Comment by pembrook
7 days ago
Doesn't matter how intelligent or educated or homogenous culturally the Finns are...if Russia were to decide to invade.
Domestic political antifragility means nothing if you're not anti-fragile in terms of the outside world.
It's called the anarchic global system for a reason. The only thing enforcing norms is power and the fear of it.
Antifragility would be the EU finally forming a real union. As someone living in Finland, I'm not holding my breath that happens in our lifetimes. If you take a sample of average, non-cosmopolitan Europeans, they can barely even communicate with each other in the same language. Let alone come to agreements on who's going to pay for each others bloated social welfare expectations.
The EU is the very definition of Fragility. While Finland has made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology), it doesn't matter because size is more important.
Our diversity is not fragility. It makes things harder to arrange but it also keeps them fair. There is no chance of some president/party getting voted into office and making unilateral decisions that screw everybody. Like you know, the US. Or the UK with Brexit. In Europe the diversity keeps that from happening.
It also combats exceptionalism, that "Our nation is the greatest ever!" kinda stuff. Because in Europe we know we're not a nation but an alliance. That we need others to survive.
And remember that Finland didn't even bother joining NATO until Russia invaded Ukraine, if they thought it was so important to be together as a big bloc, this would have been the first step.
Ps: if the other countries in Europe didn't agree with Finland's smart decisions, how do you think these decisions would come to pass if Europe was one big country? Because the people wanting those would be in the minority. You would have very little input to the whole. And no chance to decide them yourself as you currently do.
“Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.
If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)
Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.
> “Diversity” is a nice positive spin on what is an extremely fragmented/disjointed/nonexistent energy policy, military strategy, technological cooperation, consumer markets, etc. Like I said, the average European cannot converse with his/her neighbor even at a 1st grade level in a common language. These are obviously not strengths in the context of the current international order, and to try to brush that away with platitudes is to live outside of reality.
I don't think we should be a geopolitical strongman like America though. The world has seen enough of America oil police. Blowing up half the middle east under the guise of 'freedom' and leaving power vacuums that caused nasties to bubble up like ISIS. Which hurt Europe a lot more than it did the US (think mass refugee exodus, attacks etc). They caused these problems.
I think it's great that Europe has more ideals than just money. We still care about all our citizens, not the top 0,01% that has all the money.
> If the EU had a cohesive strategy on these things, you can 100% guarantee Russia wouldn’t be starting wars along its borders. Russia is a small, weak economy compared to a theoretical unified EU (the irony of that phrase!)
Well especially because we don't have a good nuclear deterrent. And this is nothing new. Putin has been massacring ex-soviet states during all of his career. Checznia, Georgia etc. But nobody gave a crap in Europe. Part of this is that the EU had their designs on Ukraine also and this is why we suddenly care. I don't like this expansionist EU. Yes, I do think the Ukrainians should be helped and they should be free to choose who to align with. But it's a bit hypocritical that we didn't help the others before them.
For the nuclear deterrent we should have worked on that more but America was always against that and they assured they would protect us. Clearly now we can stop trusting them. Even after Trump I don't think relations will ever be the same because we know there can always be another Trump.
But with a deterrent we will be fine. Putin is not going to invade Poland if he knows Moscow will be nuked the same day.
> Also, the reason Finland didn’t join NATO before is not because Finland felt they were so strong on their own. It’s because Finland didn’t want to piss off Russia in the slightest way and end up like Ukraine. An inability to make formal alignments comes from a position of weakness, not strength.
So, in other words appeasement. Which is something that you are accusing the EU of now.
I just don't think you can expect the strongman EU to emerge and there are many people like myself that don't want that to happen.
Also, military blocs (NATO) and economic (EU) are very different things. After NATO we should just form a new military one.
You are right, but the problem with turning the EU into a real union is that it is very difficult and risky. The creation of new nations and new identities more often than not leads to violence - and they are often formed by war.
Yes, the EU is fragile, but I think trying to fix it that way would be worse.
I think 1) the rich democracies in Europe are unlikely to go to war with each other and 2) have good reason to unite against common threats so I think a military alliance is military alliance makes sense.
Yes, we already have NATO but the US is going to be ever more focused on China, and Russia is not the threat the Soviet union was so a new military alliance focused on Russia and securing the Atlantic (the latter in cooperation with the US) makes a lot of sense. Obviously different countries have different interests (the Atlantic is a lot more important to the UK than it is to most others) but also enough in common.
> made far more rational decisions than its EU neighbors (having correctly prioritized energy security, military, and technology
Because there is one objectively correct way to prioritize /s
I would argue everything else sits downstream from those things. It would be quite an understatement to say they are...somewhat important...in the continued existence of a country.
So objectively, there is a correct way to prioritize those items if we're talking about being antifragile. People like to forget the Russian invasion of Ukraine actually started in 2014.
But again, the inability of the EU to agree on even a common set of values is why we never have to worry EU countries will start seriously integrating with each other. We will remain disjointed sitting ducks as we are in love with our early 1900s romantic ethno-nationalist movement stories of who we are.