Comment by mrweasel
7 days ago
I don't think the current US administration understand the EU.
There are some things where I have my doubts about the current actions of the European countries, like rearmament. Will that be dropped the minute a new US administration enters? What the EU does well, like really well, is trade and bureaucracy. It is, in my mind one of the few areas where the EU can absolutely run circles around the US, while managing to protect and isolate itself from the worst fallout. We've already seen this with the current EU tariffs, they are extremely precise and targets Republican votes at almost no cost to EU consumers. I think that will continue, rather than imposing broad tariffs, the EU will target things Trump care about specifically.
I have a pet theory on why that is. In EU to become a Brussels career bureaucrat you need to be able to speak a couple of languages fluently. This serves as a kind of a filter. Whatever they are, dumb they most certainly are not. To a lesser extent this applies to European politicians too.
Bureaucrat yes, politicians no. Every eu law is translated in to every language of the union and EU employees an army of interpreters that translate in real time sessions of EU parliament- you can be an EU politician only knowing your mother tongue. Expense spent on these translation services has a side benef though- you have a large volume of publicly accessible multilingual text which came in handy for training machine translation (eg deepl) even on smaller languages.
That’s why I said “to a lesser extent”. It’s _possible_ to survive as a high level EU country politician without being fluent in a second language, but it’s definitely suboptimal. So it still serves as a forcing function.
The thing is, you need to take into account the fact that a lot of the political "deals" are not done during official EU sittings, when these translation services are available.
A lot of the discussions happen during the informal after-hours in cafes and restaurants.
This is one of the reasons why, for many years, the Dutch delegation was very unsuccessful at pushing their own interests and placing their representatives in "important" positions, as they were all keen on taking the first train home from Brussels, and were skipping these informal gatherings.
It's not a stretch to imagine that a poor mastering of the "important" EU languages will put a politician at a disadvantage in such settings, due to an inability to communicate with his/her peers.