A sad day for autonomy

Whose autonomy? Are you talking about some nebulous 'national autonomy'? I couldn't care less. And, "...at the expense of the many"? What exactly is it that you think the many are losing?

liar, admit it, your just a puppet on strings being pulled by a euro-bureaucrat in Brussels now.

It doesn;t particularly though. I mean it doesn;t really affect the pace of privatisation, or greatly affect our day to day lives in the workplace or in our communities.
A more unfied EU may have some negative connotations for world peace in the future, but the ins and outs of the lisbon treaty don;t really affect that much. The growing economic conflict with Russia over gas and oil reserves and the slow decline of the power base of the US will continue whether the treaty is ratified or not.

Yeah, it's irrelevant. I don't have any more say over what the EU does then over what the British government does, nor do any other ordinary people.

What does 'autonomy' mean? This is a genuine question - anarchists use the term all the time and I have no real idea what they mean by it.

I think autonomy is supposed to mean freedom from something. In other words it's a completely negative freedom which has no conception of what kind of society we should create or how we should get there.

I once had an argument with an anarchist who thought that the EU should be criticised on the basis that the fewer levels of bureaucracy you have above you, the more free you are. As if anarchism is no more than a simple absence of governmental structures.

I bet the residents of Somalia love all of that autonomy they've been getting.

Hey guys,
I think you are all right in the sense that there is no real autonomy in the way our lives work in the society we live in, still.
Lisbon has made the "product" of education exploitable to an extreme all over europe, I think this is not a very new step for the UK but if you have followed the actions by other European Students, Danish, German, Spanish, Austrian (just to name a few), there has been harsh criticism of the Eu, their politics and the way they in fact are changing our day to day lives.
Same goes for farmers of which some are facing ruin because of changing EU legislature or have grave fears because of the introduction of GMOs, sorry don't feel like getting in very deep right now.
But I personally have been coming into contact with more and more EU law, guidlines and rulings that are actually messing with peoples life.
The only "Autonomy" problem I can see is that the EU not even is legitimized through a bourgouise liberal meaning of the word Democray, as the parliament really has very little power and nothing else is elected or electable.
From a more radical point of view this could be seen as a strategical advantage, as people might slowly realize, that these decisions are made by people so far removed from them that there is no way in hell they have the right to make them and thus will be more likely to question this kind of authority and the way we live in general.
A very positive take, for sure, the negative one would be, that people just slide of more and more into apathy as they don't feel like they actually have the right to be in charge of their lives.
Anyway, my point is, the EU has an impact on a lot of peoples lives, that is for sure, and the EU structural apparatus is even further away from a world that recognizes the autonomy of human beings, in that sense I kinda know what tina is hitting at.

I (used to) know of one self-described "anarchist" who reckoned we should support the EU(SSR) cos it apparently undermined national chauvinism and encouraged socialism or some trash.

Well many of the countries in western Europe have made a hell of a lot less bad job of running their countries than westminster has done running ours. Perhaps letting them run this country for a bit isn't such a bad decision.

Well supposedly a successful EU project would probably force British politics towards the centre, seeing as how the national mainstream discourse is pitched a little way to the right of the EU median.

This is all utterly fanciful though, since the left-right dichotomy in European bourgeois politics is a complete fallacy anyway, and in real terms the EU acts to facilitate the further exploitation of its resources (the biggest and important one being its workforce of course) and it further coordinates the prevention of migration of non-EU citizens (southern Spain being an example, and increasingly Italy as well).

I imagine that an EU supra-state - with interlinked interests - could arm a coordinate response against strong, entrenched workers' movements in specific regions (the French union movement for example).

i think that's Toni Negri's position; EU is a bit like Empire, which means soon there'll be communism

When I was younger and more naive I used to be strongly tempted to support the EU just because of the sheer amount of irrational bile it inspires in Little Englander UKIP twats. Actually, come to think of it, supporting the EU just to piss Kilroy off still sounds quite tempting.

I also know a guy who did acid and then got freaked out cos he was convinced that everyone hated him because they thought he was the EU. True story.

Autonomy means you can take acid and freak out and your friends wont think you're the EU. Clearly.

It's a word that has a lot of currency in other European languages (such as Spanish, Italian and German) but translates rather awkwardly.

In Spain, Italy, Greece, Latin America and probably some other places, many state unis are called "autonomous", which means that the state funds them but is prohibited from intervening in their running, often including the banning of police and military from campus grounds (obviously this all unravels as soon as there's a mass struggle that threatens the state, vis a vis UNAM, 2000).