Europa is too pure and regulated to be hegemony.
Do you think the US became a superpower by being kind and egalitarian and taking it slow? Nah, they came out the gate swinging, uppercut to Hiroshima and a roundhouse to Nagasaki, and it only got worse from there. They watched the old European powers withering under the weight of colonialism and insurrection in Indochina and southeast Asia and said “I’ll have a piece of that”.
You don’t become Hegemon by standardizing power grids and phasing out coal. You become Hegemon by selling your soul to the MIC, spinning up black site torture rooms in countries most people don’t even know the names of, funnelling guns and drugs to everyone who will take them, and bringing a fucking bandolier of hand grenades to every knife fight.
It has a lot more to do with humans being humans universally, everywhere you go, and people are as vulnerable to Putin’s and other wealthy crime lord’s tactics in Europe as they are in fucking Crimea or Venezuela, it’s just that people broadly think themselves too immune to social messaging to ever vote against their own best interest.
Such as dissolving the largest economic and social union Europe and maybe the world has ever seen just because enough people saw scary stories on TV about what would happen if they didn’t vote for Brexit.
A “world order” is literally the thing we need most to secure our future, and it’s the one thing individual people are most scared of, because the people who want to retain power are doing everything they can, without limits, to preserve that power and sow fear in every dumbass out there with a TV or computer.
Maybe Europe doesn’t need to be a hegemony. Maybe instead Europe should just be a self-reliant world power, capable of standing up for itself against other large powers like the US, China, and Russia.
capable of standing up for itself against other large powers like the US, China, and Russia.
To do that, it needs to consolidate power in some way, a way to compile all resources of united/allied countries and leverage them against other powers. IE: they would need to be hegemonic in the exercises of power necessary to maintain control.
People are repulsed by the word “hegemony” because it’s scary and often used to describe authoritarians, but we literally need to get to a single-world-government as soon as possible to secure our survival as a species. The problem is right now if we set that up, the cretins of the world would vote the very worst people to lead that world-government because the very worst people keep shoving propaganda up the asses of our most stupid people and we keep letting them.
Fair enough. I just googled the meaning of “hegemony” and it said “leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others”. So what I mean is that Europe doesn’t necessarily need to be dominant in the world, but it should be able to stand up for itself.
we literally need to get to a single-world-government as soon as possible to secure our survival as a species
I’ve thought about that a little bit. Perhaps such a government could help resolve disputes. It could perhaps prevent terrible wars like those in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan. Maybe a single world government will happen at some point, in the distant future.
We would need to get to a post-scarcity civilization first. Something we could actually do if we all decided collectively we wanted it more than our immediate rewards and if we had guidance in that direction and leadership that also wanted it.
So yeah, probably a thousand years from now when AI runs the planet or when we’re all dead and the apes and robots can make utopia.
I must say that I am prepared to die to defend Europe. It is maybe one of the last causes truly worth fighting for
If even quarter of people feel like me then we cannot be beat, we cannot be defeated. We will meet there on the Vistula river to stand against the darkness
It will only be after my cold dead body that the orcs will destroy this beautiful land. The mountains, the fields, the cities, rivers and forests, the peaceful, good people.
A duty is more fitting word. We ought to protect things that are rare and precious. If everyone simply runs away before aggressor then everything is lost for certain. An orc won’t stop just because you go on your knees and hope they will have mercy. They are not people, they are orcs.
I won’t judge those that won’t be there if the time comes because I understand them perfectly. However, if we all run there will be no one to stop the enemy from destroying our remarkable, precious Europe.
If we just give it up without a fight then we would betray everything we believe in.This isn’t just about land and borders. It is fight for European values against the darkness of Russia. A struggle so our idea of the just, equal and diverse society prevails. We must protect this idea at all costs.
Anyone who is enjoying the accepting queer community and tolerance of Europe should consider to be there if the time comes. This is what we will fight for and die for if needed.
Not because some politician tells us to do it but because there is no other place in the world where people truly can be themselves with dignity and without fear. There is nowhere to run, this is the first and maybe the last place where you can be truly free.
Get this, there’s already a thing called the European Union - almost like we’re already pretty united! :)
I don’t really think further unification is the goal here.
USA misunderstand that European State are nowhere similar to US states. If you expect Germany France and Poland to go federal and have common institution for security defense etc… let me tell you it will not happen, we were at war 80 years ago and we’re not even having the same language. Ain’t no way do I’m trusting anybody else than France to represent and defend France
We are not truly united, not yet. The shadow from the east seeks to divide us and corrupt us. Only together we can face it. So sharpen your weapons and train your body because before long we will have to defend our way of life.
The Enemy is already trying to damage our morale. He wants to leave us divided, indecisive, feeble. If we show to be united and determined we will end this war before it comes to our door
Only here to say that this picture REALLY makes the scandanavian countries look like a droopy dick n balls.
Anybody who knows the actual history and current reality of european imperialism will not want this at all.
Yo when tf did Switzerland join?
Same year that UK rejoined lmao.
We just have to through the Bell riots and WW3, but then it’s all tea. Earl gray. Hot. From thee
WW3 is scheduled for later this decade
reminder that the world did not enjoy it the last time Europeans were super powerful
Europe is the biggest provider of independence days !
Well, not the EU after the UK left. Spain and France tried but they were up against WASPs and that’s simply not a fair contest of evil.
Yeah, they all hated each other and their internal beer hall brawl spilled out over the borders. It wasn’t that Europe was any kind of united force. Maybe it’s time. We’re fucked in the US, now.
Though I gotta admit it’s ironic AF that the Allies set up Germany with a far better constitution/Grundgesezt and government framework than our own Constitution which ended up essentially frozen because politics have gotten so bad that opening it up would have probably destroyed whatever good remained in it thanks to talibangelicals and corporate money.
I think they were talking about colonialism, not WW2
Ah, yeah that was a bad time for the rest of the world too.
But Europeans loved it
I don’t think the world enjoys anyone being powerful
I’d rather see other powers collapse than Europe join this stupid game
Eh, power vacuums don’t last. You’re basically just asking for a Somalia situation where there’s n small powers continuously at war.
as if there aren’t any other options
World federation, superpowers, small powers. As far as I can tell it’s just a question of how big the blocs are. I don’t see how you move laterally to that continuum in any lasting way; humans are going to act like humans.
A unified world power, for instance through a competent UN that is achieved through diplomacy sound pretty okay.
“boys will be boys” excuse
I didn’t excuse anything. We’re shit. But, it’s the way things are.
Although, come to think of it, we’d probably just elect a world government if we weren’t shit anyway. Just to coordinate things as we’re being understanding and reasonable with each other.
In my uninformed understanding of humans and their history, unifications happen only in the face of crises and threats (and far from all the time, clearly). Maybe–hopefully–the world eventually makes common cause in order to stabilise the world as things spiral out of control in a few decades, but right now our species appears more concerned about whom gets to dictate what and how humans should live and behave like.
Not even most Europeans.
Hi Americans!
Europe is not the Germans.
This time you’ll get the Vikings, the Romans, the Conquistadors, the Spartans and the people who ruled the world by the cunning use of flags all teamed together.
The British imperialists genocided more people throughout their history than the Germans. Just that the Brits took their time with it. The French, Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch and Italians also have many million skeletons in their closet and the French massacred millions of people trying to gain independence after World War 2.
If you go to any place in the world outside of Europe there is a good chance that Europeans committed a massacre there to steal land and resources at some point in the past few hundred years.
But not now, now for the most part they’re all democratic countries.
You hang on to the past so hard and you get Gaza, India Pakistan war, the Middle East etc.
A country being democratic for some people has absolutely no indication of whether it is an imperialist threat to other countries.
Do you think the countries being invaded by the US or having their legitimate governments overthrown and fascist puppets installed care about the US being democratic on the inside? Do you think Pakistan is less threatened by India because it is a democratic country? Do you think the Serbian massacres in Bosnia were acceptable and the Kosovarians were welcoming the Serbian invaders because Serbia became democratic a few years earlier?
Also the Middle East like many post colonial areas in Africa are unstable precisely because the French and British democracies designed artificial countries in a way that will cause tensions by separating people such as the Kurdish people into many states and throwing together different people into single states. Continued military “interventions”, arming groups in proxy wars and other meddling certainly doesn’t help either. Take Libya for instance where France is helping the Haftar regime to continue waging war against the internationally recognized government alongside Russia, Wagner, the UAE and Egypt.
So many good points in one post. People have to get off their high horse on democracy. My goto is every US president since WW2 is a war criminal. Do you think the people suffering war crimes care about democracy? It would be laughable if it wasnt infuriating.
Just to bolster your argument on the Middle East all anyone has to do is look at Sykes Picot. The whole middle east is just some brit in an office drawing squiggly lines, so that the west can extract as many resources from them as possible.
Its like people forgot the ottoman empire even existed and instead just get real racist with lines like “prone to war” “stuck in the past”. Bro the US is still creating nation states in the Arab world. Of course they are going to go to war, the west is standing on their neck.
.Take Libya for instance where France is helping the Haftar regime to continue waging war against the internationally recognized government alongside Russia, Wagner, the UAE and Egypt.
Pretty sure France is not there to be along with Russia and Wagner but because Russia and Wagner is there. Russia’s interest is to grow influence and cause issues to Europe.
France is there to get cheap Libyan oil from a warlord. If that means partnering with Wagner they are fine doing so.
If France was interested in challenging Russian influence they would support the internationally recognized government and help its fight against Haftar. You know, like how limiting Russian influence in Ukraine is done by helping Ukraine, not by helping Russia allied separatists in Luchansk.
France is there to get cheap Libyan oil from a warlord.
I will need more convincing on that. But I do see that France’s involment does have pretty bad optics - and maybe reasons. But because France is not the only one there, it sure isn’t something black and white.
And I wouldn’t draw comparisons to Ukraine as the Libya has unfortunately have had so much internal instability that is not comparable - though one could say something Euromaiden and the aftermath of it but that is still order of magnitudes different starting point.
Europe is not the Germans.
The English ran laps around the Germans in terms of human attrocity for centuries.
The French weren’t far behind.
Hey, don’t forget Belgium. They didn’t have much, but it’s quality over quantity!
Unite, but first, launch Orban into space, one-way-ticket kind-of way.
The top US export is oil.
If you want to do something, wean yourself off oil. Big push for solar, wind, and anything else that doesn’t rely on digging up bits of dinosaurs.
Electric vehicles, public transport, bikes, walking.
And as an added bonus, the world gets a little cleaner. Might be important, you know.
This is what I always have to bring up when people go “bUt cHInA!”. So what? Energy independence is valuable and should be pushed for.
> In 2023, renewable energy represented 24.5% of energy consumed in the EU, up from 23.0% in 2022.
They’re working on it a lot faster than (most of) the rest of the world!
In 2022, renewable energy sources contributed 31% of the electricity used in Texas. Fucking Texas.
Get those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers.
The insane thing is that renewables has been increasingly more cost efficient and more ROI than fossils for a long time, especially in places like Texas. Wind and sun for days. Investments in tech and production pay off big time, and obviously keep paying off long-term.
It is just oil subsidies and profiteering holding almost all of society back for decades. But things can change.
One of the ironies of the Texas electricity grid - ERCOT - is how it accidentally created huge incentives for new solar and wind energy by trying to prop up the natural gas markets.
ERCOT operates via an auction system, wherein the electricity carriers put in bids for GWhs and producers meet those bids. When demand is low, electricity is very cheap - $10-25 MWh. But it rise rapidly during a heat wave, peaking at $3000 MWh in some instances. Gas plants don’t have any incentive to sell onto the grid at this point, so they turn themselves off until the price rises. But when a bunch of gas plants operate as a cartel, they can coordinate when they release electricity and drive up the price.
The problem is that the auction price is set on the last GWh sold but it applies to the entire sale of energy for the auction cycle. So if you’re selling continuously across the day, you can accidentally trip into a ahem windfall when gas producers surge the price.
Because green producers can’t really control how much they put out onto the grid, they’re at the mercy of the market. But if they know, in advance, that the gas companies are going to fuck with things, they can anticipate enormous profits during these strategic moments. And because wind/solar don’t need a supply chain like gas does, you can just keep building and building and building wherever you find opportune spots for harvesting (which Texas has in spades).
So the gas companies inadvertently kicked off a green energy boom by their periodic price spike scheme.
Renewable energy development being rapidly accelerated by gas companies price gouging with artificial scarcity… thereby causing Texas to move toward a post-scarcity energy economy… magnificent. What a strange world.
Don’t worry Texas is going to fix that. They’re getting ready to pass a bunch of laws that limit renewable energy usage in Texas.
They’ve been making a lot of threats. But there’s a ton of money in renewables, too. It’s a hard lift
It’s way more than just threats. They’re already passing legislation.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2025/04/16/texas-senate-passes-anti-solar-wind-bill/
The Senate passes a lot of bugnuts bills. Watch the House calendar if you want to see what has a chance of actually passing. It took Abbott nearly a decade to get his watered down voucher bill through, in large part because the calendars committee guy hated the idea and would book the legislation at the tail of every session.
EU already absorbed Switzerland in this pic despite them not wanting it, so there’s that.
Undid Brexit too already
No Iceland either 😔
Or Canada.
What? That hasn’t happened yet? Oh, sorry. That’s the problem with being from the, er, can’t say. Temporal prime directive and all that.
Switzerland is 100% dependent on the EU.
That’s not true.
They are completely landlocked by the EU and their Airspace.
Also most of their imports/exports go there.
They don’t even farm enough to sustain themselves. So yes, obviously it’s true
Landlocked does not mean dependent.
They also are not completely dependent which 100% means.
Last time I looked into imports and exports of countries Switserland was around 50-60%.
Of course it does mean that.
If the EU wants, they can fuck up Switzerland quite badly.
All they have to do is to close the borders and airspace.
The claim was “100% dependent” which is extremely incorrect.
Not a single country in the world is 100% dependent.
Furthermore, the threat of an attack does not imply dependence.
That phrasing was obviously hyperbole, since 100% dependence isn’t even a well-defined statement (you can not assign a simple percentage to degree of dependence). Using it as a point to argue against is misguided at best, disingenuous at worst. You should read it as “it is definitely dependent [to a high degree]” rather than “it is entirely dependent”.
I mean they mostly are, they’re approx. 50% dependent for agriculture, so if the EU were to block all borders and halt all exports to them the Swiss would become significantly skinnier than they were before.
No shame in that by the way, the Swiss also provide the EU with lots of stuff and services that are valuable.
Power corrupts. No single country should be a global superpower
That’s fine, Europe is several countries.
So was the US. Technically the use of the word “state” implies it still is. What is the line between a bunch of states working together and them no longer being a bunch of separate countries?
It’s a thin line indeed. Aren’t the countries in the UK closer to being actual countries than the US states?
Not really. All American States have the same level of inherent sovereignty. There are also a lot of federal programs that rely the individual states performing the work. States also maintain their own militaries under partial or complete state control.
In contrast, UK country sovereignty is a mixed bag, with the largest country in the UK without any devolved powers.
The US generally views American state sovereignty more in line with EU country sovereignty.
You cannot compare the US’ setup to Europe’s. One is a nation that is still incredibly young and was sliced up like a cake for several territories that still are relatively homogenous in culture.
The other is a continent consisting of countries with very diverse cultures and thousands of years of history, who made a union to collaborate on certain political issues.
The two are not even close to being the same. Not even close.
I did not compare them. I asked where the line is between a bunch of countries working together in a union and that union being a new larger country.
The line is when all the countries agree to become one big country. Which will never happen in Europe. The US is different as it never got to be a bunch of individual countries with centuries long history (if we ignore the native americans’ old territories) before becoming the US. That development happened simultaneously while the country and its rules were formed. The concept of country was already well known at the time too, while Europe, like most of the world, figured that shit out slowly and over centuries.
This is why Europe will never become one country. The history is too ancient and the cultures run too deep. There is no way that I as a Dane would agree to become a citizen of United Europe where I lose my identity and history as a Dane and now have to build some new identity with other Europeans. We have many things in common, but we are not the same. The Soviet Union already experimented with this stuff, and it didn’t work out because the countries it forced to become part of a unified nation with the same identity, didn’t agree to it. It was forced and it was damaging to these countries’ identities.
I do not know a single European who would want to become one country and none of us would agree that the European Union’s setup is in any way similar to the US. It is not the same.
There is no way that I as a Dane would agree to become a citizen of United Europe where I lose my identity and history as a Dane and now have to build some new identity with other Europeans. We have many things in common, but we are not the same. […] It was forced and it was damaging to these countries’ identities.
This is an interesting line of arguments that parallels much of the rhetoric that came out of many British during Brexit. They felt the EU had started to dissolve their identity and was forcing policy that was bad for them that they had no representation in. Whether or not they were correct, or making those arguments in good faith, it once again points back to the line being quite blurry
I made a similar line of questioning recently in the anarchy Lemmy, after disagreeing to how anarchists usually approach why community is better than government. “when is a community so large it is no longer a community and it is a state” I think your focus on cultural identity is interesting given they use the same line of arguments to define community vs government. I also wonder if that line of thinking is dangerously close to the kind of thinking that creates isolationism and xenophobia.
Respectfully, I disagree with your reasoning. At no point have I said European countries want nothing to do with one another, just that we want to keep our own identity and sovereignty.
You are making a bunch of assumptions while completely ignoring the fact that European countries have the EU.
We are not isolationist nor are we xenophobic. We just want to keep our countries as they are.
It’s kinda like accusing someone of being anti apartment complex if they say no to move out of their family home that they have lived in for generations, and get an apartment in the complex instead. “Oh, maybe you’re racist because there might be people of different ethnicities in the complex? Or maybe you just hate having neighbours and want to isolate yourself from everybody in your silly little house?”
Or maybe I just have a greater emotional attachment to the house that was built by my great grandfather and I feel more at home in the house I have upkept and renovated myself than some apartment complex where every apartment has the same layout and there are rules as to how much I can modify mine.
Doesn’t mean that apartment complexes are a bad thing. Not at all. But if you already have a house with a garden that is yours and that you have a history with, why on earth would you want to give that up for an apartment in a complex that you don’t have any attachment to?
The only reason something like the US has worked out is because people willingly agreed to the setup and willingly left their old countries to build up something new.
Had the native Americans had the means to defend their lands, then I’m sure there would have been no US and instead a continent with old, independent countries that would hold on to their own traditions and cultures. There may have been a union similar to the EU, but that is not the same as them agreeing to become one big country. That is just collaboration and trying to have some agreements in place that ensures peace and trade between nations. The exact opposite of isolationism and xenophobia.
On the contrary, periods of imperial hegemony have been some of the more stable and peaceful episodes of human history. One of them is ending right now.
The stability isn’t much consolation to the slaves who die under empires
That’s fair. But history is an uninterrupted succession of empires. Good ones, bad ones, middling ones. It’s the human condition. The USA was an empire founded by enlightenment libertarians, so I’d say there’s a fair chance we’re going to look back on it fondly. Similarly, the EU, if ever it could pull itself together, has the potential to be as good an empire as we’ll ever get. IMO.
The USA was founded by slave owners and for a good chunk of its history anyone other than white male landowners were second-class citizens (and de facto still are). There are no good empires.
The human condition is malleable. A better world is possible. Indeed, sometimes it peaks out from the raging waters. Paradises built in hell, like Barcelona during the Civil War, prosper for a time and flounder. To believe that we cannot make something beautiful is to lack imagination.
Yeah. People like to complain about American warmongering, but the period between World Wars I and II was orders of magnitude more deadly.
The only way to enforce that, is to be a global superpower
Weird map. The non-Union Balkan states and Norway are cut out, but Switzerland is filled in.
and UK
fuk switzerland, free riding mfers
Some of you European federalists seem keen to annex and rule to ensure a full and strong federation.
Switzerland spends a fraction of what their neighbors do on defense as a portion of GDP, which they get to do because of the benevolence of those neighbors. They’re “neutral” because they know that their neighbors are peaceful which they take full advantage of while contributing nothing. Of course their neutrality also conveniently allows them to harbor the money of the worst people and regimes in the world, going all the way back to Nazi Germany.
they’re not really the neutral banking country anymore. a lot of the money fled after they started freezing Russian accounts following the Ukraine invasion.
Which is why you would want the EU to enter undeclared war on Switzerland, invading the country and replacing their local government, killing and arresting anyone who would resist.
The almighty Nordic cock and balls
Norway should really check a doctor
Dang! Cannot unsee anymore
I can’t unsee Putin screaming at Poland at the balcans, seeing both goes together quite nicely
We have too many traitors like Orban in the EU. The work against us.
