Monday, July 31, 2017

Cooperate or die

Here is an excellent speech about the virtues of cooperation in permanent institutions like the EU. It was meant to be about Brexit, but it is actually against any sort of nationalism in the 21st century. I found out about it from an article in The Guardian that says this: "In the weeks running up to the referendum, when Peter Mandelson was trying to galvanise remainers with an appeal to their pockets, and Yanis Varoufakis was making complicated speeches about conjuring forth ever deeper democracy, one man gave a simple, passionate speech that at the time I found bizarre. John Gummer, speaking to the Environmentalists for Europe, said – almost tearfully – that, because of the EU, nobody had had to send their son to another country to kill someone else’s son for 70 years. A eulogy to peace seemed quite tangential to the argument, but only if you had failed to see, as I had, how much bellicosity the leave side were generating, how much their nationalism and sovereignty were rooted in nostalgia, not for any old Britain of yore, but for a victorious Britain."

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