Fairplay to them, the whole point of the EU project was to make us all "Europeans" and to prevent constant disastrous fighting between states and people of the continent.
Sometime in the last 10 years many people and the media in the "core" countries got all smug and uppity towards those lazy "peripherals" and so on forgetting exactly why the project was started, overnight we stopped being "Europeans" and became "undustrious Germans", "smart and holier than thou Nordics", "lying Greeks", "lazy Spanish" and in case of my own little peripheral island country "reckless Irish".
It's a similar issue that we see in the US. There are a number of people (and the entire Constitution) that pushes for state level decisions unless it's absolutely necessary at the Federal level. This approach creates a more unified country because people are able to make their own decisions and live with them.
States are able to compete economically. People are able to move within the country to states with policies more in line with their own views. States have to have balanced budgets while the Federal government...well...doesn't.
There's a push in this country lately to do everything at a Federal level though, which creates constant tension because effectively people are trying to push their views on each other rather than simply pushing them on their own states and bearing the consequences internally.
At the same time, people become righteously offended at this concept. For every New Yorker I ask "Would you like Texas to govern New York?" I get another who is determined that New York should be able to dictate policy in Texas.
> This approach creates a more unified country because people are able to make their own decisions and live with them.
I don't know why you would assume that: There's a whole host of tensions that come with decisions made at the state level. Reciprocity is a huge one that comes up semi-frequently (for example with firearm laws).
> People are able to move within the country to states with policies more in line with their own views.
"Just move" is an ok answer if your beef is, say, with Oregon's gas pumping laws.
It's a really awful answer if your problem is that your state allows "separate but equal" bathrooms for black people. Those suffering at the hands of those extreme policies are also the least likely to have the means to move.
> States have to have balanced budgets
I don't know why you think that. State budget crises aren't unknown or even all that uncommon.
> There's a push in this country lately to do everything at a Federal level though
Because for most of the history of the United States, human rights issues have only been resolved at the federal level. Slavery, segregation, women's suffrage, and same-sex marriage have all been framed as "States Rights" issues.
> This approach creates a more unified country because people are able to make their own decisions and live with them.
>>I don't know why you would assume that: There's a whole host of tensions that come with decisions made at the state level. Reciprocity is a huge one that comes up semi-frequently (for example with firearm laws).
There are and those get to be negotiated and worked out. The tensions arise, such as with firearms laws, because states don't see eye to eye on those issues so they get to dictate exactly how things work in their own states. That is entirely the point. Firearm laws are a great example because just because I might wish your state did things differently...it's not my state and therefore I don't really get a vote.
> People are able to move within the country to states with policies more in line with their own views.
>>"Just move" is an ok answer if your beef is, say, with Oregon's gas pumping laws.
"Just move" becomes a much more difficult proposition when your beef is with the entire country. I have neighbors who moved their kids out of Colorado as soon as marijuana was legalized. That was a choice they were able to make with a policy they disagreed with.
>>It's a really awful answer if your problem is that your state allows "separate but equal" bathrooms for black people. Those suffering at the hands of those extreme policies are also the least likely to have the means to move.
The extreme example counter response is never far behind in political discourse. Civil rights / human rights issues are a different ballgame and those absolutely are things that need to be resolved at the federal level. There's a whole host of other policies that don't though.
> States have to have balanced budgets
>>I don't know why you think that. State budget crises aren't unknown or even all that uncommon.
They are crises because they have to be balanced. That is the point. If your state's budget doesn't work there are furloughs, layoffs and immediate budget cuts to balance it. At the Federal level that doesn't happen unless Congress fails to pass ANY budget regardless of whether it's balanced.
> There's a push in this country lately to do everything at a Federal level though
>>Because for most of the history of the United States, human rights issues have only been resolved at the federal level. Slavery, segregation, women's suffrage, and same-sex marriage have all been framed as "States Rights" issues.
Again, above answer applies. Those ARE the issues that are Federal issues. There's a wide gap between those issues and virtually every other policy in the country being effected by a broad reading of the interstate commerce clause.
"The extreme example counter response is never far behind in political discourse. Civil rights / human rights issues are a different ballgame and those absolutely are things that need to be resolved at the federal level. There's a whole host of other policies that don't though."
The problem isn't whether you allow some things to be decided at the state level and some things to be decided at the federal level. The problem is this: WHO gets to decide what level is correct?
There's a very large portion of the US that feels that voting rights issues should be decided at the state level. Same with abortion rights. Same with firearm ownership/possession. Same with gay marriage (and reciprocity is a big one there). I'd lay odds that if not for that pesky meddling Federal Government there's at least one state with a legislature that would be willing to ban miscegenation again, and refuse to recognize marriages that wouldn't be legal in their state.
> The tensions arise, such as with firearms laws, because states don't see eye to eye on those issues so they get to dictate exactly how things work in their own states
That causes some AWFUL problems for people traveling between states, which is incredibly common nowadays because of air travel.
Google for the myriad of really terrible stories involving people accidentally traveling to New Jersey with a firearm. In at least a few cases they were forced to travel to New Jersey because of an airline mistake (unexpected layovers, misplaced luggage, etc.). Reciprocity is a much bigger issue than you're making it out to be.
> The extreme example counter response is never far behind in political discourse.
"States Rights" almost always comes up as an argument in the context of human rights violations. I don't think it's too extreme to remind people of that.
> There's a whole host of other policies that don't though.
Where's that line get drawn? If I frame marijuana as a human rights issue (see: the racial discrepancies in conviction rates for drug offenses), does it become ok for the federal government to resolve then?
> They are crises because they have to be balanced.
Errr no? There are plenty of states that are "balanced" only because the federal government gives them copious amounts of money, well in excess of their GSP.
They're "balanced" but to call it anything other than artificially balanced is silly.
> There's a wide gap between those issues and virtually every other policy in the country being effected by a broad reading of the interstate commerce clause.
Those are the primary issues anti-federalists bring up when States' rights comes up as a discussion, both historically and currently (not slavery obviously, but same-sex marriage is an incredibly recent one).
If you're talking about things like the drinking age (which isn't even really a mandate, just an extreme carrot on a stick), then sure, whatever - but who cares? Those are trivial issues in comparison.
> Google for the myriad of really terrible stories involving people accidentally traveling to New Jersey with a firearm. In at least a few cases they were forced to travel to New Jersey because of an airline mistake (unexpected layovers, misplaced luggage, etc.). Reciprocity is a much bigger issue than you're making it out to be.
That's not about reciprocity so much as it is about NJSP thumbing their noses at FOPA (federal law since 1986) I think
Without quoting the whole thing I'll just reference.
Firearms/Jersey: That is true and it's one of the big reasons that if you are going to transport a firearm you have to know the laws. I'm not arguing that it doesn't have problems.
People disagree about things all the time. People argue about things. The way cities setup laws causes issues and confusion for people, especially travelers. It can be annoying but it's less annoying than having outside parties make those decisions for you without the local residents having a say in the matter.
States/Human Rights: Fair enough. I take no real issue with that outside of a branding/labeling political perspective.
Line: Honestly as often as possible. The line is supposed to be hard, difficult to overcome and argued to a point of undeniable certainty before the Supreme Court or to the point that it gets past both houses of congress AND the president. If something can't be argued convincingly enough to pull that off, it's left up to the states. Framing anything as a human rights issue would depend on backing up an almost total lack of demographic free will in order to do so. That's why a lot of Indian reservations are dry though. The native american population doesn't handle alcohol well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_and_Native_Americans). Doesn't mean the whole country shouldn't have it, but it makes complete sense for them to want to ban it locally.
Balance: Federal programs that create an exercise of redistribution are out of the hands of state budget control but the funds are still limited, budgeted and when the money runs out somebody is still left holding the bag.
Issues/Gap: There's a number of issues that go well beyond the drinking age and it usually has to do with aiming a federal monetary firehose at an industry with no regard for the after effects. The Farm Bill is a great example of this because of the disruption that it caused globally and played a huge part in Mexico's farming industry struggles, which had cascade effects eventually helping us get to the immigration issue we have today.
Others revolve around tax policies around businesses and the lack of understanding of how money flows in different areas. Tax policies are huge, especially when talking about business tax policies because the big guys who everybody envisions when talking about taxing the 1% or forcing businesses to provide benefit X can actually afford it. The smaller businesses caught in the middle are the ones that can't and they are your eventual potential competitors. Small businesses employ 2/3 of the people in this country and every tax increase hits them harder than anybody else because most of them are 1 or 2 bad months from going under completely.
We can look at how we got to the medical issues we have today, when the federal government incentivized businesses to provide health insurance and never gave citizens the same ability to simply pay for it directly pretax. That removed insurance from the consumer market and was the first big step in creating the cluster that led to needing an overhaul.
We can look anywhere from student loans and education prices in conjunction with national campaigns that made it undesirable to just learn a trade rather than getting a degree...ANY degree regardless of its ability to help you earn a living. Increase demand, create money out of thin air to pay for it and wonder why prices keep out pacing inflation...
Let's not forget military spending while we're on the subject.
We can look at housing prices and the issues on both sides of the federal isle that led up to creating that debacle.
These are not trivial issues. They are massive economic disruptions that happen when a federal financial firehose is aimed at a problem and they always have consequences.
Right now the TPP is squeaking its way through the system with barely a blip on the radar. That legislation is scary but all anybody on my Facebook feed cares about right now is rainbows and confederate flags - the issues that let people for one reason or another feel better about themselves.
The issues that have serious consequences that involve math, numbers and logical exposition of the worst case scenarios in trade agreements...those are boring. Those are federal. Those are out of reach and we don't immediately FEEL how those affect us. We'll deal with that when we have to.
Just like credit card debt.
Just like the 30 year mortgage that will result in paying more than double the price of the house but we could fit it in the cash flow.
Just like the degree with zero job prospects that we just took on $50,000 worth of debt to get.
Just like how we really stuck it to those greedy businesses owners to get them to give us stuff that we assume they can afford...because after all they own a business and by default, that makes them rich.
Sorry but the Republic does not enshrine states' rights nearly as much as you say. One policy I have problem with is the open alcohol container policy that is nominally at the state level but is actually at the federal level enforced by the federal highway funding.
There are a lot of fundamental issues that we need to address at a federal level. I don't think it is decided that a strong central government causes a break down in the union of states.
Off-topic: I blew a zero in three different breathalyzers. Who comes up with idiotic rules like if you have an open container in the vehicle (that I never touched) I am automatically guilty of drunk driving?
It is the 10th amendment, part of the Bill of Rights.
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
I'm aware of the Supreme Court interpretation of it but there are also a number of people who contest that particular interpretation, as people do on multiple Supreme Court rulings.
Totally agree with you on the highway funding thing. That's basically the tax equivalent of taking your wallet and then telling you what you have to do to get it back. It was one of the earliest recent examples of a Federal power grab and if I'm not mistake that was actually Reagan.
For me, what's maddening is people claiming 'cognitive dissonance' when the Federal Government does the job it is supposed to do, which is make sure 'states rights' don't get out of line with the constitution or the bill of rights. In my experience, the people shouting 'states rights!' are generally the people who are doing something completely hideous ( violations of secular principles, human rights/liberty, etc. ).
I believe, the reason there seems to be a push to do everything at the 'Federal Level' these days is because extremism in political views is really LOUD and the more people are getting into a frenzy by living in communal echo chambers. The more people believe that the 'world is ending RIGHT NOW' the more urgent and forceful the 'solution' becomes.
The issue with this comparison is in the US the states do not in reality have balanced budgets. Most of the states receive huge subsidies from the federal government in the form of money for highways and road construction etc. This shifts the debt from the state to the federal level, something the EU is not set up to do with its weaker federal system.
> For every New Yorker I ask "Would you like Texas to govern New York?" I get another who is determined that New York should be able to dictate policy in Texas.
Is that really the same thing? For certain economies, the impacts of state-level decisions have federal ramifications. California can remain relatively autonomous when making decisions about how best to regulate an information economy, but I do think that Calfornians and New Yorkers have an interest in how resource-extraction economies, say in the South or in Appalachia, do business.
I honestly can't understand your argument; you're saying that for some reason, places with information economies should have legal power over places with resource economies?
You get to regulate what's in your state. If Google is in your state, you get to tell google how things are. But if a coal mine is in a different state, you don't get to tell them how things are.
This would be a tolerable state of affairs if we lived in a world where decisions only had spatially and temporally local consequences. But, alas, we don't.
Not for just "some reason": for the reason that resource economies create environmental impacts which linger and are not restricted to geographic region. Were you honestly not able to make that inference by yourself?
It sounds like you're just coming up with (half-assed) justifications for the moral superiority of information economies. Every globally integrated economy has geographically disparate effects; that doesn't tell us anything about who should have legal power over whom.
The logical conclusion of your argument is that a non-exporting, environmentally neutral area should, again for reasons that you have not made clear, have increased legal precedence over other areas.
I really don't know how to make it more clear to you: do you think that the air and water in Texas stay in Texas. What part of the argument is unclear to you?
> The logical conclusion of your argument is that a non-exporting, environmentally neutral area should, again for reasons that you have not made clear, have increased legal precedence over other areas.
Come on, man, now who's being half-assed?
I am completely unclear how this is the conclusion you jump to. If you earnestly want to argue with someone, process their argument by pretending it was your position, and consider what would the most advantageous interpretation of the argument be. If you want to set up straw men for me to knock down, then that's just wasting both of our time.
A more obvious conclusion would have been: being that natural resources -- air quality, water purity, natural beauty, etc -- are non-renewable resources, which once polluted cannot easily be recovered, and are not owned: they exist, then, to be enjoyed and consumed by all citizens equally. Therefore, no particular state -- even the state in which they are found -- has exclusive right to them.
Put in other words:
* California can decide, largely on its own, to export sites onto the internet, because the internet is (mostly) not a consumable resource
* but it cannot unilaterally decide to export oil onto its beaches, because the beaches are non-renewable and belong to more than just Californians
That's a result of the political process. The voters of some states feel that the federal government should take a certain amount of money from taxpayers and give it to the states. The voters of other states feel the amount should be substantially less. The legislators of the former must "bribe" the legislators of the latter, in order to get any legislative work done.
Depending on the economic climate and regulatory environment, this kind of "competition" tends to be a race to the bottom. Those who have even a slight advantage anyway (i.e., the rich) are given concessions such as tax cuts or eroded worker's rights that increase their advantages over time.
The great human project of using technology to lift everyone up equally requires some force against this race to the bottom.
It's a little more complicated than simply accusing the other party of cognitive dissonance. There actually is a right answer and a wrong answer to some of these questions.
K-12 education, for instance, has no business being a state-level issue. It is grossly unfair if a kid in New York learns about evolution while her cousin in Texas learns that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work. (Especially considering the disproportionate influence that Texas has on the textbooks that every other state must buy.) Yet Federal control of educational standards is one of the most contentious issues of all.
> K-12 education, for instance, has no business being a state-level issue.
This is contentious because there's no constitutional basis at all for the Federal government having any say over education per the 10th Amendment.[1] The Constitution doesn't mention education at all, which means the states should have control. This was mostly the case until the 1980s.
Are public schools in Texas really teaching anybody that Jesus rode a dinosaur to work...?
For what it's worth, I grew up in South Carolina, went to a Christian school up through 5th grade and grew up in a Southern Baptist Church. At no point during any of this did anybody try to convince me that the world was 10,000 years old. We learned dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago. We learned everything we needed to learn. I now have a masters degree.
This school brainwashing stuff that floats around the internet is a scare tactic at best and an isolated minority of people at worst who actually believe their children aren't going to have internet access one day. Most of the best schools in my area now spend more time focussing on teaching kids HOW to learn effectively and core life skills because there is an assumption that the bulk of the information is a few clicks away.
Somebody teaches a kid a made up story, that kid is eventually going to have Google and question just about everything those people ever told him.
This scenario is a sufficient argument for placing K-12 education under Federal control, in my view. Local control makes absolutely no sense where teaching objective facts in a standardized curriculum is concerned.
For what it's worth, I grew up in South Carolina, went to a Christian school up through 5th grade and grew up in a Southern Baptist Church. At no point during any of this did anybody try to convince me that the world was 10,000 years old. We learned dinosaurs lived 65 million years ago.
At this point I'd say you're an exception, but I don't have access to the statistics I'd need to make the case. Most Christian denominations may not specifically encourage their followers to toe the "Intelligent Design" line, but among Southern Baptists, my experience is that they do. (Of course, the Earth was only 6,000 years old when I was a kid.)
This school brainwashing stuff that floats around the internet is a scare tactic at best and an isolated minority of people at worst who actually believe their children aren't going to have internet access one day. Most of the best schools in my area now spend more time focussing on teaching kids HOW to learn effectively and core life skills because there is an assumption that the bulk of the information is a few clicks away. Somebody teaches a kid a made up story, that kid is eventually going to have Google and question just about everything those people ever told him.
I'd like to agree with you (and did at one point) but the opposite seems to be happening. The rise of the Internet has disintermediated us from our teachers, so to speak. Every moron with an opinion and a Facebook account is an "authority" now.
This isn't just a right-wing phenomenon, either -- look at the childhood vaccination rates in places like Marin County. It's another example of something that should have gotten better, but instead has gotten worse. As you said elsewhere, it's not a partisan issue.
The point was rather to give the fighting appropriate and effective political venues for resolving conflicts and finding effective solutions. There will never be no fighting because that is not possible or at least quite unhealthy. After all, isn’t the point of politics to solve conflicts – which are quite normal and will always be everywhere – in a non-violent way? (Tools for solving conflicts between nations in a non-violent way have always been quite limited – with obvious disastrous consequences, especially as we got better at killing each other.)
However, I do agree that it is sad that fighting is happening along national lines and that ugly stereotypes and propaganda play the role they do.
Just recently I was watching serious and respectable German TV and some expert was – probably unintentionally, but hey that’s stereotypes and toxic thinking for you, it worms itself into your heads – talking about Greeks “hiding” money at home after withdrawing it that would be inaccessible and as such money the creditors would have to pay. This toxic way of framing the conversation is just so sad. Greek people who withdraw their very own money from banks because they are unable to trust those banks are not hiding anything or doing anything immoral or unethical or even slightly impolite. They are the victims in that situation – and we have to be very careful how we talk about people, especially if we generally talk about “Greeks” or “Germans” or whatever.
Do you remember Cyprus ? One day they are good hard working European, the next day all of them are gangster laundering russian crime money and taking money out of their bank account is fair justice ( but fear not brave citizen, your money is safe at the bank because your are not dishonest like they are )
Europe has treated its "citizen" like rubbish since the crisis. You can hardly blame the push of Eurosceptic parties across Europe - in time of crisis, Europe is really ugly.
Greek people withdrawing money (and mostly getting it out of the country) show a lack of support to their country. This excerbates the problems of their financial system. It also begs the question why the rest of europe should schow solidarity with a country if its own people dont.
Voting against austerity and restructuring policies is not standing behind your goverment/nation. Trusting it with your money is.
That level of generality is too high. The whole point was to prevent Germany and France from going to war again as they had twice in the twentieth century and twice in the nineteenth century.
Promiscuous expansion made ever closer integration harder and less likely and thus actually hurt the purposes for which the union was originally created.
It's like when people complain about the Security Counsel and its permanent members. They are missing the point of the UN. It isn't supposed to be a fair body for global quasi-governance. It is supposed to prevent World War III.
This is interesting. I wonder how many other large government bodies meant to unify multiple different cultures have hit this at some point, and what percentage has failed. The US seems to be a notable success, but at the time of its establishment, the colonies were not /that/ different.
California, Illinois and New York pay for the majority of America. These blue states luckily have values which protect the poor, socialist requiring red states. It's ironic that those states vote against their own interests, but we blue states sigh and pay out... Because no matter our race, economic class or education we are all Americans and we all make this place what it is.
California is almost parity for dollars in versus received.
The bigger question is if that is even a valid comparison to make that 14 states get back less in federal dollars than input.
If it is then you'll have to concede that Wyoming, Kansas, and Utah, aka: decidedly not blue states, are in the same boat as "we blue states".
I grew up in one of those states that is in the top 5 of dollars received. Main reason is the entire state has next to no population. I'm not sure how you get it to parity without a population to do so. That and despite being quite liberal, I have to admit this argument that this is a blue versus red state thing based on dollars received is maddeningly annoying and disingenuous.
If America loses those red states, we lose a lot of our ability to feed ourselves on our own. The grain belt is a huge asset, even given its cost. Giant cities are not islands unto themselves.
Surely what matters is actual dollars. Delaware has less than a million people living in it. California has almost forty million. So long as CA is contributing a net positive percentage to the federal government, it's very likely that they are contributing more overall to the well being of the nation than Delaware is.
Thats great, so which is it then, total dollars or return on federal dollars?
If i put in 1k in federal taxes and get 800 back, what matter is it what state i'm in? Or are we saying Delaware residents getting 70 cents on the dollar is not as bad as Californians getting 95 cents because there are more people, thus Californians are more important?
I'm honestly not trying to be a dick here but what exactly is the argument outside of if you aren't California or New York, you're not important to the conversation.
Give me numbers not supposition, how much has California invested in federal dollars versus the other 14 states getting less than their input. Without that this amounts to a pointless discussion.
I don't have numbers but his point is that a per-dollar amount doesn't show how much a state is contributing at all.
> If i put in 1k in federal taxes and get 800 back, what matter is it what state i'm in? Or are we saying Delaware residents getting 70 cents on the dollar is not as bad as Californians getting 95 cents because there are more people, thus Californians are more important?
Californians aren't more important individually, but California is. Obviously a million people with $5 each is a larger sum than twenty people with $10 each.
Eliminate NYC from new york state and what happens? Same Chicago and LA in their respective states. Likewise, many western states have huge flows of government spending for reasons that don't make sense on the surface. Those states, tend to have military installations, and huge allocations of national parks and national forest land.
In other words, that type of government spending is not social policy handouts. But rather is the US paying to keep up assets that it owns already (basically security and maintenance).
Rural appalachia is an exception (eg, west va = highly democratic; TN home of senator gore, etc) as these states were the target of many early government projects (like TVA and Food Stamps).
Lastly, huge amounts of governmnet spending are on healthcare
(& social security, which again have nothing to do with modern red state/blue state issues).
>> I wonder how many other large government bodies meant to unify multiple different cultures have hit this at some point, and what percentage has failed.
Same happens in India, states with separate rules, completely different culture and still functions under one federal umberalla..
Yep, nationalism is on the rise and it's a bit ugly. As a US citizen living in Europe for over 10 years now, I wish that people would just get along. There is a deep lack of faith and trust between people. And, furthermore, that the economies would get much closer together so ordering something from one EU country and having it delivered to another wasn't such a damn pain.
This might have been the cover story, but is VERY far from the actual reason the "EU project" exists.
As with all similar noble initiatives, the EU has much less to do with fairness and much more with power concentration (as is becoming exceedingly obvious).
GP is right that the EU is the result of a long process that started with the goal of preventing another big European war. You are also right in that a large part of what is happening is a result of power politics.
Hyperbole? The E.U. is a project spearheaded by the same 3-4 nations that had the biggest colonies on earth, enslaving over 2 billion people in horrendous conditions (including mass executions when they misbehaved). And that was going on, not in the middle ages, but until the sixties (and in a different form today).
Betweem them, the country that had the less colonies, started 2 world wars in order to expand. EU was created, among other things, to contain that country (and you can find that as an explicit goal from prominent French politicians advocating for its creation)...
Powerful empire-building nations are not about fun and love...
After all, you write: "EU was created, among other things, to contain that country", while my post was in reply to somebody who claimed that peace-keeping was totally irrelevant to why the EU (and its predecessors) were formed.
That may be so, but the EU was still created by individuals. I'm sure many of the officials believed the story. I'm also still confident that the European citizens can have the EU as it should be, not as it currently is, if they can get over their short-sighted selfishness.
> the whole point of the EU project was to make us all "Europeans"
Constantly repeating the lie doesn't suddenly make it true.
Also, trying to force people who prefer to remain sovereign and independent (and maybe most of all: democratic) is not a good recipe for a future without "disastrous fighting between states and people".
>the whole point of the EU project was to make us all "Europeans"
Or rather that might have been the project of those in power designing the E.U., but it was never a stated goal or a desire of the people of the E.U. nations.
It was mostly bureacrats and technocrats making the decisions for this -- and it has had very undemocratic infrastructure and rules in place from the start because of that.
The prospect of a united Europe (which sounds rather nice when put this way, let's rephrase it, the prospect of an involuntary integration to a larger empire-like unit) was rejected several times by member nations in EU referendums (for the EU-constitution and such).
Sometime in the last 10 years many people and the media in the "core" countries got all smug and uppity towards those lazy "peripherals" and so on forgetting exactly why the project was started, overnight we stopped being "Europeans" and became "undustrious Germans", "smart and holier than thou Nordics", "lying Greeks", "lazy Spanish" and in case of my own little peripheral island country "reckless Irish".
Yeh :(