Comment by lmpdev
2 days ago
As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
I think this is your "intuition" because it is what you are used to, I see no reason why this would be the objectively correct way to do things. The legislative procedure in the EU is a bit more complex than laws simply flowing "up" or "down". There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
> There is a trilogue, which is effectively a three-way negotiation between the Council, Parliament and Commission. But ultimately the approval of Parliament and in most cases the Council is required (ie, Commission cannot force laws).
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
Well, it can make regulations, which are directly effective. And some directives are actually directly effective - there is a whole line of case law on this (starting with a case called Van Gend en Loos).
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.
Oh I completely agree with all your points
I’m just highlighting inefficiencies and inflexibilities where I see them to start a dialogue
I believe the point of the EU structure is precisely to make it hard to make laws, because the EU was designed to NOT be a federalist system.
I think it's less to make it hard to make laws and more to ensure the primacy of the member states governments over the parliament, but for the same reason you gave. To not become a federation.
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
What is it designed to be? The aim is "ever closer union". right? Every change in the EU treaties inches closer to federalism.
A common currency without a common fiscal policy has already proven not to work well.
there will be always inequalities and "blind spots", just look at the US, more homogeneous in many ways, yet still there's no single market for many things (healthcare for example)
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
> Every change in the EU treaties inches closer to federalism.
The Treaties haven't changed since 2011 or so, and I don't expect any changes in the next decade at the very least.
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The goal behind the EU is to represent Europe as a single unified economic bloc capable of being a world power. It's not meant to make the European Union into a superstate.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
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