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”.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t focus on nationalism all too much here, I feel like it’s bikesheding. It seems to me like nationalism is just how regions <-> EU tension looks like, because this is how Europe is structured right now. Almost each political body is its own nation. Ofc, this makes possible conflicts even more brutal, because it’s easier to dehumanize people with whom you can’t communicate with. That being said nationalism is not the core dynamics here. Instead I would say that nationalism is just the way how fragmentation looks like in this setup and what we are really seeing here are reactionary forces to the progressive federalisation.
And they have their merits. Think of one of the divisions that have been mentioned—center vs border split.
The European Union looks to many like something that could become an empire, where the center slowly drains and uses peripheries, slowly degrading the standards of living there.
Unifying political bodies is risky as it may marginalize you. Think of the Appalachian region and Detroit in the US, I am pretty sure they would never push for deindustrialization.
“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.
Farage considers himself English and British, and values these groups over others. So he considers empowering either Europe or Scotland to be bad, because they are not England or Britain.
Europe can’t become a nation until it has a lot more self-identified nationals. The UK is actually an interesting example of the kind of empire-country that the EU could aspire to become.
Relatively few people in the UK primarily identify themselves as British. More see themselves primarily as English, Scottish and Welsh. But for most of these people, it doesn’t stop them also identifying as British. (And let us not forget the Cornish, Manx, Orcadians, Shetlanders, Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Auregnais, Sercquiais, Northerners and others who may comfortably hold a stronger local identity as well as a weaker British one.)
Similar regionalism occurs in most European countries of course, though perhaps only Belgium and Spain rival the UK in this way. (Belgium is perhaps a good example of the EU in miniature. In the last 15 years it has twice gone around two years without an elected government, yet it’s machinery of state and local governments have continued to govern.)
In the cases you raise, “decentralisation” is indistinguishable from nationalism. They are examples of people wanting to be governed as a smaller group than they are currently, and that group is a nation.
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.
What I write about egg shredding is of positions hold a few years ago, but it illustrates the principle:
In Germany, we don’t really like to throw little baby chickens in the shredder. If Germany would be completely on it’s own we would require eggs to screened early to prevent it from happening, even if that means that our eggs are a few cents more expensive. However, we are living next to Poland. If we would require eggs produced in Germany to do more egg screening and then cheaper Polish eggs outcompete the German eggs in our supermarkets we don’t want that. A common market means that we can’t simply forbid Polish eggs, so there’s a need for a shared agricultural policy that somehow brings the different ideas about how eggs should be produced together.
If one country decides to increase subsidies for apples and then outcompetes other European countries for apples or creates pressures for them also to add apple subsidies to protect their apple growers that isn’t great either.
If you have a common market common agricultural policy does make some sense.
Isn’t the obvious solution to allow only early-screened eggs to be sold in Germany, no matter where they came from? And similar for other kinds of goods that can be made in unethical or polluting ways: require both domestic producers and importers to prove that the goods were produced ethically/cleanly/etc. And this doesn’t require a shared policy between many countries, each country can impose such rules on its own.
Isn’t there an obvious solution to that: allow only early-screened eggs to be sold in Germany, no matter where they came from?
That violates the rules of a common market which is the core of what the EU is about. This is the logic why Dominic Cummings considered Brexit to be the obvious solution.
Recently, the Trump administration was arguing that some EU rules for things like car safety block US cars to be sold in Europe so as part of his tariff threads he pushed through rules so that now cars that EU rules used to consider to be unsafe to be sold. Trade agreements limits how countries can limit what’s sold in them and the common free market is a trade agreement that everything can be sold everywhere in the EU.
I don’t think that violates free trade. Trump may think so, but that’s on him.
Putting a tariff on foreign cars certainly violates free trade, because it discriminates between domestic and foreign sellers. But requiring e.g. catalytic converters on all cars sold in your country, domestic and foreign alike, is okay. Banning leaded gasoline in your country is likewise okay, as long as you don’t discriminate on the origin of that gasoline. Countries should be allowed to pass laws like that.
ETA: looking at actual history, it seems different European countries banned leaded gasoline at different times, and the EU was already well established by then. Which seems to confirm my point.
In practice, it’s all a matter of trade negotiations. Trade deals specify on what grounds countries can pass goods from being sold. Plenty of trade agreements then have clauses for Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement to enforce what was negotiated which reduces countries sovereignty to just do what they want.
Trump did get the EU to allow US goods to be sold that were previously blocked form being sold because of regulation like car safety regulation.
EU’s rules are quite complex. The general rule is in Article 34 of the TFEU:
Quantitative restrictions on imports and all measures having equivalent effect shall be prohibited between Member States.
The provisions of Articles 34 and 35 shall not preclude prohibitions or restrictions on imports, exports or goods in transit justified on grounds of public morality, public policy or public security; the protection of health and life of humans, animals or plants; the protection of national treasures possessing artistic, historic or archaeological value; or the protection of industrial and commercial property. Such prohibitions or restrictions shall not, however, constitute a means of arbitrary discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade between Member States.
Then there are plenty of more specific EU directives ChatGPT lists Regulation 2019⁄515 and Directive 1999/74/EC as mattering to the egg question.
I get your argument. But the same one can be made about anything. French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage. Better housing policies in Poland? Shouldn’t be allowed, because lower rents mean lower salaries, which means cheaper industrial goods, which, again, puts Germany at a disadvantage. And so on. But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something. If they don’t, if they are forced to behave exactly the same in all regards, what’s the point of having a federal state in the first place? A centralized one would do.
French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage.
I think when you look at it you will find that French films are not a major source of competition for German cinema. Even with French subsidies, German don’t focus on watching French films. If anything the are watching films from Hollywood.
Better housing policies in Poland?
Everyone wants better policies, the key question is what policies are actually better. If Poland for example allows housing to be build with less concern for parking spaces than Germany which results in cheaper housing, the cost of having less parking space is born by the Polish citizens that live near that housing that could be constructed with less parking spaces.
Having people be able to trade off availability of parking spaces vs. cheaper rent in different local jurisdiction makes a lot of sense as the relevant costs are born by the local population.
The same goes for playground construction. If Berlin wants to require people who build a house to construct playgrounds and Warsaw doesn’t and that leads to lower rent in Warsaw, that’s a matter of local preferences and it doesn’t make sense to decide on requirements for playground construction on the EU level.
As citizen of Berlin, I would like lower rents, less parking spaces and less playground construction requirements, but I think it’s reasonable to make that decision on the state level (Berlin is both city and a state within Germany).
That’s different than many aspects of farming policy, where it’s not about benefits that are accrued locally.
But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something.
In the EU states and lower level institutions compete on plenty, that’s not a good argument to make if you want to criticize the status quo.
In my view, nation states are largely the product of the whims of history. Nobody could look at a map of Europe in 1 CE and predict where all the borders will run in 2025 CE. In other timelines, Austria is part of Germany because the Habsburg never became as dominant.
You are correct that technically, the smaller the sovereign state, the more voters can affect their own affairs. If you are living alone on a sovereign island, your vote really counts! However, there are tradeoffs to consider. Coordination is difficult, and larger states often have a smaller overhead fraction, because maintaining a criminal code for 100M citizens is about as much work as maintaining it for 20M citizens.
And of course you can have layered federalism. If you are a citizen living in Frankfurt, you get to vote in municipal elections, state-wide elections, German federal elections and European elections. On each level, your vote is diluted more, and people from further away who speak strange dialects or weird languages have an influence in the matter, just like you have some influence in their matters. However, few people argue that Hesse or Frankfurt should secede from Germany.
I agree that the EU has a deficit of democracy, in that the rules are made by the governments of member states for the most part, and there is no direct democratic influence. But this is the doing of the nationalist faction. I also agree that some policy proposals put forward by the EU are horrible.
“Nobody could look at a map of Europe in 1 CE and predict where all the borders will run in 2025 CE. ” The Roman European provinces of 1 CE (and the national boundaries at the time) have pretty similar borders to the major states of 2025 CE.
Even with the Hapsburgs ruling Austria for 700 years, afterward it still chose to became part of the German state in 1918-9, and it willingly did became part of the state from 1938-45. If the Soviets had decided to merge East Austria with East Germany, there’s every chance the same would have happened in the west. (Britain wanted Austria to merge with Bavaria). And then if not for the EU, the Austrian state of our timeline may well have joined Germany after the fall of the wall.
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”.
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.
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.
I wouldn’t focus on nationalism all too much here, I feel like it’s bikesheding. It seems to me like nationalism is just how regions <-> EU tension looks like, because this is how Europe is structured right now. Almost each political body is its own nation. Ofc, this makes possible conflicts even more brutal, because it’s easier to dehumanize people with whom you can’t communicate with. That being said nationalism is not the core dynamics here. Instead I would say that nationalism is just the way how fragmentation looks like in this setup and what we are really seeing here are reactionary forces to the progressive federalisation.
And they have their merits. Think of one of the divisions that have been mentioned—center vs border split.
The European Union looks to many like something that could become an empire, where the center slowly drains and uses peripheries, slowly degrading the standards of living there.
Unifying political bodies is risky as it may marginalize you. Think of the Appalachian region and Detroit in the US, I am pretty sure they would never push for deindustrialization.
“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.
Farage considers himself English and British, and values these groups over others. So he considers empowering either Europe or Scotland to be bad, because they are not England or Britain.
Europe can’t become a nation until it has a lot more self-identified nationals. The UK is actually an interesting example of the kind of empire-country that the EU could aspire to become.
Relatively few people in the UK primarily identify themselves as British. More see themselves primarily as English, Scottish and Welsh. But for most of these people, it doesn’t stop them also identifying as British. (And let us not forget the Cornish, Manx, Orcadians, Shetlanders, Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Auregnais, Sercquiais, Northerners and others who may comfortably hold a stronger local identity as well as a weaker British one.)
Similar regionalism occurs in most European countries of course, though perhaps only Belgium and Spain rival the UK in this way. (Belgium is perhaps a good example of the EU in miniature. In the last 15 years it has twice gone around two years without an elected government, yet it’s machinery of state and local governments have continued to govern.)
In the cases you raise, “decentralisation” is indistinguishable from nationalism. They are examples of people wanting to be governed as a smaller group than they are currently, and that group is a nation.
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.
What I write about egg shredding is of positions hold a few years ago, but it illustrates the principle:
In Germany, we don’t really like to throw little baby chickens in the shredder. If Germany would be completely on it’s own we would require eggs to screened early to prevent it from happening, even if that means that our eggs are a few cents more expensive. However, we are living next to Poland. If we would require eggs produced in Germany to do more egg screening and then cheaper Polish eggs outcompete the German eggs in our supermarkets we don’t want that. A common market means that we can’t simply forbid Polish eggs, so there’s a need for a shared agricultural policy that somehow brings the different ideas about how eggs should be produced together.
If one country decides to increase subsidies for apples and then outcompetes other European countries for apples or creates pressures for them also to add apple subsidies to protect their apple growers that isn’t great either.
If you have a common market common agricultural policy does make some sense.
Isn’t the obvious solution to allow only early-screened eggs to be sold in Germany, no matter where they came from? And similar for other kinds of goods that can be made in unethical or polluting ways: require both domestic producers and importers to prove that the goods were produced ethically/cleanly/etc. And this doesn’t require a shared policy between many countries, each country can impose such rules on its own.
That violates the rules of a common market which is the core of what the EU is about. This is the logic why Dominic Cummings considered Brexit to be the obvious solution.
Recently, the Trump administration was arguing that some EU rules for things like car safety block US cars to be sold in Europe so as part of his tariff threads he pushed through rules so that now cars that EU rules used to consider to be unsafe to be sold. Trade agreements limits how countries can limit what’s sold in them and the common free market is a trade agreement that everything can be sold everywhere in the EU.
Jut stumbled upon a writeup about the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy which gives more details about the current state of affairs: https://elaine.mayoris.com/go/x5u4ooluse0aaauiok2lg063hjgfz7kqjvjwcsgwsoi2/2866
I don’t think that violates free trade. Trump may think so, but that’s on him.
Putting a tariff on foreign cars certainly violates free trade, because it discriminates between domestic and foreign sellers. But requiring e.g. catalytic converters on all cars sold in your country, domestic and foreign alike, is okay. Banning leaded gasoline in your country is likewise okay, as long as you don’t discriminate on the origin of that gasoline. Countries should be allowed to pass laws like that.
ETA: looking at actual history, it seems different European countries banned leaded gasoline at different times, and the EU was already well established by then. Which seems to confirm my point.
In practice, it’s all a matter of trade negotiations. Trade deals specify on what grounds countries can pass goods from being sold. Plenty of trade agreements then have clauses for Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement to enforce what was negotiated which reduces countries sovereignty to just do what they want.
Trump did get the EU to allow US goods to be sold that were previously blocked form being sold because of regulation like car safety regulation.
EU’s rules are quite complex. The general rule is in Article 34 of the TFEU:
Article 36 TFEU than says:
Then there are plenty of more specific EU directives ChatGPT lists Regulation 2019⁄515 and Directive 1999/74/EC as mattering to the egg question.
I get your argument. But the same one can be made about anything. French government subsidizing French cinema? Not fair, because it puts German cinema at a disadvantage. Better housing policies in Poland? Shouldn’t be allowed, because lower rents mean lower salaries, which means cheaper industrial goods, which, again, puts Germany at a disadvantage. And so on. But in a federal state, the members should compete on at least something. If they don’t, if they are forced to behave exactly the same in all regards, what’s the point of having a federal state in the first place? A centralized one would do.
I think when you look at it you will find that French films are not a major source of competition for German cinema. Even with French subsidies, German don’t focus on watching French films. If anything the are watching films from Hollywood.
Everyone wants better policies, the key question is what policies are actually better. If Poland for example allows housing to be build with less concern for parking spaces than Germany which results in cheaper housing, the cost of having less parking space is born by the Polish citizens that live near that housing that could be constructed with less parking spaces.
Having people be able to trade off availability of parking spaces vs. cheaper rent in different local jurisdiction makes a lot of sense as the relevant costs are born by the local population.
The same goes for playground construction. If Berlin wants to require people who build a house to construct playgrounds and Warsaw doesn’t and that leads to lower rent in Warsaw, that’s a matter of local preferences and it doesn’t make sense to decide on requirements for playground construction on the EU level.
As citizen of Berlin, I would like lower rents, less parking spaces and less playground construction requirements, but I think it’s reasonable to make that decision on the state level (Berlin is both city and a state within Germany).
That’s different than many aspects of farming policy, where it’s not about benefits that are accrued locally.
In the EU states and lower level institutions compete on plenty, that’s not a good argument to make if you want to criticize the status quo.
In my view, nation states are largely the product of the whims of history. Nobody could look at a map of Europe in 1 CE and predict where all the borders will run in 2025 CE. In other timelines, Austria is part of Germany because the Habsburg never became as dominant.
You are correct that technically, the smaller the sovereign state, the more voters can affect their own affairs. If you are living alone on a sovereign island, your vote really counts! However, there are tradeoffs to consider. Coordination is difficult, and larger states often have a smaller overhead fraction, because maintaining a criminal code for 100M citizens is about as much work as maintaining it for 20M citizens.
And of course you can have layered federalism. If you are a citizen living in Frankfurt, you get to vote in municipal elections, state-wide elections, German federal elections and European elections. On each level, your vote is diluted more, and people from further away who speak strange dialects or weird languages have an influence in the matter, just like you have some influence in their matters. However, few people argue that Hesse or Frankfurt should secede from Germany.
I agree that the EU has a deficit of democracy, in that the rules are made by the governments of member states for the most part, and there is no direct democratic influence. But this is the doing of the nationalist faction. I also agree that some policy proposals put forward by the EU are horrible.
“Nobody could look at a map of Europe in 1 CE and predict where all the borders will run in 2025 CE. ” The Roman European provinces of 1 CE (and the national boundaries at the time) have pretty similar borders to the major states of 2025 CE.
Even with the Hapsburgs ruling Austria for 700 years, afterward it still chose to became part of the German state in 1918-9, and it willingly did became part of the state from 1938-45. If the Soviets had decided to merge East Austria with East Germany, there’s every chance the same would have happened in the west. (Britain wanted Austria to merge with Bavaria). And then if not for the EU, the Austrian state of our timeline may well have joined Germany after the fall of the wall.