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Originally Posted by milo
do you think muslims in the uk are english/welsh/scottish/nirish/british? and from that european? Theres really little point in accepting any of your M-L opinions as being sincere if you're willing to prejudice on race for either an individual or a nation.
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I don't think you are asking me, but I'm going to throw in my opinion too. I think the whole nationalism -issue has never caused much more than grief. Generating regionalistic or nationalistic groups has rarely lead to anything else except for racism and xenophobia towards the people outside the group. In some cases, these beliefs are stronger (ie. the urban legend of the first black person in the Finnish countryside being driven off by a local with a tractor for being a troll), in some cases weaker. The same applies to classes. Once you register yourself as a member of given class, you automatically differentiate yourself from other classes - making yourself different, most of the time, "superior" in some aspect. The history is full of bloodshed, torture, and slavery bound to class, race, place of birth, or the surname of your parents. This is all pointless, useless, and has never lead to anything good on grand scale (Granted, I am in a "debt" to the Christian society at large for murdering, raping, stealing, and nearly genociding different "lesser" cultural groups in order to gather wealth to Europe).
While I am by definition European, Atheist, Finnish, White, Male, Lower class, (and a number of other things), and while how my life has been so far obviously creates prejudice to me, and affects what I do, excessive self-generated prejudice is just childish. I bet I'll be soon nailed as a hypocrite or with some other more creative term.
What comes to the expansion of the Union, in principle, I don't really mind much about the political integration - while it has it's benefits, the main part the political integration needs to reach is agreements on market laws. What goes to the reminder, nations should be allowed to join the Eurozone (which is, in my opinion, the main point of the whole Union, taking into account it's history) when the suitable economical criteria are met. If the criteria isn't met, there's little sense for the applicant and the Eurozone at large to do it. In the future, though, as "economic globalization" proceeds, it gets more and more sensible to create free-trade areas and even more/expand existing monetary unions, and it's really of benefit to us all.
The reasons that prevent countries like Morocco and Ukraine from ever, or at least in the near future, becoming members of the Union aren't primarily because they aren't suitable, but because they're seen as a threat. The market zone has it's requirements, and accepting a country like Ukraine would again cause problems to for example the agricultural industry in countries like Finland. While there's, in practise, little sense in continuing agriculture (in form of the mentioned pigfarmers and other), because other countries are by natural resources able to do it more effectively, the political concensus requires some naive form of "self-sustainability" (the same thing that applies to the pathetic thing they call the Finnish Defence Forces, which could easily be replaced and made more credible by investing 5 years worth military budged into nuclear warheads and obsoleting the conscript system at large), which is really the bottom line here.
It's not the economic profits and sustainability. It's the sight that allowing countries like Morocco and Ukraine generates a "security risk", and while they won't directly admit to it, they'd harm certain parts of the economy that are for some reason required to be kept intact. Go figure.