With only one country not having ratified the reform treaty of Lisbon that is supposed to streamline decision making and international appearance of the Union, the Czech republic, the EU is building up pressure on Prague. Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the EU commision, has called on the Euro-sceptic czech president Klaus "not to create any further artificial obstacles". Because Klaus, apparently running out of arguments against the treaty after the irish referendum now claims that Lisbon would allow ethnic Germans that were driven off Czechoslowakia after WW II to come back and seize their lost property, an issue that has actually been solved in bilateral treaties with Germany and his country decades ago and has nothing to do with the treaty. But playing the anti-german card has already failed in Poland and is unlikely to win Klaus public backing...........


EU chief adds pressure on Czech leader to sign treaty | France 24

Nothing about this new treaty sits right with me and I cannot believe its widespread support in Europe. Though, as an American, my thoughts matter very little.

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I am a liberal, a classical liberal. Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. In Europe they are glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are.

Courage, Truth, Honor, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Industriousness, Self-Reliance, Perseverance

Did you read the treaty ?

Good portions of it, yes. I should point out that I am not a fan of the EU, in its present guise, to be begin with. I honestly have no problem with the increased economic ties and cooperation between members that the EU means. It is the government apparatus that I have would have a problem with if I were living in a member nation.

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I am a liberal, a classical liberal. Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. In Europe they are glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are.

Courage, Truth, Honor, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Industriousness, Self-Reliance, Perseverance

Well nothing in life is for free and as much as I dislike the whole apparatus myself, I know, that it's a pain we have to endure to be able to widden and strengthen our European economical/political union.

It's not perfect, it's not good, but the alternatives would be even worse.

So god damn it, when will that fucking czech clown president sign the treaty to get over with it??

I mean what are the true alternatives to the EU?

Europe as it has been during the early 20th century? Sorry Czech president Klaus, but in such a world you'd be toast in a single second and bigger nations like France/Germany or Russia ( not even speaking about the USA/China..) would eat you and your country for breakfast and shit you out before brunch time.

Whether we like it or not, but there is no alternative for a stronger, more united European Union.

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"Homo Homini Lupus"
Thomas Hobbes

Replace Brussels with Washington and the European States with the US States.

Just as a thinking model.

Would you then say, disband the US too and make it a conglomerate of State Nations ?

Never mind the different languages,
There has been a european common culture for hundreds of years.

People like Klaus FI try to deny that.

Next time you come over, take a couple of months for your visit and I´ll show you around Europe.

Perhaps you´ll have a different view after such an experience..

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"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse
of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion.
The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner
as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion,
or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." - Ludwig von Mises

damn, I thought I read;' sign a Lebensraum treaty'..there for a minute

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"The captain has turned off the `No Dubbing' sign. You are free to speak any language you choose."

Oh and yes, its always charming to read my history, of another bash fest where in every 30-40 years you kill each other in great heaping batches while you express your European solidarity...


are you saying that, lets see; the age of The Dauphin, Hohenzollerns, Holy Roman Empire, Tudors… Stuarts et al shared a common cultural history? In what context?

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"The captain has turned off the `No Dubbing' sign. You are free to speak any language you choose."

Now get out the calculator and the last time - apart from the Balkans - we clobbered one another was 63 years ago.
And I can´t for the life of me see another war here in the making.

To your second part, check the Groups and families you mentioned on the basis of a who married whom.

You´ll only find family feuds after that.

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"There is no means of avoiding the final collapse
of a boom brought about by credit (debt) expansion.
The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner
as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit (debt) expansion,
or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved." - Ludwig von Mises

The problem is that you can't have one without the other; we found with a purely economic union that you need some governemntal and exectutive controls. Thus the Commission. Then we found people complained about the lack of accountablity in the Union and so we had the parliment and so forth. One just leads to the other, you can't just have an economic union/co-operation as the EFTA of the 70's showed.

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We havn't had a major war since the second world war and TBH its hard to ever see another war between the big european pwoers. France and Germany won't fight each other, not will Britian. We're too strong intertwined economically and culturally to do so. The EU has brought peace to Europe for the first time since the Roman Empire and its also brought prosperty and undertsanding. Considering it was concieved at a time when the cold war and another war between France/Germany (who had, after all, gone to war about 5 times in 100 years before 1945) was seen as a very real possibility its done a remarkable job.


Yes. First off we share a common religious base (romo-catholicism) a similar cultural base (Rome) and a shared history. The idea of Europe has been around for a long long time and our history has been intertwined for long time. Look at the Haspburgs, the Crusades, the Norman conquests, the Viking invasions, the Roman Empire, the celtic expansion and the reformation. All are pan-suropean movements.

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1. You may have missed it, but the EU was the consequence out of that history. And it has been quite sucessful in eliminating the military option, for everybody.

2. What about the roman empire and the ancient greeks ? what about Christianity ? What about the spread of ideas, religions, culture and arts that also crossed borders at least as often as armies ? What about ideals ranking from the reformation to the french revolution ? To claim that Europe had no cultural roots in common is just very very ignorant.

Come on, it must have been a joke.

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"Homo Homini Lupus"
Thomas Hobbes

Apples and oranges Wolfgang. To compare the EU with the United States is, IMO, a really ignorant argument.

For starters, the states that make up the United States have never been truely unique or independent in the European sense. The first 13, for example, were primarily made up of British subjects. They already had that bond formed. In addition to this, the states were never independent to begin with.

In Europe we see something different. The nations are, for the most part, ethnicly distinct. The Germans live in Germany, the Dutch in the Netherlands, Swedes in Sweden, etc.... In addition to this, many nations have centuries of independent tradition heritage. None of these factors exist in America.

I would argue that that common culture is, largely, artifical.

I doubt that. I have been to Europe multiple times in my life and have interacted with a good many Europeans over here in the US.

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I am a liberal, a classical liberal. Classical liberalism is liberalism, but the current collectivists have captured that designation in the United States. In Europe they are glad enough to call themselves socialists. But no one in America wants to be called socialist and admit what they are.

Courage, Truth, Honor, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Industriousness, Self-Reliance, Perseverance

Well, Thor, here you are mistaken about a couple of points. The nation states are an idea that came up during the eighteenth century, and the idea was always rather fiction than reality. Neither before nor after there was any european nation developed in a cultural and ethnic vacuum and ALL european nations are the product of countless waves of migration, cultural, linguistic and ethnic assimilation over millenia.
Especially Germany provides a good example. Modern Germans are a complex mixture of celtic, slawic AND germanic tribes and ethicities that for most of their history didn´t even have a state called Germany let alone a common language called High German.
Parts of Germany have been part of other countries for long periods of their history ( like the Rhine-Moselle region belonged to France) and their cultural, linguistic mix is clearly different than for example if you meet Berliners)
On the other hand we have states that are not part of Germany yet speak German ( Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg for example)
Cultural heritage is rarely totally independent in Europe and borders have been redrawn to often to claim there was something like a "distinct" or "pure" nation. ( Luxembourgers would laugh at that)
We are all standing on each others shoulders in this regard and so forming a union was the logical consequence out of a century of catastrophic wars and mutual self-destruction.