There are ways to be part of the Single Market and all that goes with it without becoming an EU member, for example by becoming a member of the EEA like Norway.

They would be able to keep the Pound that way, as well as a number of other things such as controlling the fishing rights in their own waters.

They would however have to accept Freedom Of Movement, which was one of the main arguments for Leave during a Referendum which was very much a mix of racism and fantastical expectations of keeping most of the rights even after leaving the EU (Britain has major problems with widespread nationalistic delusions of grandeurs, so lots of people believed all the fantasies about “they will give us all we want”)

Any significantly stronger ties required Freedom Of Movement (basically to be inside the Single Market, even as a non-EU-member, means having all rules necessary for it to be a free and open market, which includes Freedom Of Movement), which was one of the main reasons the Brexiters won - like in the US now, Britain’s very own rise of the Far-Right by taking over their mainstream conservative party some years ago was also mainly anchored on racism.

I’m quite curious how many of those 66% of Britons would still be alright with stronger EU ties if that meant that Poles could once again immigrate to Britain at will.

I know that both Portugal and The Netherlands also have their own local systems, but you can’t really use the system of one country in another country.

The only country in Europe which I know for sure doesn’t have its own local payments system is the UK, though it would not surprise me if there are others.

What’s really needed is some sort of pan-european payments system, ideally one which also gets accepted in the rest of the World. The closest we have to it at the moment in the EU is that you can do normal (so called SEPA, if I remember it correctly) bank transfers to any account at any bank in the EU, all for the same cost (generally free) independently of it being in the same country or across borders, and quite a number of retailers all over Europe do accept payment via bank transfer, but that’s not an actual payment system, it’s a bank transfer system that you sometimes can use to pay an online order from a retailer.

As things stand now, if for example from my Portuguese bank account I want to buy something from an online store in Germany, the payment has to go via Visa (Mastercard isn’t really common in Portugal)

The EU is not a country.

Some countries in the EU currently have or have had Social Democratic governments, but mainly they have governments which are Neoliberal, though a milder form than the US: generally the mainstream Rightwing around this parts has policies which are to the left of the Democrat Party in the US, though not by much, so for example nobody has a Healthcare system which is as bad as the US - even the ones with a Health Insurance based system have way more rules and consumer protections around it - and even in the worst countries Public Transport is better than in the in US.

Then again at least one country in the EU - Hungary - currently has Fascism whilst the other ones which are said to have Far-Right governments (such as Italy) politically sit between the US Democrats and Republicans.

In the things which are the responsibility of the EU (i.e. trade-related subjects), the EU is significantly more pro-consumer than the US, with for example the precautionary principle - i.e. proven safe before allowed, rather than the US’ method of allowing until proven unsafe - being used for chemical substances which people tend to come in contact with, and more broadly with consumers having way more rights all across the EU than they have in the US (were it massively depends on the State) and with stricter rules when it comes to pollution and more broadly Environmental damage.

I supposed that in the things which fall under the responsibility of the EU, it tends to be sort of half-way between Neoliberal and Social-Democrat, for example it’s very Neoliberal when it comes to Finance, but it’s Social Democrat when it comes to consumer rights and protections, especially for things like food, though even there it’s sort of somewhere between lax and strict in regulatory terms. I suspect this is due to different countries caring more about different domains and hence the politics of countries which care more about a specific domain getting more strongly imprinted in legislation at an EU level so it ends up reflected into very different political spins for different trade domains.

Well, for me moving abroad was a massive eye opener, especially since I started by living in The Netherlands and when it comes to the way they do things the Dutch are very different even though they’re generally pretty relaxed (though they might not look so since they normally only real open up to people who they know well).

I went in with all those “bad” habits and found out that, no, those were not in fact “the way people do things”, they were just the way people tended to do things in my own country.

It probably helped that I moved driven by wanting to “learn different perspectives and ways of doing things” rather than for economic reasons (back in the 90s somebody with an Engineering degree would be just fine in Portugal and be under no economic pressure to emigrate). These were the days when you could be hired from abroad even as a junior software developer and the company would pay your moving and settling costs, so you didn’t actually need money to move, just willpower and guts.

IMHO, everybody should live abroad for long enough to feel that you really live there (so at least a year or two), if only for the perspective and broader life experience it brings.

“I fart in your general direction!”

It’s a mix of various behavioural and social learned habits.

Consideration for others is only direct person to person and regulated by social shame: people don’t think of “the system” as being “other people”, they think of it as something you take advantage of and you’re a sucker (otário) if you don’t, so when they’re not being watched by others or standing out they’ll take for themselves that which is of the fuzzy “others”:

• They’ll go around the queue if they found a quiet way back or they feel not seen (people in cars generally acts as if they themselves are not seen)
• They’ll swindle the State on tax or benefits if they’ll think they can get away with it.
• They’ll park their cars on sidewalks hindering or even blocking pedestrians.
• They’ll keep on crossing the traffic lights just after they turned red even though pedestrians are waiting to cross.
• They’ll not use the car blinking lights when it’s merely for the benefit of others (I.e. turning right) but will when it might help them (I.e. turning left across another lane).
• They’ll leave trash on the ground in the middle of a forest.

And more.

Generally people will behave vastly more selfishly if they think they won’t stand out but be ashmed to do so when they feel that others are judging them negatively for it (that’s what I mean with “regulated by social shame”)

This kind of behaviour then translates into very low activism when it comes to things which are “of everybody” such as the Environment.

As for other elements of the lack of prosperity in Portugal, I would say two related to the management culture in the country stand out:

• A tendency for Nepotism, for example “a cunha”. More in general choices about who does what are regulated by “who do I know” and “who do I like”, not objective merit and suitability criteria. The result is that generally the best person for the job is NOT the one that gets the job, especially in positions seen as more prestigious (mainly management).
• Very little natural tendency for being organised: people tend to do just about everything reactively, the whole time, and almost never proactively and this also applies to managers who are generally terrible at preparation and organisation resulting in lots of time wasted from “going after the wrong thing”, inappropriate tools for the job, lot of empty periods were somebody is waiting for others and so on. Further, because of the lack of preparation and organisation a lot of otherwise predictable problems that could have easily been avoided if tacked earlier become full-blown fires, so people end up spending lots of time in firefighter mode - fixing problems rather than doing productive activities. All this inefficiency is then compensated with overwork, which brings its own problem since overworked people are tired people and tired people make more mistakes and have an even lower tendency to be proactive. The Portuguese tend to work long hours whilst having low productivity. All this also means that most Portuguese managers are pretty shit at the more advanced levels of management, i.e. Strategy.

And so on.

All these various elements are painfully visible in the behaviour of Portuguese politicians and their management of the country.

Because this stuff are learned behaviours most people that grew up here have them and they naturally feel that “this is how people are” since in their life experience “everybody does this”. From my own experience, people can learn to act differently, but when pretty much everybody around them behaves like that, they’re not even aware that they’re acting in specific ways which are not universal plus some of these things only yield rewards when most people are doing it and being the sole person acting in a certain way just makes one stand out or even be seen as a sucker.

If it’s good enough for inventors, it’s good enough for musicians, writters and software developers.

More likely Nero.

The relationship of the average Portuguese with cars is still just as weirdly fucked up as it was 40 years ago.

Yeah, I’ve lived in a couple of countries in Europe and my fellow countrymen are the least socially aware of all and easily 30 - 40 years behind Northern Europe and Scandinavia.

I moved back to Portugal some years ago, after 2 decades abroad, and in several things (mobility, environmental awareness, social values) it was like going back in time.

Things are especially bad in everything to do with cars, with people still having the same mindset as back in the 80s, even young people.

Pretty similar to how Brexit reduced the popularity of being anti-EU in the rest of the European Union.

I agree with that: I don’t think any “people” has an intrinsically heightened disposition for racism.

In fact, if I thought otherwise I would be quite the hypocrite as that would be pure and simple racist prejudice.

What I do think is that the Press and Political environment in Germany for the past decades have promoted race-based thinking thus increasing the acceptance of racism and even a certain blindness to it because the dominant forms were “benevolent” racism. This is how Germany ended up were it is now: by the active normalizing of a dysfunctional behavior as being “benevolent” rather than due to predisposition of those living there for such things.

You see a lot of that too in places like the US were one party is Racist in the traditional sense and the other spins their Racism in the modern sense (but when it comes to, for example, Muslims, they’re both traditional racists).

The really alarming thing is that rather than stop and re-evaluate that posture in light of how that ended up with the German Government supporting the most extreme Genocide of this century (so far :/ ) very overtly due to the race of the genociders, the German authorities have instead doubled down with authoritarian measures (IMHO, bypassing the Courts to expel dissidents is pretty authoritarian for a supposedly Democratic nation).

IMHO, such climate of race-based thinking and normalization of racial prejudice and discrimination (even if spinned as “positive”) is also fertile ground for the growth of traditional racists such as the AfD in Germany and the MAGAs in America - the moral and ethical distance between “those people should be supported because of their race” and the traditional racists’ “we should be supported because of our race” is much, much smaller than the distance between “people’s race should not mater for how they are seen or treated” and “we should be supported because of our race” - “if it’s OK to do it for them then it’s OK to do it for us” is quite a tiny mental step.

I don’t actually think that Germany is worse in this than for example the US, it’s just that I had a far, far better opinion of Germany than I had of the US previously and the deep disappointment of figuring out the dark nature of racial policies in German Politics makes it hit me harder than what’s happening in the US.

That makes sense.

I stand corrected.

Oh, casual Racism is a plague all over the World and, worse, some of the countries which supposedly have gone beyond it, really just changed the lists of “good”/“deserving” races and “bad”/“undeserving” races and called the discriminatory behaviour anchored in those new lists “positive”, as if treating people differently depending on their race is a good thing as long as it’s only for certain races but a bad thing for others.

Racism is always a coin with two faces - there are always some who are presumed to, due to their ethnicity, be relatively better people and thus treated in a relatively better way, and others who due to their ethnicity are presumed to be relatively worst people and treated in a relatively worst way - and just because one goes around empasysing the “positive” side of treating some better due to their race doesn’t make the thing any less Prejudiced, Discriminatory and unjust.

The boundary between Racism and not-Racism is not defined by which are the races for which you will treat individuals better and which for which you treat individuals worst, or even on the focusing on positive treatment for some races (the modern spin on Racism) rather than negative treatment for other races (the Fascist spin on Racism), it’s defined by judging and treating or not people differently depending on their race.

To eliminate Racism you need to eliminate the way of thing thinking that is the foundation of Racism: that the character of people, their worth and the treatment they deserved depends on their ethnicity.

“Positive” Discrimination doesn’t eliminate Racism, it just moves the unfair, Racist, treatment to favour different ethnicities - a different list of ubermenschen and untermenschen rather than just treating all as equally being menschen.

Whilst you (rightly!) point out and criticize the casual racism all over the place done with the traditional (Fascist) spin on racism, you seem to be totally oblivious to the Racism with the modern neoliberal spin which is just as unjust, prejudiced and discriminatory (hence just as Racist) as practiced in Germany, where it is systemic and even weaved into the structures of power (exactly as shown in this news story, with people being deported without trial for being against it), and the powerful activelly practicing discrimination on the basis of ethnicity and suppressing criticism of it with laws that bypass the Courts, is a far, FAR worse situation than merely the powerless being casually racist.

The takeover of Israel by a nakedly ethno-Fascist regime which has started a full-blown Genocide along ethnic lines of proportions and cruelty exceeded only by the Holocaust, is what shined a harsh light on the reality that the whole business of presuming things and treating people based on their ethnicity is wrong even when you spin it as “positive”, and Germany was so far down into Racism with that modern neoliberal spin that the country, unlike many other countries in Europe which also previously supported Israel, has been unable to pull itself out of it when it de facto transformed into support of a very extreme form of Fascist-style Racism.

True, I never lived in Eastern Europe, only in Northern, Western and Southern Europe.

Are you telling me that Eastern Europeans commonly support groups mass murdering children along racial lines if the ethnicity of the members of the group doing the mass murder is deemed more important than other ethnicities?

Because that’s some pretty extreme Racism (as race-based discrimination goes, it’s pretty hard to beat actually sending weapons to child mass murders and justifying it with one’s “unwavering support” of their ethnicity), whilst the most extreme Racism I’m aware of in EE is in ex-Jugoslavia between mainly Serbs, Croats and ethnic Albanians which was also a Genocide but didn’t leave tens of thousands of dead children, bombed out hospitals, a long list of murdered journalists and a list of babies murdered just in the first 6 months which is 17 pages long, not even close.

Even the stuff that happened following the break up of Jugoslavia did not get anywere as bad as what Germany supports in Gaza very overtly because of the ethnicity of the Genociders and I’m not aware of any present day EE nation like Germany supporting outright Genocide openly because of the ethnicity of the genociders (though from what I’ve heard there’s a lot of Racism in Hungary, though I believe they fall short of supporting mass murdering of children if done by those of the “right” race).

In this Germany is almost in a class of its own (though not quite: it’s there together with Brexiter Britain and Trump’s America, hardly stellar company).

PS: Re-read how I named the Roma People, “Roma people” and how my use of the word “Gypsies” is very clearly framed as a clarification for those who do not know the proper name of that people. I expected that the way I wrote would make it pretty clear that the proper way to refere to them was “Roma people”, but guess I was wrong in that.

I was born in a country which was under a Fascist dictatorship.

Not long after, there was a Revolution, the Fascist Regime was overthrown and the country became Democratic.

Still now, half a century later, people in my country of birth remain quite sensitive and easilly alarmed by practices of those in power which are similar to the kind of things that those in power in the Fascist regime would do (for example, things like civil society surveillance).

I expect exactly the same from Germans, maybe just less of it since their Fascist days have been gone for longer and (judging by my own country), people’s alertness to and rejection of things “like what they used to do before” seems to fall the further away from the dictatorship days we are.

Or are you telling me that Germans are special and different from other people and hence it’s wrong to expect them to have a higher tendency than those who never had Fascism to reject practices by those in power now which are similar to those of their very own past Fascist dictatorship?!

PS: That said, maybe a people who has freed itself from Fascism is significantly more sensitive to anything that bares even just a passing ressemblance to what the Fascists use to do, than a people whose Fascism was overthrown by others, in which case I was wrong in expecting Germans to have a natural rejection of Fascist practices. That being so, it would also explain just how easilly the German power elites keep on bit by bit, doing more and more things like they did in the “old days” and most of the population meekly accepts it or even defends and aplauds it.

I suspect the problem was that the attempt at making amends was framed in a way that kept the Racism alive and well (i.e. the duty of making amends was framed as being towards an entire ethnicity rather than being towards the actual people who were victims, their families and their descendants - so kept treating people as ethnics but a specific ethnic group is now “good ones” rather than “bad ones”). This both explains the repeated loud proclamations of “unwavering support for the Jewish People” and the complete and total lack of similar support for other etnicities targetted by the Nazis with the Holocaust, such as the Roma People (more commonly known as Gypsies).

That the making of amends was itself structured within a Racist thinking framework isn’t exactly surprising given than the whole thing was done back in the 50, which was still very Racist by modern day standards, and that pretty much all of the Nazi “middle management” as well as the Nazi-supporting wealthy elites were kept in their places (it’s easy to get old Fascists to loudly proclaim their disavowing of the last regime, but changing the actual way they look at their fellow human beings in the privacy of their minds is something much harder).

The surprising part (certainly it was hugelly surprising for me, who used to have a very good opinion of the country less than a decade ago) is that in its way to the XXI century Germany has not in fact evolved along with the rest of Europe away from a mental framework that sees ethnicity as more relevant than character.

Absolutelly, all Western nations have problems with the Far-Right and its favorite practices (Racism, Fascism, Might is Right, Nationalism and so on), to a less or greater level depending on the country, but the vast majority of countries in Europe had actually, before this period or moral and ethical regression started a decade ago, gone far further amongst the population in general in disassembling the ideological foundations of Racism and Authoritarinism supporting that kind of crap, than Germany.

I’ve lived all over Europe and once upon a time I naively expected that people in the country of Nazism would nowadays be the most sensitive to racist thinking and acting of all, and hence the least racist of all, but that’s not at all my experience.

Germany and Germans justifying the racist practices of their own power elites and the fast slide back to authoritarian practices, with whataboutism and “legality” (as if most of the worst actions of the Nazis weren’t things they first made sure to make legal) is, frankly, scary as fuck for any European who is not a far-right Muppet, not least because it shows the moral and ethical distance between mainstream German politics and the AfD is paper thin.

Most of Europe isn’t supporting the mass murder of children by a nation because of the ethnicity said nation claims to represent and most of Europe hasn’t made it legal to deport people who weren’t tried and found guilty of something, and that Germany, of all nations, who did what they did almost a century ago and spent the time since telling us “Never again!” are back to the level of racism that knowingly sends wepons and ammo to a nation mass murdering chidren justifying that support with the ethnicity of the people of that nation, and is passing Fascist legislation to deport people without trial, is really making them stand out from the rest of Europe when it comes to Racism and Fascism.

Your peers in Europe on the Racist and Fascist scales are the likes of Hungary, not the Scandinavians or even the French.

I seem to remember that most of the actions of the Nazis once they got into power were also legal.

Maybe, just maybe, people should have a standard of right and wrong which does not delegate that definition to “legality”, especially people in Germany.