Datawolf wrote:This is unfortunate. Any speculation on what will happen if/when the EU economy completely tanks? I recall someone (Mr. Trollman, I think) mentioning that the EU was established in the first place as some sort of neighbourhood watch against Russia.
You're thinking of NATO, which may as well stand for
No Russia
Allowed
Treaty
Organization. The EU was created for two reasons: the first was to provide en economic incentive for political unity that would prevent wars in Europe from destroying things every generation (which they have basically done for two generations straight - a new record). And the second was to create an economic bloc that could avoid being colonized by Russia
or the United States (and more recently, to be able to stand up to China, the Arab League, and India).
Interestingly, NATO is still doing just fine. If you'll recall, NATO just demanded and got regime change in Libya in less than a year without losing soldiers. That fresh off of demanding and getting independence for Kosovo even after promising Russia that they weren't going to. NATO dreams of adding Georgia and Ukraine and pissing in Russia's
literal front yard are on hold for the moment, but the line has moved steadily East and Kaliningrad is completely surrounded by NATO countries.
The collapse of European Monetary Union isn't going to break NATO. It may break the WTO, or at least cause the US, China, and Russia to rewrite a bunch of EU rules. Good chance that in 5 years or so we can start calling Port made from California or Argentine grapes "Port" again. Like, on the bottle and everything. The failure of the EU narrative is going to cause a bunch of countries to abandon it. Despite the fact that the EMU has been an incredibly undemocratic institution that has fought tooth and nail against democractic oversight at every step of its rise and fall, its narrative has been one of democratically united democracies - so chances are unfortunately pretty good that a bunch of the countries are going to go through undemocratic stages.
You can already see that happen in Italy and Greece, where the current leaders are unelected bankers who
promise to defy the will of the people to dismantle the social safety net. Spain just
elected a Francoist party to an absolute majority in parliament. All of these countries have strong fascist movements and recent fascist histories (as does Portugal), so the idea that the PIGS countries could decide to abandon democracy and spend a period languishing under an iron fisted tyrant shouldn't be treated as unthinkable scare talk like it is in the media today.
Datawolf wrote: Is it possible that Russia might step in, pay off everyone's debts and force Europe to suck its vodka soaked dick for the next few centuries?
No. At least, not all at once.
Gx1080 wrote:Russia is a rotten carcass, plundered by the excess of the Communists and then by the Bankstas on the 90's under Yeltsin. The Russian boogeyman is an overused relic from the Cold War.
what is that I don't even.
OK, no. Just, no. Your grasp of Russian history before 1991 is basically nonexistent. Let's go back a bit. Russia spent the 19th century as a vast undeveloped wasteland languishing under the grip of disinterested tyrants and rapacious feudal warlords. Like China, it was an endless hellscape of subsistence farmers with starvation in one province or another
every year for centuries at a time under a ridiculously out of touch set of emperors. They were routinely kicked around by Western Powers and even got their asses handed to them by the Japanese Empire.
However, like China they had a huge population and a tradition of obedience to authority and indifference to human life, so under Communist central planning they grew fast and strong. They went from a ludicrous laughing stock to the most powerful country in Europe in
one generation. And they kept that going for like two generations before their empire collapsed under the weight of being unable to reform themselves to late 20th century standards with the amount of dogmatic conservatisim they had invested in.
In the 1990s, Yeltsin brought in a bankster coup that created a
literal banker-criminal syndicate that controlled (and continues to control) tremendous amounts of the country's wealth. Russia fell prostrate under the draining maw of corruption and lost a good chunk of its territory.
Nevertheless, Russia is still the strongest single country in Europe. And with the EMU falling apart, power will naturally gravitate back to Russia as it moves away from Germany. The reality is that in the whole world the largest tribe of people is the Han (the majority population of China) at about a billion people, and then there's a three way tie between the Americans (the synthetic tribal affiliation of of people in the US and Canada), the Bengali (the people of Bangladesh and Eastern India), and the Arabs (the majority population of the middle east) - at about 300 million each. Now here's the thing: the Slavs are in three different groups but
collectively they are
400 million people and occupy more than half the land area of Europe (in addition to all that stuff in Asia).
Right now, West Slavia is all part of the EU, and Yugoslavia is divided into the NATO part and the Russian part, and Russia doesn't even own all the Russias as White Russia is currently Belarus and Little Russia is off being the rabid weasel that is Ukraine. But the reality is that if the Slavs get in line to form Slavia, it would be bigger than other prospective world super powers like the Caliphate or United Bengal. And unlike those ones, or even China, Slavia is full of Europeans who can like
read and shit.
Slavia is not a world super power right now because it is divided into factions. But it's divided into like
four factions, and has a much better chance of getting put together than The Caliphate does. And of the current countries in the Slavic region, the only ones that are strong enough to push Slavic Unity are Russia and Poland. People in Europe are totally right to fear Russian domination. Dominating Eastern Europe in something that Russia did 30 years ago and something they could do five years from now if NATO participation dried up.
The thing you don't hear nearly enough about is the rising influence of Poland. As the most powerful country in Slavia that isn't Russia, their influence is continuing to rise. They are the sixth most populous member of the EU, and the largest country in mainland Europe that isn't on the disaster train that is the Euro. Also, it's important to remember that everyone in this region remembers
Poland used to look like this.
-Username17
