re: Catalonia's Parliament just voted to declare independence from Spain; Spain fights back

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Northern Ireland declare independence from the UK

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If this happens, what's the likelihood that those counties just return to Ireland?

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If this happens, what's the likelihood that those counties just return to Ireland?

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Slim to none. The protestant/catholic divide is too vast for unification, especially when they can mooch off of NATO for defense and the Eurozone for access to markets.

The Eurozone simply makes nation states unnecessary since regions don't have to band together for economic, monetary, or defense reasons. Everyone prefers local control when possible. The EU's shared currency and free movement of people and goods eliminates all of the drawbacks of extremely localized government over most matters.

Europe has a choice to make:
Confederation or Federalism

They can form a unified EU government with authority to enact unified rules of immigration, unified base regulatory policy, shared currency, and military decision-making.

Or, the EU must break up back into a large loose confederation of nation states which control their borders, utilize their own currencies, and fund their own militaries.

For the past 20 years, Europe has been trying to have their cake and eat it too, with the EU handling regulatory, economic, currency issues, and movement within the EU while the nation states maintained their autonomy over fiscal matters, entitlements, and immigration from outside the Eurozone.

The problem is that some nations have weaker immigration laws than others, but once an immigrant is legally established in one nation, they can move freely to all others. Thus, nations like Greece and Spain (which still maintains North African colony cities) are flooded with migrants. Once those migrants make it there, they can move anywhere throughout the continent, often migrating north to wealthier nations like Sweden and Belgium which have more robust entitlement regimes.

It's the same issue the United States is having with our essentially open border to the South. The wealthier nations are being bankrupted by violent, entitled immigrants let in by poorer nations.

Either the EU must be empowered to deal with it continent-wide, or each individual nation must shed the convenience of free movement of people and goods, expel the immigrants, and re-secure their own borders.

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