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xaxbxcxdxetoday at 5:32 PM3 repliesview on HN

Is there any "western" values coalition? Like really adhering to them, not just the "free trade" lowest comon denominator.


Replies

jankubicatoday at 6:35 PM

As a side note, you cannot escape values even when you are only considering "free trade". As an example, influential EU law cases include questions of promoting abortion as a freedom of service, ban on Sunday sales, ban on sex dolls ... Then free trade clashes with other fundamental rights, such as a right to strike. Arguably this tension is exactly the spill-over effect that made EU project successful – integration in one area (originally steel and coal for obvious post-WWII reasons) creates pressure in an adjacent area to integrate as well.

aleph_minus_onetoday at 6:06 PM

> Is there any "western" values coalition?

I would claim (both by living in Germany and the posted diagram) that for each of these values, most share this value, but not everybody. The problem is that for each value, the stakeholders who do/don't share it can be different. So, a lot of agreements are very complicated.

This is also in my opinion a central reason for the rising anti-EU sentiments in many countries: the more is dicated from above in Brussels/Strasbourg, the more often it happens that in some group who has a really strong opinion on this topic strong anti-EU sentiments will become socially very accepted in this group.

The solution that I would thus propose to keep these anti-EU sentiments not to escalate would be to keep the areas where the EU has any influence to those areas

- where there is an insanely strong consensus over what is "right" vs "wrong" over the whole EU, and

- which are politically rather uncontroversial (i.e. the opposite of being a political minefield).

brendoelfrendotoday at 6:11 PM

What does "western" values mean?