The Brexit referendum thread: potential consequences for GB, EU and the Brits in CH

[idefix]

	Quote:	marton
	"Yugoslavia broke apart when money ran out" The basic issue was that Tito died and then there was no strong man available to hold the country together. After that it was only a matter of time.

Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later.

How did the breakup happened?

First, Beobanka was lending money to businesses like there was no tomorrow. The CEO of Beobanka was.....Slobodan Milosevic. Maybe you've heard of him .

Beobanka invested heavily in Agrokomerc, which was the greatest financial scam that happened in the last century (something like Enron).

When Slovenians found out that the Agrokomerc scandal would bring down the entire economy, they wanted out. Slovenia was much more developed and was funding the other poorer regions like Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia. Belgrade was printing the common currency like crazy so Slovenians couldn't just sit back and watch going down the drain together. Finally, they thought they'll be better of independent and they didn't want to pay anybody elses bills. (sounds familiar? )

After that you know that Serbia wasn't letting the free will of people expressed on independance referendum in Slovenia to become true. (Again... does this sound familiar?!

History repeats itself

[marton]

Many thousands marching in UK for "Bremain"; bunch of nutters - the train has left the station.

[marton]

	Quote:	idefix
	Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later. How did the breakup happened? First, Beobanka was lending money to businesses like there was no tomorrow. The CEO of Beobanka was.....Slobodan Milosevic. Maybe you've heard of him . Beobanka invested heavily in Agrokomerc, which was the greatest financial scam that happened in the last century (something like Enron). When Slovenians found out that the Agrokomerc scandal would bring down the entire economy, they wanted out. Slovenia was much more developed and was funding the other poorer regions like Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia. Belgrade was printing the common currency like crazy so Slovenians couldn't just sit back and watch going down the drain together. Finally, they thought they'll be better of independent and they didn't want to pay anybody elses bills. (sounds familiar? ) After that you know that Serbia wasn't letting the free will of people expressed on independance referendum in Slovenia to become true. (Again... does this sound familiar?! History repeats itself

"Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later. "
However the fact remains that if Tito had been replaced with another strong leader then Yugoslavia would still be one country.

[idefix]

	Quote:	marton
	"Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later. " However the fact remains that if Tito had been replaced with another strong leader then Yugoslavia would still be one country.

No, Tito or no Tito Yugoslavia would have never survived.

Yugoslavia was getting a lot of money for its "planned economy" that dissappeared once the Berlin Wall was gone. As a tampon zone, tito was getting money from the west and the east. Non aligned movement and all of that.

But as Maggie once said "communism works until you have other people's money to spend" it happened exactly that, once money was an issue everybody wanted to skip the bill. If Tito was alive in 1990 I imagine him going the Saddam way.

It's all down to money and nothing else. Stop those subventions for the French farmers and you'll see what happens next

[curley]

	Quote:	marton
	"Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later. " However the fact remains that if Tito had been replaced with another strong leader then Yugoslavia would still be one country.

True, yet I don't think I'd plead in favour of another one like him. It looked good from the outside and people went on holidays there ..... yet I went to school with Jugoslavs who's parents sent them out of the country to grow up in our international school .....

[marton]

	Quote:	curley
	True, yet I don't think I'd plead in favour of another one like him. It looked good from the outside and people went on holidays there ..... yet I went to school with Jugoslavs who's parents sent them out of the country to grow up in our international school .....

Indeed

But how many Yugoslavs died from inter tribe violence during his tenure?

And how many thousands later?

[idefix]

	Quote:	marton
	Indeed But how many Yugoslavs died from inter tribe violence during his tenure? And how many thousands later?

Thousands were killed and imprisoned for doubting the socialist regime. You could end up in jail if your neighbour heard you tuning in "Radio Free Europe".

Tito stopped the violence by enforcing his own.

[marton]

	Quote:	idefix
	Thousands were killed and imprisoned for doubting the socialist regime. You could end up in jail if your neighbour heard you tuning in "Radio Free Europe". Tito stopped the violence by enforcing his own.

And how many died after 1990 in the internal Yugoslav wars? 150,00? Plus another 150,000 with war wounds?

[miniMia]

	Quote:	Odile
	Not at all- but it was an 'internal' war- but yes, reminds us how important it is to work together. Richdog, it was Churchill who talked about the ideal of a United States of Europe. Why couldn't work in Europe? Arizona is so different to New England, Colorado vastly different to Texas, California bears no ressemblance to Maine.

sorry but the difference between Sweden and Greece is galaxies away compared to Arizona and Maine.

[greenmount]

Guys, let's not fool ourselves, the Southern parts of Europe - Spain, Italy, Portugal, Greece (to a certain extent), benefited a great deal from the EU deals.
But, in the end, I think we all like it happened that way.
Now, in all fairness, I ask you to answer if it is right to blame the Eastern European parts if they want to see the same kind of development.
Please, ignore your opinions according to which "we" 're "Untermenschen"... for a moment. Let's talk about economics here.




Edit. Protests in London. More people than our regular EFers anyway...lol
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-br...-idUSKCN0ZI0FA

Interesting times, indeed.

[Sbrinz]

More bad news!

The EU are stating that Britain must first leave the EU before trade negotiations can begin. Negotiating will begin as a third country, AFTER Brexit.

At the EU summit this week the 27 government leaders - without the UK - agreed Brexit "divorce" talks should begin and end before any talks on a new settlement for the UK, Chris Morris says.
Brussels sources told our correspondent there was a real determination among the leaders not to mix the two.
The statement from the 27 said they wanted the UK to be "a close partner of the EU". But they also spoke of an agreement to be "concluded with the UK as a third country".
The phrase "third country" means the UK post-Brexit.
Outside the EU, the UK would trade with the bloc under World Trade Organization rules, pending a possible new deal on free trade.
WTO conditions would mean trade tariffs and non-tariff barriers, as the UK would no longer be in the EU single market.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-...endum-36682735

[marton]

	Quote:	Sbrinz
	More bad news! The EU are stating that Britain must first leave the EU before trade negotiations can begin. Negotiating will begin as a third country, AFTER Brexit. At the EU summit this week the 27 government leaders - without the UK - agreed Brexit "divorce" talks should begin and end before any talks on a new settlement for the UK, Chris Morris says. Brussels sources told our correspondent there was a real determination among the leaders not to mix the two. The statement from the 27 said they wanted the UK to be "a close partner of the EU". But they also spoke of an agreement to be "concluded with the UK as a third country". The phrase "third country" means the UK post-Brexit. Outside the EU, the UK would trade with the bloc under World Trade Organization rules, pending a possible new deal on free trade. WTO conditions would mean trade tariffs and non-tariff barriers, as the UK would no longer be in the EU single market. http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-...endum-36682735

But no surprise

[Sbrinz]

Cameron needs to immediately apply for Britain to become a Union Territory of the Republic of India.

Whilst historically speaking it seems only right and proper to give India a chance to rule Britain for a few hundred years - it actually makes a lot of sense for the British too!

Worried about jobs? India’s economy is growing 4x faster than Europe’s and will overtake the entire EU’s sometime in the 2030s - becoming twice the size of the EU economy by 2050.

In economic terms alone every young Brit should wish to replace their garish red EU passport with a classy blue Indian one ASAP.

Worried about the future of the NHS? India already provides nearly as many Doctors to the NHS as the EU does - and that doesn’t even include those of Indian origin, born or educated, in Britain. 25,055 Indian v 30,082 EU.

Worried about diversity? With over 100 different languages spoken everyday and adherents of every religion - even Britain’s favourite materialist consumption - there truly is something for everyone here!

Worried about being understood? English is one of India's two official languages - which will be a huge relief for all those have struggled to communicate with their continental neighbours for all these years.

Worried about not being part of something bigger? India has more than twice the population of the EU. Half of which are under 35, so the bonus is no more worries about an ageing population!

Worried about where to go on holiday? The Himalayas are nearly three times the height of the Alps and thousands of miles longer - there are more sandy beaches along India’s coastline than all the Costas you can dream of - and India has tropical rainforests and even a desert too! Plenty of visa free inter-railing adventures as well on the world’s largest railway network.

Worried about not being ruled by an unlected bureaucracy in a far away land? We’ve got that covered as well! Nowhere on the planet has perfected the shuffling of paper and writing of rules better than New Delhi - what’s more India’s civil servants salaries are more than 10x lower than Brussels. Talk about getting more for less!

British MPs, the whole of Whitehall and even the Royal Family (subject to the return of the Kohinor) can all be pensioned off at the fast expanding and internationally renowned Best Exotic Marigold Hotel chain in Jaipur.

Which would free up the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and much of Central London to become a permanent Bollywood film set. With more viewers than Hollywood this is sure to help keep London’s tourist economy going - which within a decade or two will be mostly Indians in any case.

Embrace the 21st Century. Swap Brussels for Delhi. Say Goodbye to Little Europe and Namaste to Incredible India!

Yours in waiting,
An Immigrant of British Origin,
New Delhi, India

[Odile]

And here a great article about a young man from Prague- about his first visit beyond the border when he was 10, about their fears from Russia and about what it now feels like to be a second class European.

http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...m_source=atltw

[TobiasM]

	Quote:	idefix
	Tito died in 1980. Trouble started in 1990, whole 10 years later. How did the breakup happened? First, Beobanka was lending money to businesses like there was no tomorrow. The CEO of Beobanka was.....Slobodan Milosevic. Maybe you've heard of him . Beobanka invested heavily in Agrokomerc, which was the greatest financial scam that happened in the last century (something like Enron). When Slovenians found out that the Agrokomerc scandal would bring down the entire economy, they wanted out. Slovenia was much more developed and was funding the other poorer regions like Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia. Belgrade was printing the common currency like crazy so Slovenians couldn't just sit back and watch going down the drain together. Finally, they thought they'll be better of independent and they didn't want to pay anybody elses bills. (sounds familiar? ) After that you know that Serbia wasn't letting the free will of people expressed on independance referendum in Slovenia to become true. (Again... does this sound familiar?! History repeats itself

This is nothing similar to the break up of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was split along ethnic lines and the country was forcefully created under dictatorship into a Soviet style union. Not sure what your point is?

[marton]

	Quote:	TobiasM
	This is nothing similar to the break up of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was split along ethnic lines and the country was forcefully created under dictatorship into a Soviet style union. Not sure what your point is?

"Yugoslavia was split along ethnic lines " Ethnic/religious; mainly there were there Muslims, Orthodox Catholics and Roman Catholics.

[idefix]

	Quote:	TobiasM
	This is nothing similar to the break up of Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia was split along ethnic lines and the country was forcefully created under dictatorship into a Soviet style union. Not sure what your point is?

Obviously you were 3 and a half when Yugoslavia broke apart, so you don't know much about it, don't you?

[marton]

Bit late now but worth reading;
A lecture by a law professor has become an unlikely internet hit after he used it to attack what he called the Leave Campaign’s “industrial scale dishonesty”.

Michael Dougan, professor of European Law at Liverpool University, said watching the Leave campaign had been: “Probably the equivalent of an evolutionary biologist listening to a bunch of creationists tell the public creation theory is right and evolution is completely wrong.”

Source

[greenmount]

	Quote:	Odile
	And here a great article about a young man from Prague- about his first visit beyond the border when he was 10, about their fears from Russia and about what it now feels like to be a second class European. http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...m_source=atltw

Thank you for this article, Odile. I think I agree with the author, it's hard not to take it personally.

	Quote:
	A 'Second-Class' European in a Post-Brexit World For those of us who grew up behind the Iron Curtain with dreams of owning real jeans, the U.K.’s vote feels like a personal rejection. A happy trio of East German refugees shout "Freedom, Freedom" as their train leaves a railway station in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1989. In 1990, my family drove the 125 miles from a newly post-communist Prague to the Czechoslovak border with Austria. Crippling travel restrictions had recently been lifted, and we were going to visit the West on vacation for the very first time. I was 10 years old and, though the line of cars at the border was several miles deep, and though it was sweltering in the back of our yellow Škoda, I spent the trip in a state of awe at our good fortune. By the time I’d finished fourth grade, I’d heard stories of those who'd been killed while attempting to leave the prison that the Eastern Bloc was; the last to lose his life at the Czechoslovak border had in fact been a child, a boy slightly younger than myself, when his family was trying to escape East Germany. But then, seemingly overnight, the old restrictive system had begun to disintegrate. In 1989, after Hungary allowed a group of East Germans to cross into Austria, which was part of the West, many of their compatriots hoped to follow suit. Suddenly, tens of thousands of East German refugees flooded into Prague, sleeping in makeshift tents in its historic center, right near our home, before they continued on their journey. To be permitted to cross a national border: This was the stuff of dreams. Wearing our best clothes to make a good impression on this first trip, we practiced polite German phrases and conversation starters on each other in the car, getting ready for our grand audience with the West. But when we were finally let across, the first places we entered on the Austrian side had posted notices that read, in glaring capital letters: CZECHS, DO NOT STEAL HERE! For the rest of the trip, we tried to keep our voices down in public, so no one could hear us speaking a Slavic language, and hoped that no one would notice our Czech license plates. As we drove deeper into Western Europe, the sense of longing grew. Surely we’d meet someone, somewhere, who would not be able to tell that we were only Czechs? Of course, we were used to feeling second class. This was built into our upbringing and culture. We Czechs, like other Central Europeans, had lived for decades with a feeling of failure for not having been able to free ourselves from Soviet dominion, along with its absurd, backward, and cruel politics. Even before communism ended, most of my friends and I suspected that shelves in stores were not meant to be empty, that toilet paper was not meant to be scarce, and that there were more enjoyable ways for an eight-year-old to spend an afternoon than standing guard in a tiny uniform in front of a pro-Soviet monument. (This was one of my duties as a member of the Young Pioneers.) Our parents, despite strict censorship, got their hands on samizdat copies of Orwell novels. None of us had any doubt that the Europe we knew then was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. My friends had a slang word for cool: If something was top-notch awesome, it was “British.” The West, we sensed, was a better place: polished, rich, and free. My friends even had a slang word for cool: If something was top-notch awesome, it was “British.” Of course, we knew to say this only quietly, because any complimentary talk about the West could be overheard by our schoolteachers and get our parents in trouble. We were the West’s biggest fans and groupies, like players who hadn’t made it onto the team but kept cheering for it in the stands. Or like players sold to another team against their will because they did not matter enough. Václav Havel became president in 1989, and the last Soviet soldier left Czechoslovakia in 1991. Countries in my region were eager to join NATO and the European Union, and spent most of the 1990s making reforms and pleading with the West to let us in. Fortunately for those who wanted to look toward Europe, Russia, preoccupied with its own economic implosion, was busy. The Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 and the EU in 2004. But the familiar long border lines lasted well into my 20s, with customs officers meticulously checking whether Czechs—and Hungarians, Slovaks, and Poles—headed for an Italian beach had enough money on them or whether they were the real owners of their cars, since the EU Schengen Area that guaranteed free movement of persons was not open to us until 2007. There are criticisms—some unfounded, many wholly legitimate—that people in my region, just like everyone else, have of the EU today. But openness within Europe and between Europeans is the most valuable thing about our continent. It allowed us to fully engage with Europe, trade, make, buy, sell, move, love, learn, and earn. And more than Germany, France, or Denmark, the U.K. was the country that had for decades given us familiar music, movies, humor, and literature, and held the greatest appeal for me and my friends. There are wonderful Scandinavian bands and Dutch DJs, but Adele, The Rolling Stones, and Paul McCartney sell out humongous arenas, still. Britain has the culture my compatriots and I, in the absence of our own regional idols and contemporary cultural giants, look up to. English is the second language we now most comfortably speak. As a result, for those who wanted to try their luck abroad, many Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and other neighbors felt the United Kingdom or Ireland made most sense as destinations. London offers opportunities in every imaginable field. It also allows multi-national couples a shot at success that other European capitals simply lack. I work in international development and my husband in tech: Buona fortuna to us in finding a competitive career for both in Rome. And so it is difficult for me not to take personally the U.K.’s rejection of staying open to Europe. Polls show that the decision was largely driven by backlash against immigration, and that some of the districts with the highest support for Brexit were those that had high concentrations of Poles, Romanians, and other Eastern and Central Europeans. Laminated cards reading, “No more Polish vermin” and “Go home Polish scum” were found in Cambridgeshire after the vote, and the U.K.’s Daily Mirror just ran the alarmist headline, “Brexit to cause immigration surge as 500,000 East Europeans 'will rush in before borders close.'” It now appears that second-class Europeans—Europeans who grew up with smuggled vinyls and dreams of owning real jeans, while hiding from informers and censors, or whose parents did—are not so welcome in the Europe we thought we’d come to share. It does not need to be printed out in capital letters to be obvious. But many people on the streets of Prague, Bratislava, and Warsaw understand another thing, too. An inward-looking, destabilized European Union is not good for anyone except for Russia, which has never stopped seeing our region as an area to claim, and whose military and agents have been pushing closer. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, and even Poland, are all worried about their long-term security. Given that for a country like mine, the last two and a half decades were the longest period of freedom in modern history, we don’t take not being invaded for granted. It is truly disheartening that it was we, and other immigrants, who U.K. voters seem to perceive as the threat to stability. As Havel pointed out, a defining Czech characteristic is self-doubt. Some say anxiety. I feel both now more than ever. Despite my best efforts, I was not able to hide deeper in Europe at all.

Aargh, and the last phrase is brilliant. Touching and sad, but so true. Thank you, Zuzana Boehmova.

[MusicChick]

	Quote:	Odile
	And here a great article about a young man from Prague- about his first visit beyond the border when he was 10, about their fears from Russia and about what it now feels like to be a second class European. http://www.theatlantic.com/internati...m_source=atltw

It is a story that a girl wrote. It is great, fits for my life, too. Though I tend to not glorify Anglophone countries, lived in them enough to know better. The 2nd class citizenship can follow one anywhere, here one is made to feel it sometimes, too, by some people. The best is to smile at ignorance and continue one's work, projects and dreams, just like the autor of the article and her husband.

This is, btw, one single epic EF thread. A legend. I am going to ruin it a little, I know - but thanks, community, for being civil and debating in a classy way. 90 pages, wow.