4 ms·

> Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” But why has the EU become a government? This scope creep and the enormous bureaucracy it has

> Honestly, every government is going to “fuck up so many times” But why has the EU become a government? This scope creep and the enormous bureaucracy it has established has passed ao gradually that few people remember when it really was just a trade community. The EU should not exist in a form where fuck-ups impact the private lives of individuals.

derefr 8y ago
The EU is an illusion; the constituent bureaucracies that encompass it already existed (just with different and mostly-random 80% coverage of the Eurozone) as treaty organizations before the EU was formed. The point of the EU agreement was essentially to establish a meta-treaty of "if you, as an EU country, want to have a treaty with another EU country, then it has to be with all the other EU countries" (the "if you're going to bring chewing gum you have to bring enough for the class" rule), and then to retroactively apply that to all existing treaties within the Eurozone, either expanding, merging, or discarding those treaty organizations that enforce those treaties to match. It looks like the EU is a lot of things now, but it's not like those treaty-ratified government departments and organizations didn't exist before the EU. They were just illegible, because they were doing things like "UK-France Treaty of Lausanne Naval collaboration", which wasn't obviously an attempt at protecting the entire continent (because it wasn't run by multilateral agreement, but rather just... oligolateral(?) agreement of a few parties interested in mantaining peace in the area), even though peace for the entire region was the treaty organization's stated goal. Likewise the thousand trade agreements that were flattened down into the Eurozone trade agreement, each of which was—at the time—between all the interested member nations that they could get to the table, but where that membership hadn't since kept up with changing borders. If you want to hate the EU, you have to hate it for the things the EU itself does, that wouldn't exist if we never made an EU. That's mostly "a rationalization of multilateral treaty membership." Few people really hate that. I suspect that what people who dislike the EU really dislike, is treaty organizations themselves. The EU "puts a name to a face" for many of those organizations, so to speak, but they've been there pushing governments around (at their own behest, as sovereignty-level precommitment strategies) since at least 1815, when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigation_on_the_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigat... was founded.

derefr 8y ago

The EU is an illusion; the constituent bureaucracies that encompass it already existed (just with different and mostly-random 80% coverage of the Eurozone) as treaty organizations before the EU was formed. The point of the EU agreement was essentially to establish a meta-treaty of "if you, as an EU country, want to have a treaty with another EU country, then it has to be with all the other EU countries" (the "if you're going to bring chewing gum you have to bring enough for the class" rule), and then to retroactively apply that to all existing treaties within the Eurozone, either expanding, merging, or discarding those treaty organizations that enforce those treaties to match. It looks like the EU is a lot of things now, but it's not like those treaty-ratified government departments and organizations didn't exist before the EU. They were just illegible, because they were doing things like "UK-France Treaty of Lausanne Naval collaboration", which wasn't obviously an attempt at protecting the entire continent (because it wasn't run by multilateral agreement, but rather just... oligolateral(?) agreement of a few parties interested in mantaining peace in the area), even though peace for the entire region was the treaty organization's stated goal. Likewise the thousand trade agreements that were flattened down into the Eurozone trade agreement, each of which was—at the time—between all the interested member nations that they could get to the table, but where that membership hadn't since kept up with changing borders. If you want to hate the EU, you have to hate it for the things the EU itself does, that wouldn't exist if we never made an EU. That's mostly "a rationalization of multilateral treaty membership." Few people really hate that. I suspect that what people who dislike the EU really dislike, is treaty organizations themselves. The EU "puts a name to a face" for many of those organizations, so to speak, but they've been there pushing governments around (at their own behest, as sovereignty-level precommitment strategies) since at least 1815, when the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigation_on_the_Rhine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Commission_for_Navigat... was founded.