Posted on 06/10/2016 9:29:57 AM PDT by Olog-hai
German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble warned Friday that if Britain voted to leave the European Union, it wouldn’t have access to the single market like non-members Norway and Switzerland do.
“That won’t work,” the veteran minister told Germany’s Der Spiegel weekly, which on Saturday plans to publish a German-English edition at home and in Britain with “Please don’t go!” on the cover.
“That would require the country to follow the rules of a club which right now it wants to leave.” […]
Schäuble warned that a Brexit could spark contagion in the EU, according to excerpts of the interview due to appear in Der Spiegel’s Saturday edition. “How, for example, would the Netherlands react, given its traditionally very close ties to Britain?” he said. …
(Excerpt) Read more at thelocal.de ...
They apparently resume their master race ambitions when not cowering from imported 7th century savages.
EFTA members are either members of the EEA (which requires submission to EU regulations) or, in Switzerland’s case, have “bilateral agreements” with the EU that also stipulate compliance with EU regulations.
Note that the UK is singled out here.
Indeed.
The EFTA countries manage to trade with the EU without being forced to cede their law-making powers to the European Commission.
Also: UK trade is vital to the EU. The EU would lose a huge fraction of their export trade if they shut us out. We have the whip hand here.
The EU doesn’t have trade agreements with China or many African nations but does have trade with them.
You don’t have to have a trade agreement to order something online or via contract, pay for it and ship it.
Trade agreements thus are not NECESSARY for trade - and often lock in crony deals that hinder it instead, like the EU banning camel milk products because it wasn’t expressly permitted.
I suspect there are many customers/suppliers waiting for Britain to leave the EU and do business with them
- just the opposite from what the EU proponents are saying.
just continuing the Nazi goal - control of all Europe. The EU is their blitzkrieg. They will prove to more successful than Hitler was.
Schäuble needs the UK to help bail out the Euro when Greece, Italy Spain etc. go belly up again. Also needs the UK to take some of the Muslim immigrants who are overwhelming Germany.
None of the EU members cede their domestic lawmaking either, but the EU regulations still have force of law. Same applies in the EEA.
I agree that an impasse is most likely bluster, but the saber-rattling belies the true nature of the EU in spite of its protestations of “peace”.
Not a fact? Well, Germany has the highest GDP in the Eurozone and is the 2nd largest creditor in the Eurozone to other Eurozone countries (behind France). So I don’t think it’s a mischaracterization at all.
Think about how they went from being the “Sick Man of Europe” in the very early 2000s to that. It was not because of the free market. And it happened very suddenly.
And the threat was basically that the UK couldn’t obtain the “single market” benefit that Norway and Switzerland do - both countries being EFTA countries, not part of the EU. IOW, that the EU would reject UK “entry into EFTA,” and would treat the UK as totally “outside the Community.”
“Think about how they went from being the “Sick Man of Europe” in the very early 2000s to that.”
In the early 2000s they were just a decade out from being a divided nation, half of which was crippled by communism for decades. It’s really no big surprise that the former industrial powerhouse of Europe returned to being a powerhouse once they were reunited.
The European Commission’s top economists warned the politicians in the 1990s that the euro might not survive a crisis, at least in its current form. There is no EU treasury or debt union to back it up. The one-size-fits-all regime of interest rates caters badly to the different needs of Club Med and the German bloc.And such an economic government is what people like Schäuble have been pushing once more of late.
The euro fathers did not dispute this. But they saw EMU as an instrument to force the pace of political union. They welcomed the idea of a “beneficial crisis”. As ex-Commission chief Romano Prodi remarked, it would allow Brussels to break taboos and accelerate the move to a full-fledged EU economic government. …
Can’t help themselves. You wouldn’t believe what some Germans I know try to say about World War II.
The same garbage was said about the UK's decision to not join the Euro; and just a few years ago, the French and Germans ganged up on Cameron regarding putting UK banking under the EU jackboot, another empty lie. Ireland is likely to follow the UK out of the EU, in practice if not on paper, because they are heavy trading partners. Thanks Olog-hai.
AND what is it about Europeans that makes them trust Germans - knowing full well it always ends in disaster...
Ding ding. If Germany had another strongman who rebuilt both their own military and economy, locked the borders down and told the EU to cram it, most of not all of Europe would fall apart like wet paper. And they know it.
The people who had all the industry, that’s who. “Barely a yard of cloth or a pair of shoes can you make”, as one general rightly observed.
But let half the nation walk away, good luck holding the OTHER half together when the next big disagreement comes around. And even better luck keeping out the European powers who would have loved another shot at land-grabs on the continent - or in England’s case at revenge on a nation she STILL views as runaway servants and upstarts.
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