Byzantine is exactly the right word. Weak maybe not; a united EU would be the most powerful economic superpower in the world, and in some ways, the EU really do

Byzantine is exactly the right word. Weak maybe not; a united EU would be the most powerful economic superpower in the world, and in some ways, the EU really does wield a lot of power, and often for good. But most of the time, the EU is very divided. And sometimes that's good, because it does justice to the diversity of opinion, and sometimes it's unbelievably impractical, because the EU fails to act or acts too slow on things that require more action. But byzantine is absolutely right. It's in a very large part backroom politics. Between democratically elected national governments, but still very opaque, with insufficient checks and balances, with too much access by corporate lobbyists (there was a time when two different factions proposed literally the exact same law independently from each other, which was clearly written by lobbyists).