Future of the European Union

[Montmorency]

Having read The Rule of Law in Crisis and Conflict Grey Zones, Regulating the Use of Force in a Global Information Environment, I chose to read the word above as the use of international normative law. An emerging doctrine that essentially gives life to the concept, but since it is not accepted and universal fact the enormous majority of de-territorial law is in fact international treaty. Which would fail for the reasons specified, and there is nothing to indicate that normative law does not suffer the same problems. Do you have a different interpretation?

Well off the mark. I meant it as derived from the Deleuzian/accelerationist sense, but we don't care about those labels so in the concrete sense of political controls being diffused into the hands of trans-national elites, for instance by virtue of their market clout and the overriding imperatives of their economic framework. C.f. what googling the term gets:

the severance of social, political, or cultural practices from their native places and populations.

This is exactly what I've been trying to refer to you over time, that leaving the EU ub favor of liberalization to all comers clearly - or if you don't agree with "clearly", then suggestively enough that you can't ignore the possibility - eliminates more popular control, or at least popularly-responsive control, than EU membership ever could in the medium-term.

As I said, Corbyn appears to believe otherwise, that Brexit is an opportunity to show that the capitalist system can be defied. Summary in a followup post. Pre-emptively I'll state that I think the UK is too small and weak to accomplish this, that the concert of explicit and implicit controls of the world economy, institutions, and state actors results in the rapid and premature electoral expulsion of a radical Labour government. Alternatively, Labour would have to install a socialist-in-name dictatorship and emulate the quasi-self sufficiency of Cuba, an outcome that can hardly be called inspiring (inspiration matters in setting an example to other countries' socialist movements) and one that cannot shield the UK in the long-term context of persistent international capitalism (every factor in the world, from political to technological to ecological, inciting the implosion of the country).

In a world of islands the UK would not be allowed to pretend to be an island, in other words. Maybe EU membership overall provides some sort of buffer, when you need every edge you can get.

Everything is relative. A Singapore in europe doesn't have to be anything more than a nation that keeps public spending at 5% of GDP lower than the median for the EU, with regulation at a similar level of unobtrusiveness. Let's say 37.5% (versus 42.5%), and our existing penchant for non-socialised regulation of finance, energy, gm, etc.

What makes a Singapore from the spending-GDP ratio? It sounds like you're saying not a particular policy, but simply keeping overall spending below 40% of GDP will automatically reproduce some aspect of the Singapore model.

So I don't really think this scenario applies. Afterall, it isn't like the rest of the anglosphere doesn't operate on exactly the same basis already.

What are you referring to?

Anyway, what exact features you envision for a Singapore model, whether these are desirable for most people, and if they are compatible with other narrow aspects of your preferred state (e.g. military interventionism) are a separate topic and beside the point. I'm more interested in why you assent to one kind of politics and not another, and what contradictions are present.

Not social engineering, political engineering. A process that happens all the time everywhere, as governance must perforce respond to changing circumstances.

It strikes me as a kind of misuse of the term to, as I suppose you are doing, limit it to the continuous efforts of a central government. Why should private groups and discrete political events be excluded if they arrive at the same type of result? Which is not to say that there is a linear correlation between the aims of the engineers and the actual product, just the opposite. There are always unforeseen consequences. That's why I called it a gamble.

To be specific: do you think my scenarios of the EU evolution are realistic? And what might you suggest in their stead?

I said I believe something like your Singapore - more broadly speaking, liberalized dissolution - is the default scenario for the UK, applicable in or out of the EU but with more rapid development outside. Some would call that "pessimism".