2012 Nobel Peace Prize

[C0ckney]

does anyone have any figures for the number of positive arguments advanced in this thread in support of giving the EU this prize? so far i'm counting zero.

[notyoueither]

That's a rather suspect count.

[C0ckney]

feel free to point out any you think i've missed.

[notyoueither]

why? your line of causation is not at all clear.

Nonsense. You are unwilling to accept that free movement of people necessitates other political decisions, but that does not mean you can have it (free movement of people) without other steps and links.

currently, countries set their own welfare policy, but have to provide welfare on the same terms to other EU citizens. it's not a perfect system of course, but it works well enough.

So how do you avoid having half of Greece take trains to London and Frankfurt?

the euro has been a disaster, especially for the poorer countries, as we are now seeing. countries have surrendered the ability to set their own interesting rates and control their own currency. it hardly needs to be pointed out that having one interest rate for 15 very different economies is a recipe for trouble. the same is true for having a single currency. it means that countries which need to become more competitive like greece, ireland, portugal and spain, instead of lowering interest rates and depreciating their currency, have to instead go through an 'internal devaluation'. this means that wages are reduced, living standards fall, demand collapses and unemployment soars. it's a vicious cycle.

Other geographically diverse countries manage with a single central interest rate for multiple economic regions. There is more to the anguish in Southern Europe than a single interest rate and a single currency. There is the incompetently incomplete banking system in Europe and ludicrous restrictions on the ECB.

this is not the first time in history we have seen this happen. people who liked the gold standard leading up to and during the great depression, would love the euro today.

what is true is that one solution to the various crises in europe would be a fiscal union. this in effect means a political union. however, there is a huge political problem with this. nobody has asked the people of europe if they want this and they need to be asked and give a clear answer if any such union is to have political legitimacy.

Like I have said, the economics have been made a hash of. That does not mean they need to be borked, they just are.

[notyoueither]

feel free to point out any you think i've missed.

I'll let you review and think about it.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Words that can only ever be uttered by a callow youth who's never had elderly Albanians diving for his crotch.

[Hauldren Collider]

[C0ckney]

I'll let you review and think about it.

so zero then. good to know.

[C0ckney]

Nonsense. You are unwilling to accept that free movement of people necessitates other political decisions, but that does not mean you can have it (free movement of people) without other steps and links.

no. you have asserted that the free movement of people requires the things contained in post 64. i have asked you to explain why.

i have also pointed out that each country sets its own welfare policies but must apply the same standards to other EU citizens. this is true also for other areas. countries can set their own university entrance requirements (and fees etc.) for example, but must apply them equally to citizens of other EU nations.

So how do you avoid having half of Greece take trains to London and Frankfurt?

you can't. free movement of people means precisely that.

Other geographically diverse countries manage with a single central interest rate for multiple economic regions. There is more to the anguish in Southern Europe than a single interest rate and a single currency. There is the incompetently incomplete banking system in Europe and ludicrous restrictions on the ECB.

i never claimed that the euro is the cause of southern europe's problems. however, it does mean that they have been unable to deal with the crisis effectively. because countries do not have the normal tools to respond to a downturn, they are forced to adopt the internal devaluation method, with the disastrous consequences that this is bringing. it's is a prison from which there is no escape, except to leave the euro and default on unpayable debts.

it's really not very complicated. an economy runs into trouble and the government has too much debt and too little tax revenue. because it is in the euro, it cannot adjust interest rates, devalue the currency, print money or default. so it has take steps to cut wages, raise taxes and reduce government spending. the economy shrinks further, living standards decline, tax revenues fall, unemployment rises, necessitating further cuts in wages, tax rises and spending cuts, which in turn lead to...well you get the idea.

it's how you make a downturn into a depression.

Like I have said, the economics have been made a hash of. That does not mean they need to be borked, they just are.

as many people said when the euro was launched, you cannot have a single currency and single interest rate without some form of fiscal union. they have been proven right. a fiscal (political) union is a solution, but it raises serious political questions.

[Uncle Sparky]

I agree with Gwynne Dyer

By Gwynne Dyer, October 14, 2012


Maybe they gave the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union because they couldn’t think of anybody else who wouldn’t embarrass them.

Nelson Mandela already has one. So does Aung San Suu Kyi. Even Barack Obama has one, though what for is not exactly clear. They even gave it to Henry Kissinger once, but we probably shouldn’t go into that. So who’s left? We’ll just give it to the European Union. Nobody’ll notice that.

But they did notice, and some of them were not amused.

“A Nobel prize for the EU at a time Brussels and all of Europe is collapsing in misery? What next? An Oscar for [European Council president Herman] Van Rompuy?” asked Geert Wilders, the Dutch eurosceptic.

“Rather than bring peace and harmony, the EU will cause insurgency and violence,” warned Nigel Farage, leader of the U.K. Independence Party (which wants Britain to leave the Union).

And France’s leading newspaper, Le Monde, asked on its website: “But who will go to Oslo for the EU to receive the Nobel Peace Prize? As trivial as it may seem, the question raises (the legitimacy) of an entity...whose institutional stops and starts and lack of democratic representation are regularly criticized.”

It’s actually not a trivial question at all, because the large EU bureaucracy that is based in Brussels, the EU’s “capital”, was not elected by anybody, and nobody loves it. The member countries are all democracies, but the decisions at the continent-wide level are taken by governmental elites who do not trust their own citizens to vote the right way.

The EU was an elite project from the start, and policy for the 27-member union is still set mostly by politicians and officials, not by citizens. So don’t send a Brussels bureaucrat to Oslo to collect the prize. Send some ordinary citizen, chosen by lot, to represent the 500 million citizens of EU countries, who don’t even have a vote on most EU decisions.

However, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. The original purpose of the Nobel Peace Prize was to honour people who worked to put an end to the terrible wars that have repeatedly devastated the European continent (and much of the rest of the world as well) over the past four centuries. The EU has made a major contribution to that task, but that is not its greatest achievement.

It has been 67 years since there was a major war in Europe. Indeed, there have been no wars in Europe at all, apart from the various civil wars in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia (which was not an EU member). More importantly, a war between any of the EU’s member countries is now quite unthinkable.

“This started after the [Second World] war—putting together former enemies,” said EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in an interview with the BBC. “It started with six countries and we are now 27, another one [Croatia] is going to join us next year and more want to come. So the EU is the most important project for peace in terms of transnational, supernational co-operation.”

That’s a bit over the top. The United Nations surely has more to do with 67 years in which no great powers have fought each other. So do two generations of American and Soviet officials and politicians who showed great restraint and managed to avoid a nuclear war that would have devastated the whole world. You could even give some credit to nuclear weapons themselves, which forced the great powers to behave more prudently than usual.

The great virtue of the European Union, despite its “democratic deficit” at the Brussels level, is that all its member countries must be fully democratic, relatively uncorrupt, and fully observant of civil and human rights. Not only has this prevented some members from backsliding into intolerance and authoritarianism in times of great stress; it has also been a huge incentive for prospective members to clean up their act.

Would Greece, Spain, and Portugal have ended up as full democracies after overthrowing their old dictators, and in the latter two cases as relatively honest ones as well, if not for the changes they had to make to qualify for EU membership?

Would the nine ex-Communist countries of Central Europe that emerged from the long night of Soviet tyranny in 1989 have created modern civil societies practically overnight without a great deal of aid from the EU? Would they even have bothered, without the incentive of future EU membership?

Would Turkey have striven so hard to entrench respect for civil rights in the law and force the military to retire to their barracks permanently if it had not been offered the prospect (sadly betrayed) of EU membership?

The Nobel Peace Prize is a misnomer. It should actually be the Nobel Democracy and Human Rights Prize. Occasionally it goes to some person or organization whose main purpose is building international peace, but much more often it goes to people like Nelson Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi, and most recently Liu Xiaobo, whose accomplishment, or at least goal, has been to make their own countries democratic and respectful of human rights.

And if that is the real criterion, then the European Union truly does deserve the prize.

http://www.straight.com/article-8105...erves-new-name

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

The United Nations surely has more to do with 67 years in which no great powers have fought each other.

If you discount the Korean War. And the Sino-Soviet Border Conflict. And the Sino-Indian War. And at least 3 Indian-Pakistan wars. Does this Gwynne Dyer read many books and newspapers?

This is a first, by the way. In all the years I've posted on Poly, it's the first time I've ever seen anyone post anything suggesting the UN might be an effective peace-keeping body.

[Imran Siddiqui]

It was in reference to the 67 years of no major European powers fighting each other. Context.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

So the UN is great at preventing wars within the EU and sucks donkey balls everywhere else?

[snoopy369]

China wasn't exactly a 'great power' during either of the first two, and India/Pakistan aren't exactly great powers now. Either way, none of the wars there approach the 'Great Power' wars that happened roughly once a century in the past ...

... of course, 67 years of relative peace are about what you had between the Crimean (which is roughly equivalent to Korea) and WWI, with only the occasional smaller war. Minor details...

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

India/Pakistan gets extra points because in the most recent ones they both had nukes. Yay, mutually-assured destruction.

... of course, 67 years of relative peace are about what you had between the Crimean (which is roughly equivalent to Korea) and WWI, with only the occasional smaller war. Minor details...

You're missing the Franco-Prussian war. In terms of battlefield casualties (as opposed to disease) it was probably bloodier than the Crimean War.