Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus View Post
no, but the idea of the EU wishing to be an independent superpower is:
a) laughable given how low Defence spending ranks in european priorities
b) wholly undesirable to many EU nations given the level of military integration it would require
c) daft in that considering the above it manages to damage institutions that DO provide european security
thus rendering galileo a pointless vanity project, and one that has been mis-managed to the point of redundancy to boot.
The amount of military spending of members has absolutely no link whatsoever to the capability of the EU to be a superpower. In any case, the EU (read France and UK) has enough nukes to blow the crap out of anyone threatening the old continent, be it the US, Russia or China, and it will stay the same until one of them develop some badass scifi-like anti nuke technology.
Furthermore, military spendings suck, nobody except a few right wing nationalists support them, so it is fine by me. High military spendings are not a 'duty of the nation state'. Protecting citizens is a duty of the state. When there's no threat, the spending can be reduced.

There's absolutely no reason to support large military spendings in Europe right now, except if you to play the 'I've got the biggest one' game that nobody cares about anymore.

Quote Originally Posted by Furunculus
how many times of recent has britain involved itself in events that appear to be opposed by our continetal 'partners'?
you don't just opt to have a common foreign policy, you need to agree what those objectives are.

case in point; iraq, which i supported and am thus glad could not be vetoed by javier solano.
At least there's one point of agreement between us: the UK has nothing to do in the EU. I don't even know why you whined and begged so much to get in, just to whine even more once we allowed you to join the club. I say go and whine alone and stop pestering us. I'm pretty sure you could make a Britano-Polish Union of Whiners. Would probably work fairly well ;)

Now, since that seems to be pretty much the main argument you bring in, since when is military spending the first duty of the (nation? I don't see what the nation is doing there, but heh) state? It might be according to your personal but nonetheless respectable idea of the nation, but it is not according to me and to a whole lot of people.

Oh, and a few scholars of political science, history and international relations, both from the left and the right, think the Westphalian system is well, really outdated, if not already dead and burried. Actually, there's quite a lot of them, so you might want to check their work, because according to them, we're heading right into a post-Westphalian system whose caracteristics are still unclear.

But after this ranting, I have to agree on a point, and not a minor one: the EU, in its current form, smells bad. I'm all for an European con/federation of willing European countries, but the thing we have now is neither that nor a simple free market agreement. And the worse is that even European leaders don't know what the EU is going to be

Quote Originally Posted by Evil Maniac From Mars
If Canada tried to do it without the inherent anti-Americanism involved (yes, it is involved, and some of it is vicious), then I think a lot more people would be a little happier about it.
Oh yeah, absolutely agreed. That's why I think we should give up with the anti-americanism in Europe. While I think we should have our own 'GPS' system, the fact we reached an agreement with China tells quite a lot about the general mindset that still plagues most western european leaders.