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I think it‘s the system working as intended. The EU is an international organization whose members are fully sovereign states. Unless you want the EU to be a

I think it‘s the system working as intended. The EU is an international organization whose members are fully sovereign states. Unless you want the EU to be a super state that can bully it‘s members with a mere 51% of the vote? The EU would fall apart then.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
I actually agree. The EU really doesn't like the politics of Hungary and Poland (which can be understood), but the system is working as intended.
- vkou 5y ago
  What some call working as intended, others look on, and say 'broken by design'. What's even the point of issuing rulings that can be ignored by the collusion of two out of 27 members?
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    It‘s very simple. The EU was originally a market union, which every member state profited from. For some reason, the EU has been adopting more and more powers completely unrelated to international trade, and it shows because you will never get 27 different nations to agree on controversial issues.
    - vkou 5y ago
      Generally these sorts of organizational problems are resolved by having different thresholds of consensus required for adopting different kinds of policies. Majority, super-majority... Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
      - will4274 5y ago
        > Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'. No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      And this is why I don't think that the ability for a few states to group together and ignore the EU's rulings is an automatically bad thing. States know that this protects them from becoming the US and losing most of their sovereignty.
    - iso1210 5y ago
      Seems to me that the environmental cost of mining is certainly related to international trade
      - kbelder 5y ago
        And selling fresh milk to your neighbor is related to 'interstate commerce', and regulated by the federal government. Once you start looking for tenuous connections, every human activity can be subsumed under trade. It's a wildcard.
    - Macha 5y ago
      Hungary and Poland both joined when the EU was in its current form - they knew what they were getting into. It's not liked they joined the EC or ECSC and just got pulled along for the ride into the EU's current state.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    It depends on what you think the design should have been. Some might look on and say that the ability for states to group together and not permit what they view as an overbearing ruling as a feature. Others would call it dissent. On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.
- varispeed 5y ago
  Ironically, something called "Liberum veto" is what caused Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to collapse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto The fact that one state can reject anything, is going to be the end of the EU if they don't fix it.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
The EU is a very interesting thing to watch as an American because the EU has parallels to our Federal Government in scope, but is almost like an alternate history where States had the right to secede and retained nationhood unlike our states. Also, if the political tensions in our nation continue to increase and don't stop, I would not be surprised in a decade from now if we start talking about replacing the Federal Government with a more EU-like arrangement.
- glogla 5y ago
  I'd rather go the other way around and make EU more like US (in organization, not in approach to solving things).
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  It's basically why the Articles of Confederation failed. The federal government was too made to weak to achieve much - each region (New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina) was individually powerful enough to ignore it.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Although, the EU is a lot stronger than the Articles of Confederation ever were, given that the EU has sorted out how it gets funded from year to year.
- runarberg 5y ago
  I’m not an EU expert so hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong. But I think the USA-EU comparisons are superficial at best. The EU has half the states the USA does but 50% more population. Unlike the USA—which has a really strong executive branch—there is hardly any executive branch in the EU. Instead the executive powers are held almost entirely by the member states. The EU does have a legislative branch (just like the USA) with around 650,000 people per representative. USA has around 750,000 but that number is further devalued by the USA senate (3,500,000 people per representative) which can hold a lot of power over the congress. I’m not aware that the EU has any equivalent. The scope of the two systems is also vastly different. The USA federal government represents the foreign policy of each of the state, funds a military which answers to the government, finances much of the infrastructure within the USA, etc. In the EU foreign policy is largely held by the member states, there is no EU military, and funding for infrastructure projects is more likely to come mostly from the member state it self, then from the EU. The USA collects federal taxes, while the EU gets their funding from the member states. Both have a federated court system. The USA have federal criminal courts which I’m not sure that the EU has, or at least not in the same way the USA does. To summarize: The US federal government and the EU have in common that they both have a democratically elected legislator (both with relatively low representation) and they both have a federal court system. But this is where the similarities end.
rich_sasha 5y ago
It is also a realisation that with ambitious projects you need to give up some sovereignty. All trade deals do that - swap some economic benefit for some legal commitments. It’s not even like the EU has big expectations of Poland. The sticking point now is an independent judiciary and free press. Seriously, it’s embarrassing that Poland has to be strong armed into these! In any case, Poland freely signed up to these commitments, it’s just bad form to eke out of them like this. Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  "Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland." Who voted them in? If you say that the people voted them in, it's painful, but it is the politics of the region. One of the terrifying parts of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for their leaders, including leaders who will actively undermine their own democracy, and they can be content with that because that's what they wanted. In which case, democracy has done what the people wanted, by ruining democracy. It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy. Similarly, the ability of a democratic people to vote to end democracy is democracy working even though it is also an awful necessary loophole. And if you say that we must take effort to prevent a democratic people, legally speaking, from democratically voting to end democracy, you are now technically anti-democratic. That's a weird place to be.
  - Swenrekcah 5y ago
    Aspiring dictators don’t run on abolishing democracy. It is not helpful to frame it like the people chose to ruin democracy. Democracy depends on a strong free press and independent courts. A strong free press is not just one part of a country’s businesses, it is quite literally the fourth pillar of democracy.
Macha 5y ago
And the EU should be free to insist on terms for membership of the organisation. If Poland/Hungary don't want to follow the terms they should just leave, like the UK just did. But they don't want that hassle, and they want to keep the EU benefits, so this mutual veto of sanctions is definitely a loophole to keep as many benefits without meeting the requirements. The EU is not the UN, while the UN's goal is to have every country in membership, and so it doesn't expel dictatorships just for being dictatorships, the EU is pretty explicit about democracy and human rights being requirements, which is why e.g. Turkey has not been allowed in so long. Had Orban had the level of control when Hungary joined that he has now, Hungary would not have been allowed in. PiS is probably not yet at that level, but it's clear they would like to be.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  And in which case, I would say this requirement, in practice, wasn't a requirement. I don't blame Hungary and Poland for gaming the system as much as I blame the EU for having this loophole (or feature, or necessary evil, depending on view).
  - rich_sasha 5y ago
    There are many cases in life where, it seems, the best state is not a Nash equilibrium. Still, I don't think it's fair to say "just game it then". That's a quick race to the bottom. The constructive equilibria in political systems appear to be unstable, and need active work to keep them there. The EU is in fact born out of that very realisation - its earliest seeds are in binding France and Germany in an economic union so they stop going to war with each other!
fsloth 5y ago
"I think it‘s the system working as intended." The system supports autocratic state capture in Poland and Hungary through massive EU subsidies - my tax money. No, it's not working.
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  If you think that the EU (which is primarly Germany and France) are giving out free monies to Eastern Europe just like that, then you have fallen victim to Berlins propaganda. In reality, what Germany and France buy with that „bribe“ is being able to freely export their goods (cars and retail items via international supermarket chains in particular) to Eastern European markets, while making sure the profits go back to the motherland (and are taxed there by the German/French government, leaving nothing in Eastern Europe). You get your tax monies more than back.
  - fsloth 5y ago
    This is not about money flow. I'm fine with that. What is not fine is the state capture this money flow facilitates. The state capture propagates a crony system, that will lead to a reduced economic output from what it could have been, and hence requiring more support in the future. The situation is both economically and politically untenable.
    - axiosgunnar 5y ago
      Ah ok I see, could you explain what exactly you mean by „state capture“? That the money goes to the state instead of private companies and the state is inherently wasteful etc?
      - fsloth 5y ago
        I advice you familiarize yourself with the state capture in Hungary by Orban and his Fidez party. The ruling party has eridacated free press and is close on ending judicial independence. They remain in power mainly because they funnel EU money to their voters. Poland is on it’s way in copying this system.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

I actually agree. The EU really doesn't like the politics of Hungary and Poland (which can be understood), but the system is working as intended.

vkou 5y ago
What some call working as intended, others look on, and say 'broken by design'. What's even the point of issuing rulings that can be ignored by the collusion of two out of 27 members?
- axiosgunnar 5y ago
  It‘s very simple. The EU was originally a market union, which every member state profited from. For some reason, the EU has been adopting more and more powers completely unrelated to international trade, and it shows because you will never get 27 different nations to agree on controversial issues.
  - vkou 5y ago
    Generally these sorts of organizational problems are resolved by having different thresholds of consensus required for adopting different kinds of policies. Majority, super-majority... Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
    - will4274 5y ago
      > Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'. No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    And this is why I don't think that the ability for a few states to group together and ignore the EU's rulings is an automatically bad thing. States know that this protects them from becoming the US and losing most of their sovereignty.
  - iso1210 5y ago
    Seems to me that the environmental cost of mining is certainly related to international trade
    - kbelder 5y ago
      And selling fresh milk to your neighbor is related to 'interstate commerce', and regulated by the federal government. Once you start looking for tenuous connections, every human activity can be subsumed under trade. It's a wildcard.
  - Macha 5y ago
    Hungary and Poland both joined when the EU was in its current form - they knew what they were getting into. It's not liked they joined the EC or ECSC and just got pulled along for the ride into the EU's current state.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  It depends on what you think the design should have been. Some might look on and say that the ability for states to group together and not permit what they view as an overbearing ruling as a feature. Others would call it dissent. On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.
varispeed 5y ago
Ironically, something called "Liberum veto" is what caused Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to collapse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto The fact that one state can reject anything, is going to be the end of the EU if they don't fix it.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

The EU is a very interesting thing to watch as an American because the EU has parallels to our Federal Government in scope, but is almost like an alternate history where States had the right to secede and retained nationhood unlike our states. Also, if the political tensions in our nation continue to increase and don't stop, I would not be surprised in a decade from now if we start talking about replacing the Federal Government with a more EU-like arrangement.

glogla 5y ago
I'd rather go the other way around and make EU more like US (in organization, not in approach to solving things).
arrosenberg 5y ago
It's basically why the Articles of Confederation failed. The federal government was too made to weak to achieve much - each region (New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina) was individually powerful enough to ignore it.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Although, the EU is a lot stronger than the Articles of Confederation ever were, given that the EU has sorted out how it gets funded from year to year.
runarberg 5y ago
I’m not an EU expert so hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong. But I think the USA-EU comparisons are superficial at best. The EU has half the states the USA does but 50% more population. Unlike the USA—which has a really strong executive branch—there is hardly any executive branch in the EU. Instead the executive powers are held almost entirely by the member states. The EU does have a legislative branch (just like the USA) with around 650,000 people per representative. USA has around 750,000 but that number is further devalued by the USA senate (3,500,000 people per representative) which can hold a lot of power over the congress. I’m not aware that the EU has any equivalent. The scope of the two systems is also vastly different. The USA federal government represents the foreign policy of each of the state, funds a military which answers to the government, finances much of the infrastructure within the USA, etc. In the EU foreign policy is largely held by the member states, there is no EU military, and funding for infrastructure projects is more likely to come mostly from the member state it self, then from the EU. The USA collects federal taxes, while the EU gets their funding from the member states. Both have a federated court system. The USA have federal criminal courts which I’m not sure that the EU has, or at least not in the same way the USA does. To summarize: The US federal government and the EU have in common that they both have a democratically elected legislator (both with relatively low representation) and they both have a federal court system. But this is where the similarities end.

rich_sasha 5y ago

It is also a realisation that with ambitious projects you need to give up some sovereignty. All trade deals do that - swap some economic benefit for some legal commitments. It’s not even like the EU has big expectations of Poland. The sticking point now is an independent judiciary and free press. Seriously, it’s embarrassing that Poland has to be strong armed into these! In any case, Poland freely signed up to these commitments, it’s just bad form to eke out of them like this. Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
gjsman-1000 5y ago
"Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland." Who voted them in? If you say that the people voted them in, it's painful, but it is the politics of the region. One of the terrifying parts of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for their leaders, including leaders who will actively undermine their own democracy, and they can be content with that because that's what they wanted. In which case, democracy has done what the people wanted, by ruining democracy. It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy. Similarly, the ability of a democratic people to vote to end democracy is democracy working even though it is also an awful necessary loophole. And if you say that we must take effort to prevent a democratic people, legally speaking, from democratically voting to end democracy, you are now technically anti-democratic. That's a weird place to be.
- Swenrekcah 5y ago
  Aspiring dictators don’t run on abolishing democracy. It is not helpful to frame it like the people chose to ruin democracy. Democracy depends on a strong free press and independent courts. A strong free press is not just one part of a country’s businesses, it is quite literally the fourth pillar of democracy.

Macha 5y ago

And the EU should be free to insist on terms for membership of the organisation. If Poland/Hungary don't want to follow the terms they should just leave, like the UK just did. But they don't want that hassle, and they want to keep the EU benefits, so this mutual veto of sanctions is definitely a loophole to keep as many benefits without meeting the requirements. The EU is not the UN, while the UN's goal is to have every country in membership, and so it doesn't expel dictatorships just for being dictatorships, the EU is pretty explicit about democracy and human rights being requirements, which is why e.g. Turkey has not been allowed in so long. Had Orban had the level of control when Hungary joined that he has now, Hungary would not have been allowed in. PiS is probably not yet at that level, but it's clear they would like to be.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
And in which case, I would say this requirement, in practice, wasn't a requirement. I don't blame Hungary and Poland for gaming the system as much as I blame the EU for having this loophole (or feature, or necessary evil, depending on view).
- rich_sasha 5y ago
  There are many cases in life where, it seems, the best state is not a Nash equilibrium. Still, I don't think it's fair to say "just game it then". That's a quick race to the bottom. The constructive equilibria in political systems appear to be unstable, and need active work to keep them there. The EU is in fact born out of that very realisation - its earliest seeds are in binding France and Germany in an economic union so they stop going to war with each other!

fsloth 5y ago

"I think it‘s the system working as intended." The system supports autocratic state capture in Poland and Hungary through massive EU subsidies - my tax money. No, it's not working.

axiosgunnar 5y ago
If you think that the EU (which is primarly Germany and France) are giving out free monies to Eastern Europe just like that, then you have fallen victim to Berlins propaganda. In reality, what Germany and France buy with that „bribe“ is being able to freely export their goods (cars and retail items via international supermarket chains in particular) to Eastern European markets, while making sure the profits go back to the motherland (and are taxed there by the German/French government, leaving nothing in Eastern Europe). You get your tax monies more than back.
- fsloth 5y ago
  This is not about money flow. I'm fine with that. What is not fine is the state capture this money flow facilitates. The state capture propagates a crony system, that will lead to a reduced economic output from what it could have been, and hence requiring more support in the future. The situation is both economically and politically untenable.
  - axiosgunnar 5y ago
    Ah ok I see, could you explain what exactly you mean by „state capture“? That the money goes to the state instead of private companies and the state is inherently wasteful etc?
    - fsloth 5y ago
      I advice you familiarize yourself with the state capture in Hungary by Orban and his Fidez party. The ruling party has eridacated free press and is close on ending judicial independence. They remain in power mainly because they funnel EU money to their voters. Poland is on it’s way in copying this system.