Can you or veen or somebody answer the following for me? I think I'm missing something fundamental. Great Britain is leaving the European Union, which is a politico-economic union of states, correct? The EU is supportive of the WTO and open and free trade. Would it be unfair to say that their single market is the next step up (and government driven...) from things such as NAFTA / TPP / other international trade agreements? If this is the case, then is there not cognitive dissonance in the outcry over a British exit of the EU when compared to opposition to the trade agreements listed above?
There's a lot of tribalism in politics. There's also a lot of false equivalency. For example, a referendum on EU membership does not, will not, and can not have anything to do with a Trump presidency no matter how much some people may want to draw parallels. NAFTA and TPP have benefits for some people and drawbacks for others, just like EU membership. The benefits trumpeted for the EU drew primarily on the agility and collective bargaining powers of a single currency. The UK, for example, thinks it's all that but from a population standpoint it's California, Oregon and Washington. From an economic standpoint it's California plus Washington. Meanwhile, the US from a population standpoint is... well, the phrase I like is that there are more honor students in China than there are students in the US and India will be bigger in a few years. That matters if you're a national corporation. If you're a weaver or a die maker or a cobbler or a haberdasher it matters fuckall. Post-war Europe was shaped primarily by the Marshall Plan and secondarily by the Non-Aligned Movement. In other words, in service to and then in defiance of the United States. The current political upheaval in Europe is due to citizens realizing that the past 20-odd years since the formation of the WTO hasn't really worked out as well as they'd like. The emotion driving the Brexit? It's what fueled the Sanders campaign, not the Trump campaign. Be careful whenever someone says "X is just like Y" because it means they don't want you to think about X and they don't want you to think about Y.
I dont know if I agree there. The demographics dont match very well for one. A lot of the brexit momentum was fueled by the economic migrants coming from Syria, Iraq, and potentially Turkey but there is also common ground with the sanders side with isolationism to fund the NHS. There is just a lot of frustration to go around from both sides and any movement that can hit enough of those frustrated voters has potential to take pretty drastic changes.The emotion driving the Brexit? It's what fueled the Sanders campaign, not the Trump campaign
The way I understand it is that trade agreements like TTP mean that the lowest common denominator is used, whereas the EU strives for regulations that are above the average of most of the countries involved. For example, much of the EU nature policies are modeled after the Dutch policies that were one of the leading environmental policies back in the day, so the EU enforced that level of nature protections across all of Europe. TTP could mean that products that do not live up to EU standards could still be sold here, a double standard which many deem unfair.