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. SauronPalpatine Nationalism 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.
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.
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?
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.
EU started to appear as that complicated bureaucratic elitist thing than nobody really understands under IQ 120
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.
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)
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)