[bigfudge]

But we have huge economic dependence which could also be used. We need to wean ourself off the Chinese supply chain. This will take decades, but the lesson here is that it will be used against us in future.

Europe is big enough as an internal market to sustain a good quality of life for the majority of the population — even if our 1% are disadvantaged relative to those in US, Russia. We have the capital and resources to defend ourselves too. We can open outward to Canada, Australia, democratic parts of Asia, Africa. But we need to avoid any dependence on powerful authoritarian regimes like China, India, the US, Indonesia etc.

[t43562]

I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.

Civilisation is organising in larger and larger groups - everyone becoming more dependent on each other and having laws and so on to resolve problems instead of fighting.

.....so somehow, for the sake of making Star Trek and all those wonderful science fiction stories possible.....we have to get that dependence back somehow. I'm joking but not joking. Some Americans are reasoable and somehow, for the world to survive, we have to find some way to help reasonable people all over the world to work together. So we can reach the science fiction future.

[bigfudge]

That sounds great. I'm just not sure it's compatible with current nation states.

As a first step we could perhaps agree that individual people could come and live in Europe and participate in our democracy?

I think physical presence is actually quite a good precondition for participation. At least people physically present have some skin in the game.

With a transition period, I'm not sure I'd have a big problem cutting many other links with non-democratic countries. I agree with your ideals but all evidence is that trading and communication links and other sources of interdependence will be abused. We need to have policies which respond to that.

[shafyy]

> I understand that but what's nagging at me is this: I think civilisation is about building dependence really.

As it looks now, there might be a limit on the scale of global collaboration. There's nothing that says that the trend of global depenence and collaboration will continue (in fact, it is reversing now).