0
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
0 points (NaN% liked)
Europe
8484 readers
1 users here now
News/Interesting Stories/Beautiful Pictures from Europe 🇪🇺
(Current banner: Thunder mountain, Germany, 🇩🇪 ) Feel free to post submissions for banner pictures
Rules
(This list is obviously incomplete, but it will get expanded when necessary)
- Be nice to each other (e.g. No direct insults against each other);
- No racism, antisemitism, dehumanisation of minorities or glorification of National Socialism allowed;
- No posts linking to mis-information funded by foreign states or billionaires.
Also check out [email protected]
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I for one do not mind that the EU legal environment does not lend itself easily to forming megacorporations. There is a lot of great innovation coming from the EU. The development of Lemmy is for example funded by the EU public sector.
On the topic of the article, I wonder how much of our economy is still restrained by still existing protectionism and division between member states. There is free trade, yes, but we still speak different languages and moving to work between countries is still not as easy as moving between US states.
Those are partly the same topic btw...
Not having a massive domestic market to start in and even higher requirements to translate your product costs money. It's not a coincidence that the country with the most successful tech startups in europe is english-speaking.
So why are Stellantis and VW owning all your car companies if it’s hard to form mega corps?
Unilever own almost everything you can think of in the world and Britain was in the EU.
Nestle.
Etc etc. just because you don’t have a successful tech industry doesn’t mean you don’t have ridiculously large mega corporations
I'm sorry to be that guy but Nestlé is Swiss which is not EU. Not saying that it's any less of a fucked up Megacorp though.
Switzerland applies most of the EU laws because they want access to the single market though, so for this purpose they might as well be in the EU.
That's not true though. Swiss laws differ wildly from EU laws in so many different fields including the markets. They have been in fights for tens of years over so many different things regarding regulations of the free market etc. you really can not consider Switzerland part of the EU.
Because the companys at the core (and the sectors they work in) of these megas are comparably ancient compared to technologiy megas. And they started at a time before today's easily accessable global market.
While big tech companies are the startups of just a few decades ago. And there it is immensely beneficial a) to have a big domestic market and then b) to be able to reach a lot of international markets that speak your language without the need for translations (the translations can basically start later for the countries with an already established market to finance it).
For this reason you see a US dominance in tech (big domestic market and the language most internationally understand), then followed by countries like UK (same language), China or (emerging) India (big domestic market).
While new European companies especially in the tech sector basically have no chance unless they develop in foreign english in the first place, and even then they are still at a disadvantadge.
I don't think the language barrier is that big of a deal. And more importantly I think the cultural value it provides us vastly outweights the economic benefit of a shared tongue.
I think one of the more urgent reforms that could help the EU prosper would be a common fiscal policy. We have the same tarifs on goods coming from abroad and most of us share the same currency, but countries are still offering varying tax rates. I think having an EU wide tax policy would help spreading the European branches of foreign companies more evenly. Though I reckon not everyone would like this (wink wink, Ireland).
EDIT: oh and also. I agree with your overall point, but using Lemmy as an example for "great innovation coming from the EU"...
It's interesting because every US state has a different fiscal policy (Delaware being the well-known tax heaven for companies for instance), and it doesn't seem to hinder them too much.
The language is a big one. English seems to become the lingua franca, but the proficiency level among the population differs a lot from one area to the other, and also brings the question of the local culture and heritage.
I was thinking the other day that just even a language such as Interlingua (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua), that can be easily learned for all speakers of Romance languages, would help a lot in collaborating between populations of neighboring countries. On the other side of the spectrum, languages like Latvian might go extinct due to the massive emigration: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.NETM?locations=LV
We will not get people who are past their 40s to learn a new language en-masse. Meanwhile many of the young generations are quite proficient with English.
In the business context in particular it is important that language is precise, so contracts can be negotiated. This often enough is an issue even if all parties are of the same native language. There exists a lot of legal interpretation for each language as to how specific terms are to be understood, as well as standard formulations and references for specific industries.
All of this established practice would have to be re-established with a constructed language. This process takes decades, if not centuries. In the current situation it seems much easier to teach proper English in school and encourage usage of English, so people are proficient in it.
Maybe in Western Europe, but years of online gaming have taught me that Eastern Europeans have dreadful English skills. Your perspective is probably skewed, since we Germans are comparatively fluent.
It's even worse. Germany has still some generational divide here but high proficiency on average on a level comparable to countries without that generational gap. So in reality Germans are not comparably fluent, but very proficient... or not at all. Which skews perception even more.