There were no reasons for it to be structured as it was other than fear of pissing off the Germans.

This development here means that choices can be made again. The EU was nothing like the US, there is no similarity, no parallel. The US is one state. Despite being federalized, the country has one supreme court and one constitution. The EU consists of countries with radically opposed laws and ideologies, as well as completely irreconcilable philosophies about finances.

The EU is a large economy because, obviously, it contains a lot of major ex world powers. These powers will not lessen now that Britain is loose. The EU never functioned as one economy, the idea that it was a block that took care of itself was purely fiction. It has been torn up from the inside in all sorts of unimaginable ways. Germany has benefitted, Ukraine was set to benefit, thats about it. The worst nazis. The rest of us just had to hang on because supposedly it would be all out war if we didnt. That was the threat, always.

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The future is localism not internationalism or globalism. Globalism and internationalism will only bring the world on the brink of destruction in my humble opinion. To the OP I would say Hillary Clinton obviously won’t save the world either and at this point in time I would be so bold in saying nothing or nobody can save us from the destructive path that the planet is converging on. Get ready for one hell of a ride…:laughing:

I hope we return to localism being optimistic but on other side of that coin also is total destruction of life as we know it now.

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If EU-style globalism is really so good for Europe, then the bosses shouldn’t have used their power to force mass immigration of dangerous rapefugees onto people that didn’t want it. Nobody is against economic prosperity, and that’s certainly not what this vote was about. Maybe some new EU-style union won’t force people into these kinds of decisions.

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This is a large aspect, obviously.

Since the Paris and Brussels attacks, which were both freely organized in Brussels, in the open, everyone could know, no one did anything - what was already obvious to anyone with a sense of what Europe is, became obvious to everyone else there - that you can not seriously expect to be led by Brussels. You can not have a political entity including Rome and Paris and London but have the major institutions in Brussels. Neither is Frankfurt a viable center under any circumstances.

German-Belgian rule was somehow the default, weirdly, the most illogical outcome of the world wars; the nations least capable of understanding social contracts turned into the go-to powers.

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There is never any socioeconomic prosperity when a few people are in control of everything. This criticism can be applied to both internationalism and nationalism.

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On the other hand, more mobility is going to be an inevitability, so aren’t borders going to become largely irrelevant?

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Only if that’s how we want it.

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There needs to be balance between a local economy and international trade. As an anarchist I just don’t see greedy government bureaucrats bringing that balance. Greed of course is always destructive and is a form of human nature that is not easily contained or remedied as history can attest but greed on a super global scale is downright dangerous to all…

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Fixed, you really need to study the “US Articles of Confederation” and why we ran from it. We were scared of the US turning into the EU for many of the same reasons. The EU even copied our flag from that era. It really is that pathetic. Why anyone would intentionally choose to resurrect that busted system is beyond me.

theatlantic.com/internationa … nt/249616/

I’m sorry, your shitheaded continent thought it could pathfinder it’s way to a federal union VIA a parallel process to The Articles of Confederation. In the US, we had just come out of a war and had a high rate of education, which emphasized the classics, questions of statecraft… no nation emphasized this thinking today as much as the US then did, not even the modern US. These were the philosophical preoccupations we were obsessed with. We had intellectuals even on the fiercist of frontiers pondering these things. They didn’t skimp on electing the wisest representatives to our convention.

In Europe… hard to find actual philosophers (no, not professors of philosophy, I speak of philosophers) the farther east you push. Less chance to organize collectively in a responsible manner. West have a few, but most are fools high on Nietzsche, with little practical insight. Few have been paying attention save through superficial statements and asinine answers in return. Classic being Zizek and his roaming protesting Zombies in his most recent movie.

Nobody had a handle on the situation, thinking a stringer federalism would just occur like it did in the US. We had a much better grasp on the chaos than Europe does now, we didn’t bullshit ourselves about it or allow a few bullies destroy the rest. We knew if we didn’t change, it be game over… wars between the states, each sovereign… same excuses many now claim a collapsed EU would produce.

In the end, we had the common sense to fix the system. We ducked around with the slavery clause… came back to bite us, but other than that was a very stable system. We could do things, like adopt Hamilton’s ideas of a strong central bank.

In Europe… you dumbasses couldn’t pull it together. Your intellectuals clearly look to the US during this era… France wants to jump instantly into a centralized banking system (Hamilton would not approve, he would point out the need for a convention first, and getting trade states with assets involved in the beginning, not cause them to flee away in disgust like England and possibly the Netherlands are).

What is happening in the EU has everything to do with early America. We offer the only large parallel. We are a bit confused why you followed that absurd system in the first place, we are hardly impressed with your emulation of us at our worst and most incompetent. You have reached in Europe that moment that the US most feared for itself. We didn’t want any statexit here in the US. In Europe, the dominos are falling.

Future historians can look back at these two different eras and come into new axiomatic principles for action and inaction when states have a EU/ Articles of Confederation structure. They suck donkey dick.

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or perhaps it will be a case of people needing to get places quicker, and further, do more busieness and on a wider net, then with ever greater capacity for all that. That need will supplant any vague wants and desires, its just a matter of time.

HaHaHa
balance is rarely found in ideals – even those of balance. The world will carve its path for real, and ideals arent the same as blood sweat and tears [effort]. I hope greed and agendas are the real thing we voted out of, and that message gets through, but i woul’dnt side with the kind of remarks leavers were making today [they were simply idiotic, stuff like ‘they can all go home’].

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I respect your thoughts on this matter, not only because you are more intelligent than everyone else on this forum, but also because you clearly know Europe well. So forgive me for disagreeing on certain things, and take it as an opportunity to test these ideas from all sides.

What losses are those, specifically, that you’re referring to above? How is the UK economy going to improve now that they have left EU?

Isn’t it a myth that European countries lost their democracy with EU membership? Not only do they retain their own national governments based on voting, but European state representatives vote on EU matters generally. If anything, it made the system more complex by adding more layers of voting representation. And the UK was already one of the most influential members of the EU creating EU laws. The fear of “loss of sovereignty” seems a bit overblown, don’t you think, considering their prime position in EU lawmaking as well as the fact that Britain retained their own currency even with being in the EU?

To be honest, I see the nationalistic reaction is largely driven by hatred of immigrants, and by economic fears. The EU is still recovering from the 2008 financial crisis, after all, as is the US (subprime mortgages, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps, failure and corruption of ratings and oversight agencies). The financial system hasn’t been fundamentally changed to prevent or ameliorate the effects of the causes of this crisis; in fact there are new bubbles opening up in the US already. For some reason we seem to think that having banks retain large capital reserves is going to prevent the crisis from happening again-- no, all that does is protect the banks from another multi-trillion dollar bailout, much of which US dollars bailout, I might add, went to the EU in 2008-09 to shore up their own banking system. It is good to avoid more bailouts obviously, but the current reforms will do nothing to prevent the world-wide economic shocks to billions of people if (when) another similar crisis of risky unregulated investment by multinational banks and hedge funds occurs.

I agree that Europe is different from the US in terms of federalization. But the US north and south also had radically different philosophies and economies, and in some ways still do. The US was forced together by the civil war, north and south reconciling, and this was the primary reason behind the civil war (slavery was a secondary but also important issue as well) – Lincoln simply refused to let the south secede under any terms. I agree that European nations are quite different, have different histories and cultures and languages and values, and any kinda of EU-like project must respect this. My primary complaint against EU has been the homogenization of currency. It would have been better to let member states retain their currencies and simply exert more group-level control over exchange rates.

Germany pays, by a significant margin, the most dues into the EU of any EU member state, right?

I think the EU should have rolled back the Euro and allowed member states to return to their national currencies if they wanted, and kept the euro as a symbolic currency for only certain kinds of exchanges and high value trades, as a kind of reserve. This would have prevented the problem with Greece defaulting, for example, because with the current system of the Euro there is no way to use exchange rates between national economies and public spending systems to equalize imbalances between those systems and economies; those imbalances are hidden inside the Euro’s homogeneity.

Again, I am not defending the current system specifically, but rather the general idea: the need for globalized cooperatives among nations. The EU is a good idea in theory, and it is still a good idea in theory, and even if it weren’t it would simply be a necessary idea. Some form of globalization is a philosophical mandate for the human species, period. But of course the issues now come down to the specifics, what specific cooperative arrangements and globalized forms will work, how do we balance state and inter-state concerns as best as possible? The EU is a fledgling attempt at a shared European economy and marketplace. It isn’t perfect, but then again it is still a very new attempt. Giving up on it at this point seems like cutting and running just when things get hardest, just when things need the most effort and engagement. But then again I don’t live in the EU, so I could be mistaken.

From what I’ve read, almost every EU member state has seen substantial increase in its GDP since joining the EU, especially the poorer nations; the exception to this is Greece, of course. One would reason there are also significant benefits in terms of easy movement of capital, goods, people and ideas across state borders, leading to increased economic activity and exchanges of novelty and creativity. In economic terms, lower prices and higher mobility of capital results in an improved efficiency of capital allocation. And the EU has resulted in lower prices in many cases, although trade liberalization also comes with costs, of course: continuous exploitation of the third world, more pressure and stress on small businesses, increase in things like McDonalds and Walmart popping up everywhere, etc. Again, we need to be addressing real, specific problems. The mere fact that there are problems doesn’t justify a reaction like the one in the UK today.

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The rise in prosperity is illusory; debt has grown much faster than income. It’s not quite as radical as in the US but say half as bad. I am the only one I know of my year that isnt in irresolvable debt. Yet these people are all marked as economically prosperous. In the 1960’s it was possible to live on a fraction of the work hours as today.

It sometimes seems like every intelligent person in the EU under 40 is in heavy debt. On top of that, all the nations are in debt. This is presented as a normal situation. But social life was a lot brighter before the Euro, a lot richer, more diverse, less bizarre, and less waste all around.

These free trade things go at the cost of local businesses, we dont have them anymore. The food distribution in Holland is in the hands of one concern, Ahold, with its Albert Heijn supermarket. In the 80’s every streetcorner used to have a store, like a grocery store, a butcher, a tabac, a bookstore; now that doesnt exist anymore. It has become really shitty.

Remember that we were always enormously prosperous. All of us, Holland, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, name it. The wars cost a lot of money which ended up in fewer hands than before. These capitalists run the EU largely from Germany - the German workforce pays the most because they are basically work animals, they get paid little, they are a second world country inside a first word continent, and they ruin everyone elses more mellow economies. Theyve totally ruined France, despite that France has about the nicest technology industry of the continent. The same with Italy, which has the most ports and the finest, most admirable and desired products (from foods through clothing to cars, somehow they are on top) but somehow compared to Germany it is supposedly a faltering economy. Bullshit. Germany is simply not a real economy, but a slavedriving machine. They never had to invent or abolish slavery in Germany because Germans are accustomed to slave for their king. This is why Austria is now so terrified. They are the opposite.

My general point is that success of the EU can not be measured in quantities or speeds - the primary values are quality of life, intellectual and creative wealth, peaceful cities, diverse economies, satisfied populations, none of these things are really abundant in the EU. Compared to the US, we produce virtually no important art. We have no pride, no identity. Big decisions about for example the fishing industry are made in Brussels. Century old businesses die in one season because we gave up control of our waters - a lot of that kind of thing happened in the nineties, we got used to it, as worse problems were soon to rear their heads. Now it’s hard to remember the time before 2001. But I do remember that it had nothing of the acidic quality that now pervades completely my native city, a fact I havent heard anyone contest.

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The bottom line is that Germany and Britain were never destined to live under one law, one code. They could each almost be defined in terms of what the other hates the most. Germany would always be the most brutal in enforcing its own values, Britain the most aloof about the covenant - it is predictable if you look at it from a value ontological perspective. And I have predicted it, that these things were inevitable, that peoples were bound to take back their id/entity from this vague non-entity that is become of Brussels.

20

Can you explain this value-ontological perspective? I find it hard to grasp, being Pennsylvania Dutch (Germans who settled in English America in Pa).

I would love to find out how my people overcame this contradiction you see, it would explain my people’s genesis.