In the blog “Do we want a 'one voice' Europe?” Alex Singleton discusses Bush’s travels around Europe this past week. Alex refers to an article by Timothy Garton Ash that was published in Today’s Guardian. Ash believes that Europe needs to become unified and have one voice. Singleton disagrees with the idea as do I.
It is good for each European Country to have its own voice. It allows each of them to have a say in what is going to happen. If there is disagreement between the 25 countries that make up the EU shouldn’t they all be heard?
Europe is not the United States of America. It isn’t one country. Each country has its own ideas, values and norms. Thinking that all of Europe should be one voice is like saying all of North America should have one voice. Do you think that would fly with the Canadians and Mexicans?
The competition between European Countries allows the U.S. and other countries to obtain lower prices on European goods. It also helps the EU economy because it gives them more bargaining power. Lower material prices will increase production and GDP will rise.
1 comment:
I think it is arguable that the European countries of today are more similar than the 13 colonies were 225 years ago.
In any event, there are a lot of people who think that success comes from bigness. Therefore, if a country wants to be successful it has to be large - and if Europe wants to compete with the U.S., China, and India it needs to unite to get bigger.
There is an argument in favor of that based on economies of scale - that your domestic economy needs to be large enough for economies of scale to be fully realizable so that your firms products are as cheap and competitive as they can be. But how many industries does that really apply to? Airplanes? Satellites? The list is not very long, so I don't think that argument is very strong.
A country can get very rich very quickly if they follow a certain set of policies (for example, South Korea was one of the poorest countries on the planet 50 years ago). What the Europeans appear to be doing is trying to substitute something that might work, for a recipe for growth that has been proven elsewhere.
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