It's a sad story, really. The Brits couldn't get the EU to establish a more reasonable immigration policy, so they left the EU... which will screw them over economically more than anything else. I don't know which treaties will stay and which won't, but I don't think it'll really be able to get the good without the bad.
That said, the worst thing about it is that it's a dangerous precedent. If the UK isn't hurt
too much from the economic ramifications (pound dropping like a rock, for example), then some might get it in their heads that it'll be a good idea to get out of EU as well. Not a good thing for anyone...
Not that I'm informed enough on this to comment in depth, and at the risk of sounding a bit like Dragon, I feel as though decades-long complex international economic policy is just about the LAST thing on the planet that should be subject to direct popular referendum.
No, that's actually what representative Democracy is supposed to make unnecessary. We elect our representatives not only to have our voices heard, but also so we don't have to deal with all the minutiae of government.
This issue hardly counts as "minutiae". It's a crucial matter for the country's future. Besides, if there wasn't a referendum, they could have elected a party making leaving EU their main selling point. Ultimately, it comes down to the same thing: letting morons, incompetents and those who act on emotions decide the future of the entire country. The referendum in general was a bad idea, but it is a deep problem (and a major risk) with any democratic system.
Ultimately, we're in just about the worst situation for democracy in general - a highly polarized one. It can work quite well in a largely single-minded group, where the difference between one government and the other really is minutiae and the majority is large (minorities are still out of luck, but if they complain loudly enough the majority may take pity on them). In the current situation, on the other hand the "majority" has a whoopin'
4% over the minority. A bit over a half decides what the other almost half have to put up with. The result? Tyranny of the majority.
And some of this prejudice was even somewhat warranted, because eastern Europe was indeed temporarily a bit of a crime exporter in the turbulent years after the fall of communism. I think things changed for the better, tough.
It didn't, really. Here's the thing with nationalism: it tends to suffer from scope creep. First, it's Syrian immigrants. Then, it's Arabs in general. Then they decide all Muslims are evil (and promptly start kicking out perfectly Polish Tatar people). If it doesn't make a country a paradise where money falls from the sky (and probably even then), they'll decide all immigrants are evil. This happened before and
will happen again. I'm, broadly speaking, anti-immigrant, but only because of how
morons the majority
reacts to the immigration problems. If nationalists get too much traction, it'll blow up in everyone's faces.
Really, I think I'm going to start learning either Russian or Chinese. It sometimes seems like the Western World is going to just come crashing down in a few decades at most (though Russia may well come crashing down when Putin dies, too...). The government in Poland is stupid, but it's old, predictable, self-absorbed kind of stupid.
