This is a cross-post from https://www.250bpm.com/p/eu-explained-in-10-minutes.
If you want to understand a country, you should pick a similar country that you are already familiar with, research the differences between the two and there you go, you are now an expert.
But this approach doesn’t quite work for the European Union. You might start, for instance, by comparing it to the United States, assuming that EU member countries are roughly equivalent to U.S. states. But that analogy quickly breaks down. The deeper you dig, the more confused you become.
You try with other federal states. Germany. Switzerland. But it doesn’t work either.
Finally, you try with the United Nations. After all, the EU is an international organization, just like the UN. But again, the analogy does not work. The facts about the EU just don’t fit into your UN-shaped mental model.
Not getting anywhere, you decide to bite the bullet and learn about the EU the hard way. You open the Wikipedia page. You sigh when you see the amount of text and notice all the unfamiliar names and acronyms. Yet, you start reading…
A diagram from the Wikipedia page on the EU.
Apparently, the Council of Europe and the European Council are two entirely different things. And the Council of Europe isn’t even an EU institution, despite sharing the same flag. And notice that we are not even speaking of the Council of the European Union! And the European Parliament, despite its name, is not a legislature…
You browse around, you read articles, make notes, cross-reference stuff. But at a certain point you realize that you can’t bear the prospect of reading yet another dull and confusing wall of text.
At which point you grudgingly turn to this humble blog post.
***
To be clear: We are not going to dive deep into the EU’s institutions. You’ve already done that yourself, and it didn’t help. Instead, we are going to build a kind of conceptual skeleton, an intellectual scaffolding that can be used to put all those odd facts about the Union into perspective. Don’t expect many object-level details, but if I do my job well, you are going to see where your confusion stems from.
***
Consider a stereotypical Balkan house. How does it work? Obviously, the kitchen is for cooking and the bedrooms are for sleeping. That much is clear. But what about the rebar sticking out of the roof? What purpose could it possibly serve?
If you think of the house only as a place to live, you’ll have a hard time explaining it. Rebar seems nonsensical, even dangerous to the residents.
It’s only when you start treating the house as a dynamic structure, from its historical and evolutionary perspective so to say, that things begin to make sense. Of course, the rebar is there to anchor the next floor — if and when it’s ever built!
And suddenly, all the other odd details start to make sense, from the portable concrete mixer in the backyard to the faint imprints of scaffolding in the basement.
***
Consider the European Parliament. As already mentioned, it is not a true legislature. It can’t propose laws on its own. At first glance, that doesn’t make much sense. But take a look at the timeline!
1952 – Created as the Common Assembly. It’s completely toothless. Its task is to debate the decisions of the executive. Its members aren’t even elected. They are delegated by national parliaments.
1958 – Renamed to the European Parliamentary Assembly. It can now at least consult the legislation proposed by the executive.
1968 – Quietly renamed to the European Parliament, though this name isn’t yet formally recognized in the treaties.
1975 – Gains the power to reject the EU budget as a whole.
1979 – First direct elections.
1986 – The term European Parliament appears in the treaties for the first time. The Parliament can now propose amendments to the legislation.
1992 – Gains the power to approve (but not nominate!) the head of the executive.
1997 – Can veto legislation and approves the entire executive.
1999 – Flexes its muscle for the first time. Brings down the Santer Commission.
2009 – EU budget is prepared jointly by the Parliament and the Council.
See? The name “parliament” isn’t descriptive. It is not supposed to mean that the body in question is an actual parliament. It’s a statement of intent. And all the apparent weirdness stems from the fact that we are looking at an institution in the process of transformation. The odd stuff doesn’t necessarily have a practical, functional purpose. It’s historical. It’s evolutionary. It’s rebar sticking out of the roof.
***
That begs a question: if the EU is transforming, what is it transforming from — and into what?
To answer the question, I have drawn a helpful diagram:
When it was created, the European Coal and Steel Community, the predecessor to the European Union, was an international organization. Established by international treaty, it was supposed to integrate the founding six’s coal and steel industries into a single common market. The idea was that by giving all members equal access to coal and steel — the key resources for waging war at the time — none of them (Germany, wink wink!) would be able to out-arm the others.
But it had already a tiny seed of a state built into it. It was deliberately designed so that the member states had to give up a little piece of their sovereignty to join in. The Community held binding powers over coal and steel production, pricing, and competition policy and the national governments could not veto its decisions individually. That was widely understood at the time. Britain, for example, was invited to join the club but declined, explicitly stating that it could not accept such a loss of sovereignty.
But that sovereignty loss was small, limited to the coal and steel industries. Again, this was deliberate. The founders have understood that creating a fully fledged federal Europe, as some had proposed, wasn’t politically viable. Instead, they adopted Jean Monnet’s method of “little steps”, that is, moving towards common, integrated political entity in gradual, iterated manner. The evolution of the European Parliament, with its tiny, almost trivial steps, fist renaming the Common Assembly to European Parliamentary Assembly, then to European Parliament, is a perfect illustration of that approach.
And that’s what the often heard phrase “ever closer union” actually means.
***
Since the EU’s inception in the 1950s, the Frankenstein, it seems, was always moving towards a unified state. But why is that? It’s a standard political process after all and there’s no reason it couldn’t run in reverse, moving back towards the international organization.
What follows is a speculation, but I’m including it nonetheless as it offers an example of how to even start thinking about the matter.
It seems to me that the process works like a ratchet. The pro-EU forces are mostly bureaucrats and policy-makers, for whom small, incremental changes are their daily bread and butter. The eurosceptics, on the other hand, tend to be people of big ideas, or often, of one big idea: national sovereignty. For them, small steps like trying to rename the European Parliament back to the European Parliamentary Assembly, or blocking it from participating in the drafting of the EU budget, are beneath their dignity.
Case in point: the Brexit negotiations. British government came to the table with the grand idea of reclaiming national sovereignty, but little else. It wasn’t even unified on such a basic question as whether to remain in or leave the common market. The EU side, by contrast, arrived with technical dossiers, raising poignant questions about how sausages would be traded between the UK and Northern Ireland.
So, for now at least, the dynamics appear to be asymmetric. Movement toward closer union is gradual, evolutionary and seemingly unstoppable. Movement in the opposite direction tends to happen suddenly, unpredictably and in leaps, like revolutions do.
***
All of that is fine, but it’s just the big picture. A historical one. It doesn’t offer much guidance on what to pay attention to on a daily basis.
An American columnist might write a commentary on the latest squabble between the Democrats and the Republicans. But what would his European counterpart do? Can you imagine a similar piece about disagreements between the EPP and ALDE? And have you, by the way, even heard those acronyms?
Yes, they are European political parties, but hardly anyone has heard of them. That’s because European parties are merely groupings of national parties, and they only really matter within the European Parliament, which itself is not a particularly powerful institution. The EU executive, on the other hand, where most of the real power lies, is apolitical, and the individual commissioners are appointed by member states, not by political parties.
Therefore, the real meat of political action isn’t in party politics. It lies elsewhere. If you want to follow what’s happening in Europe, you should focus on the relationship between the Union and the member states. Where an American pundit might write an article titled “What should the Democrats do about X?”, his European counterpart would instead ask, “What should Italy do about the matter?”
The kind of thing you should pay attention to is when, for example, Slovakia changes its constitution to grant national law precedence over EU law in “cultural and ethical matters.” That’s somewhat more limited than what Poland did back in 2021 but still, it’s a direct challenge to the Union. Will the EU respond by freezing funds, as it did with Poland, when it put more than 35 billion euros in COVID-19 recovery grants and loans on hold because of “rule-of-law violations”?
A different example: Viktor Orbán is clearly a security vulnerability for Europe, with Hungary repeatedly threatening to veto the aid to Ukraine. The underlying problem is that in certain areas — foreign policy in this case — decisions must be made unanimously. (Remember: veto equals unanimity equals national sovereignty.) This gives any national leader the power to block progress on any issue and to blackmail both the EU and other member states. And that’s without even considering the fact that, for Putin, all it takes to paralyze the entire Union is to bribe, threaten, or kompromat a single national leader.
In similar vein, Bulgaria was clearly pursuing a domestic political agenda in 2022 when it blocked North Macedonia’s candidacy to the EU based on accusations that the Macedonian language was simply Bulgarian by another name and Skopje was disrespecting its shared cultural and historic ties to Bulgarians. And again, the problem lies in the requirement for unanimity in the accession process.
To give a final example, the Russian threat, combined with the weakening of NATO, has created a clear demand for a common European army. Yet transferring the monopoly on violence from the member states to the Union would drastically alter the balance of power and therefore is a political nonstarter. That kind of dynamics is why you so often see proposals for “coalitions of the willing” — essentially subsets of countries ready to make unanimous decisions on specific matters. (Think of the Eurozone or the Schengen.)
***
On the more technical level, the decision-making procedures and incentives are heavily skewed in favor of the member states.
First, the strategic and political agenda of the EU is set by the European Council, that is, by the heads of national governments.
Second, the Council nominates the head of the executive, and while doing so, ensures that the President is sufficiently submissive and incapable of decisive action which could challenge the primacy of the member states. The individual commissioners, in turn, are nominated by the member states.
Third, in elections to the European Parliament, voters can only choose among their national parties and national candidates. A Spaniard cannot vote for a Finnish MEP, and a Finn cannot vote for a Spanish party. The Parliament has repeatedly approved proposals for trans-national voting lists, but the Council, not that anyone is surprised, disagrees.
Fourth, not only does the Union lack a common army or police force, it also has almost no alternative mechanisms to enforce its decisions. Given that state of affairs, it sometimes resorts to the crude tactic of blocking the in principle unrelated funds. European Public Prosecutor’s Office may be an early example of building an enforcement institution, but again, it’s a “coalition of the willing,” with Denmark, Ireland, and Hungary still outside of the club.
On the other hand, this systemic bias towards the member states is counterbalanced by how the political dynamics often play out. In times of crisis, the bargains struck among member states can sometimes lead to deeper integration.
When Germany was about to unify, for instance, France agreed to it only on the condition that Germany would support the creation of the monetary union — which later lead into adoption of a common currency.
Another example: when COVID hit, the EU was, for the first time, allowed to issue common debt.
Also, when an unpopular but necessary measure needs to be taken, national leaders are often quite happy to hand the decision over to the Union. This allows to avoid domestic backlash by shifting the blame to the EU and then melodramatically expressing moral outrage.
***
When it comes to nation states, everyone immediately knows what it means and what to expect. The concept was established long ago, in 1848, or even earlier. There’s no need to explain.
The European Union, on the other hand, is an experiment. It’s one of a kind. Nobody has a clear idea of what to expect. You see people using different, and not always mutually compatible, narratives. Some speak of the Union as a peace project. Some treat it as an exercise in economic cooperation. Others still view it as a path toward political unification. And some, of course, as a managerial conspiracy to overthrow the democratic system.
The fact that there’s no common knowledge of what the EU is supposed to be means that it lacks the basic stability of nation states, where everyone is more or less on the same page about what the state is for, even if they disagree on ideology or specific policies.
On the other hand, in an era when democratic institutions no longer generate the political legitimacy they once did, this instability gives the Union more wiggle room and the opportunity to try alternative approaches. It might accidentally stumble upon a model that better fits the modern landscape and come out on top. Or it might continue along its current trajectory and turn into a classic, fully fledged nation state just at the moment when that model ceases to work.
Well, for once, I can claim to have some actual competence on the subject. The “Balkan house” analogy is brillant, and the post itself is very good. Let me try my own explanation of this oddity in just a few lines (sorry for the redundancies).
First, as noted in the post, forget about the Council of Europe, that’s a completely separate institution, born from an independent treaty dealing with human rights and justice (and Russia is in, believe it or not).
Now, as for the European Union, it began merely as an international economic treaty in 1952, a pact between fully sovereign states, each with a long history of independence (and, well, frequent wars) behind them.
But the founding fathers, Jean Monnet (French) and Konrad Adenauer (German), and others, in true Montesquieu fashion, hoped that strong economic cooperation would finally put an end to centuries of conflict among European nations. And remarkably, it did!
From there, two opposing camps gradually emerged:
The progressive camp, eager to push European integration ever further, aiming ultimately at a genuine federal state, the United States of Europe, in which national sovereignty would be largely dissolved into a single political, military, and economic entity, after the american model.
The conservative camp, resisting this “European construction” and preferring the original idea: independent sovereign nations bound by an international treaty focused on trade and economics. The malicious tongues (French ones ?) would even say the UK joined the Union only to slow the progressives down, if not sabotaging the all project.
Note that no State has ever been all progressive or all conservative on this matter. It’s not even a left wing against right wing opposition. Center vs borders is a better match.
Anyway, from 1952 up until 1992, the progressives more or less trampled the conservatives. The construction went fast and the Union attracted more and more members.
The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 was maybe their last great victory, a huge leap toward a federal Europe, especially as it required member states, among other things, to surrender monetary sovereignty to the Union (the euro € became effective a decade later). Also that was just after the USSR collapse, and many states from the East filed their membership application in this period (but integration process is long).
Yet some members, predictably the UK, opted out euro and from that moment on, the rivalry turned into a real crisis and the progressives began to lose momentum. EU started to appear as that complicated bureaucratic elitist thing than nobody really understands under IQ 120, so it became the perfect target for populist politicians, the source of all ills (and what was even more convenient, it had at this time no clearly identified spokesperson that could object).
In 2005, the failure of the The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe was the first victory of the conservatives. It was even rejected (by universal direct suffrage !) in France that was supposed to be in the progressive camp. The text was elevating economic rules of liberal orientation at a constitutional level, something that was unacceptable for the left wing. While they were still some late joiners from the East, in reality the “construction” sort of stalled after the Lisbon Treaty of 2007 (a watered down version of the former).
UK eventually Brexited after a long and dramatic divorce that ended in 2020. That might have been a chance for the progressives to relaunch the project. But instead, it revealed something deeper and darker, an ancient evil.
SauronPalpatineNationalism was back, rising from its ashes across the world. Boris Johnson was just an avatar among others. Putin, Xi Jinping, Bolsonaro, Trump, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni… Even at parliamentary level the AfD in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France. And of course, nationalists viscerally hate the EU as much as they despise NATO or any supranational framework that dares to exceed a mere bilateral treaty.So, what we’re left with is indeed a Balkan house : half-built, with scaffolding rusting in the wind. You can clearly see the skeleton of a federal state, and yet, it isn’t one. The EU is stuck somewhere between a mere economic alliance like NAFTA and a true federation like the USA. Like the platipus, it’s something in between, a strange thing, a sui generis object.
My prediction? It will remain so, unless, somehow, nationalism goes out of fashion...
NB : dates depends wether you consider adoption at different levels, entry in force, et cetera.
This comment is far too negative on nationalism, and far too positive on the EU based on its concept rather than what it turned out to be in practice. National sovereignty is important! What does democracy even mean when your vote can’t even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn’t share its values? Etc.
It’s all well and good to say that international cooperation is positive and that nationalism is misguided, but international cooperation doesn’t necessarily result in policies you as an individual would like. Besides big-picture items like low economic growth in the EU region, a smaller one that comes to my mind is the occasional push to restrict speech and outlaw encryption on the altar of “think of the children”. That’s not an EU-specific problem, but it is yet another vector by which bureaucrats and politicians try to restrict freedom for some nebulous security reason.
Similarly, I also don’t like the labeling of the two factions as “progressive” and “conservative”, since many politically liberal-minded readers might associate those terms with “good” and “bad”. How about “cosmopolitan” vs. “nationalist” instead?
I plead guilty to not being neutral about nationalism in my previous comment. So far, reality has provided me with very little Bayesian evidence in favor of it.
On a personal level, my great-aunt (whom I knew) was tortured by the Gestapo, my grandfather had terrible experience in a labor camp in occupied Poland, never recovered, and died prematurely from alcoholism. And in the generation before, most of my great-grandfathers and great-granduncles fought for years in the trenches, were wounded, and some died, essentially for nothing.
On a less personal level and in a register more suited to LessWrong standards, the two World Wars together caused around 60 million deaths in Europe alone (up to 15% percent of the population in some countries during WWI). Vast, ancient, and beautiful cities were destroyed, invaluable cultural heritage was lost, and, of course, there were the horrors of the extermination camps. The destruction of wealth in Europe is also beyond comprehension : for WWI, roughly trillions of inflation-adjusted 2025 dollars in war expenditures and more than one trillion in material damage. For WWII, over ten trillion in war budgets and several trillions in destruction.
Nationalism was almost directly and wholly responsible for all of this. So yes, it is difficult for me not to see nationalism as a form of genuine Evil. Not only Nazism, but also the more ordinary, everyday nationalism we still see today. Let us not forget that there were no Nazis in 1914. In contrast, it seems self-evident to me that the humanists who launched the NATO project and soon after, the European project, were the good guys in the story.
I can acknowledge that rational arguments in favor of nationalism exist. I understand how so many people can be drawn to such ideas. Most nationalist leaders are democratically elected. “Make [your country] great again” or “[Your country] first!” is perhaps the most effective political slogan ever devised. It may even appear entirely legitimate and efficient at first glance. You can certainly achieve good short or medium term results. But since every country is equally entitled to make itself “first” and “great again,” the only long-term outcome is conflict, tragedy, and destruction, a net negative, as predictable as stepping off a cliff.
That being said, no extreme worldview is likely to be true. I suppose that an extreme cosmopolitan, pacifist, anti-nationalist project would also end in failure. No borders, no armies, no economic patriotism, no incentive to compete, no shared identity, total relativism regarding values, no local decision-making, all sovereignty delegated to a single global government… I simply cannot see how that could work with real human beings.
Still, just as the “conservatives” opposed to European integration are not all true nationalists (some belong to the far-left camp opposed to Brussels’ white-collar bureaucracy), the “progressives” I refer to are not all naïve cosmopolitan idealists. Their initial goal was a federal project modeled after the American example. That hardly seems unreasonable. In a federal system, individual votes are more diluted and each state’s sovereignty is limited. Yet there remain local elections, local decision-making, and a sense of local identity. It would have been harder to achieve in Europe given history and diversity, but I can imagine such a federal system functioning. Perhaps even better than the half-working Balkan house Europeans currently enjoy, courtesy of the “conservatives”, or if you prefer, “euro-skeptics”.
If you’re going to assign the blame for the world wars to nationalism, why not also assign the credit for positive things to nationalism? Like the industrial revolution (courtesy of the British Empire), the success of the United States (and in particular its successful war of independence against Britain) and so on? Putting the suffering and damages caused by two World Wars on one side of the scale is indeed a tall order to overcome, but if much of the rest of modern history is put on the other side of the scale, that can easily outweigh them.
Regarding cosmopolitanism, I think the backlash to cosmopolitan immigration policy in all Western countries is a good example to illustrate the shortcomings of this worldview. There’s a certain perspective that praises immigration on the grounds of democracy and openheartedness, but stops listening as soon as their own voters are against it. For instance, the rise of the AfD party in Germany occurred due to this: historically I’ve only been familiar with leftist parties splitting up due to ideological differences, but when the dominant conservative CDU party embraced immigration, lots of conservative voters understandably viewed that as a betrayal and thus moved to a further-right party. Personally in such situations I blame the actions of the moderate parties more than the voters who moved to the more extreme parties.
As for the EU project, I’m not opposed to it in principle. But the strategy of gradually enlarging and growing the project over time was bound to result in increasing resistance and backlash. And it’s furthermore incompatible with the notion that you need to require many decisions to be unanimous for nations to buy into the project in the first place. And it resulted in bizarre design compromises like having a currency union but no fiscal union, which e.g. wrecked Greece after the 2008 financial crisis because it didn’t have a separate currency it could devalue. 17 years later, the country still hasn’t recovered its GDP from that time.
Empires are more like the opposite of nationalism than an example of it, even if the metropoles of empires tends to be nationalist. Nationalism is about the view that particular “people’s”, defined ethnically or just be citizenship should be sovereign and proud of it, empire is about the idea that one country can rule over many people’s. This is kind of a nitpick, as having stable coherent national identity maybe did help industiral rev start in Britain, I don’t know this history well enough to say. But in any case, the British Empire was hardly obviously net positive, it did huge damage to India in the 18th century for example (amongt many awful human rights abuses), when India was very developed by 18th century standards. And it’s not clear it was necessary for the industrial revolution to happen. Raw materials could have been bought rather than stolen for example, and Smith thought slavery was less efficient than free labour.
By the way, your comment shows one thing that’s may not be obvious from the outside (and maybe even from the inside): There’s a lot of people who are in favour of the European project even if they never say so or act on it in any way. And not because it is cool and sexy, it most definitely isn’t, but partly because of the historic experience (every family has stories like yours) and partly because they see EU as a check on their national government, preventing it from going fully bonkers. That being said, this political capital is completely untapped.
“What does democracy even mean when your vote can’t even in principle influence the laws of where you live? Why should any populace grant its authority to enact certain laws to a larger entity that doesn’t share its values? Etc.”
The concept of nation state is already guilty of this all. The smallest legislature is your city/town/village council, followed by county, and in some cases even a regional legislature-like body. A nation state already takes most of the legislative rights from these and dilutes your votes with millions of other citizens.
Before nation states were invented in the 19th century*, afaik most European laws were actually pretty much locally made and enforced by the feudal lord or town council of the territory. It is feels unfathomable today, but back than a lot of towns had basically the same level of sovereignty as countries do now.
*Technically it started eroding earlier with kings trying to centralize power, but in a lot of places still was mostly intact until incorporation into nation states.
Also relevant to the discussion: Catalan independence, Flemish independence (Belgium), Scottish independence.
We should distinguish between appetite for decentralization and nationalism. E.g. Farage was for Brexit, but against Scottish independence.
That’s an interesting historical perspective, thanks! Though my point was mostly about whether a voter in a European nation in the 20th or 21st century should vote to join, empower, or expand the EU. Whereas citizens in earlier centuries didn’t even have the option to vote against the actions of their governments.
Ideally, every competence would be passed as far down as possible, but not further. That being said, there are violations in both directions. One way, agricultural policy (CAP) does not make sense on EU level and should be dealt on a more local level. The other way, army should be dealt with on the EU level—one big army provides better deterrence than 27 small ones. Also, there are violations at national level. E.g. France would really benefit from being less centralized. But in each case, it’s easy to see why there’s no political will to change the status quo. It’s coordination failures all the way down.
True that, with all the renaming, acronyms, the clashing and non-descriptive names. That kind of thing tends to happen in large corporations as well, likely the same dynamics.
Anyway, the role of the press should be to call bullshit and present a simple narrative, so that anyone, no matter the IQ, can at least understand what’s going on. That’s what I’ve tried to do with the Balkan house parable. Not sure how catchy it is, but I think it succeeds in balancing simplicity with fitting the reality. Unfortunately, I don’t see the mainstream press doing the same.
It’s not. It was Yeltsin trying to get in in the nineties, and then Russia was excluded in 2022.
To be clear, Russia was part of the Council of Europe from 1996 until its expulsion in 2022. (Your comment can be interpretted as meaning that Russia was never part of the CoE)
I like this attempt to explain the EU. Though as a EU resident, I still don’t feel like it particularly answers the questions one might ask about it. Questions like:
How powerful is the EU, relative to other major countries?
What is its role in international politics?
What is its long-term trajectory, based on key indicators like economic growth or population growth?
As a resident of the EU, is the existence of the EU a net positive or net negative for me?
Did the existence of the EU help or hurt in crisis situations like the financial crisis of 2008 or the Covid pandemic of 2020?
Are all of the questions above even meaningful?
Also, I’m wary of sentences like “this instability gives the Union more wiggle room and the opportunity to try alternative approaches” which assign more agency and coherence to such an entity than seems warranted.
Wow. That asks for a bunch of judgement calls! So here’s what I think, but YMMV:
Q: How powerful is the EU, relative to other major countries?
A: Size wise (various metrics) it’s up there with US and China.
Q: What is its role in international politics?
A: Not much. Foreign policy is decided unamimously meaning that only the lowest common denominator is viable.
Q: What is its long-term trajectory, based on key indicators like economic growth or population growth?
A: Economic growth is middling. Partially because advanced countries grow less, partially, there was an actual slowdown after 2008. Population growth is weak, but not as bad as in East Asia. But of course, there’s a large increase becuase of accession of new countries.
Q: As a resident of the EU, is the existence of the EU a net positive or net negative for me?
A: Positive. There are no longer wars in Europe. It used to be the case there was a war between France and Germany every 40-50 years. (And it’s not like it can’t happen any more, see Yugoslavia, Ukraine.)
Q: Did the existence of the EU help or hurt in crisis situations like the financial crisis of 2008.
A: I am not an economist, but if you look at, say, Greek crisis, the difference seems to be that Greece was not allowed to default which it would have probably done if it was not in Eurozone. Btw, nice blog on EU economics: https://www.siliconcontinent.com/
Q: or the Covid pandemic of 2020?
A: Just a feeling, no data, but observing the shitshow, EU seems to have done somewhat better on average than individual nation states.
Curated. I didn’t really have much idea how the EU was created. I appreciated the overall approach of orienting based on “What questions and confusions are people likely to have.”
I found this helpful not just for understanding the EU, but, having some sense of how some broader class of EU-like things might come to be (for good or for ill).
Believe it or not, the same kind of thing’s going on over in Korea. South and North Korea — the only divided country left after Germany — always try to set up something with this whole ‘North and South together’ idea. But like with your Balkan House example, what’s really happening behind the scenes is just talks about North Korea’s nukes or South Korea sending aid.
Since the 2000s, every government’s had at least one agreement where the two Koreas are supposed to act as one. But honestly, no regular Korean remembers any of them — maybe just for a test or something. What people actually pay attention to is how much the South gave to the North, where the North fired its missiles, and how much they ticked off the U.S. Real power doesn’t come from names — it comes from what a country can actually do.
China/Taiwan seem to be (slightly) more so these days, after Kim explicitly repudiated the idea of reunification.
Actually, since 2016 EU has a relatively small (~3700 officers as of this writing, which is about 1⁄6 larger than police of Luxembourg) border police force called Frontex! EU president would like to increase it an order of magnitude in a few years, but member states are not very enthusiastic