The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
That is incorrect. Usually, the legislation happens in the trilogue, which is an abomination and everything but well representing it's citizens interest, but the Commission can do very very little if the council says no. That again is a body consisting of elected officials with varying degrees of distance from a direct election.
Best example for a change: everything that happened after Magyar replaced Orban in the council.
This is just to say... Its complicated. The EU can definitely do with a reform and better, stronger democratic legitimacy.
It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints.
It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
It has more terms as well: neoliberal encasement, depoliticization or post-politics, it's designing a system in such a way as to protect private property, international trade and other economic orthodoxy from democratic influence. That is an incredibly potent theory to understand the EU by. Lots of work in academia on the subject as well, for instance:
It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances.
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
What? Tell me the similarities :)
There is not strong-willed, controlling figure or imposed ideology, the financial institutions are fairly independent, in general journalism is relatively free to choose topics, the federal states can be pretty independent from the central power if they choose to do so, and all the rest I already wrote in a sister comment.
Note I did not compare this to any country, just applying criteria for dictatorships.
No, I think the term applies very well. That there are worse dictatorships does not really nullify the statement.
Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either.
We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one.
If the decision-makers are elected by the people, it's not a dictatorship, no matter how many atrocities the nation commits.
You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.
I think you mean something different than I when we think of dictatorships.
I agree in being unhappy with this decision and maneuvering, but we do have to keep a watch out for actual, in the political sense, dictatorships and not mix them up with other concerns.
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
> Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize.
And you don't see the problem with allowing processes like this just before the extreme right might gain control of the French presidency AND gets a shot at the German chancillary (even if, yes, it's likely to fail)? The ability to make laws for the entire EU, overriding popular opinion ...
You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to?
And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too.
Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so.
The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet.
And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that.
And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads.
We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe.
Oh please. That is not and never was my argument.
I just said, it is not a dictatorship. No Fun discussion anything with you.
If you'll indulge my argument: I have a fair amount of confidence in the stability of the system and fairness of elections. It may be rigged in favour of some interested parties, but there are solid ways to get the people currently in power to be replaced by others and still retain stability in the system.
Not so in any of: Iran, Russia, Albany, Eastern Germany, The phillipines, China, Belarus, Sudan, ...
That is my whole point. The rest is a different topic, but cynicism usually does not help in doing something.
It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.
You think the UK is influenced by backroom dealing and not just the fact that they want to trade with the single market, which is the whole point of banding together as the EU?
The European Comission is the top decision maker of the EU. The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC. No different than the politburo in China.
That is incorrect. Usually, the legislation happens in the trilogue, which is an abomination and everything but well representing it's citizens interest, but the Commission can do very very little if the council says no. That again is a body consisting of elected officials with varying degrees of distance from a direct election. Best example for a change: everything that happened after Magyar replaced Orban in the council. This is just to say... Its complicated. The EU can definitely do with a reform and better, stronger democratic legitimacy.
It is slightly different than China, China has implemented hotlines/apps for citizen complaints in response to social pressure, and it actually attempts to address those complaints.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/index_en
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While you can use the hotline in private, you can't object to any matter in public.
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Given a choice between China and the EU at this point I would choose to live in China.
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Apart from the fact it can't make decisions.
It can only propose; the decision is made by the EU parliament.
fortunately I don't think the average EU citizen could name a single member of the EU parliament
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> The European citizen has zero (0) influence on the members or actions of the EC
Whenever one reads EC you need to read: "All of the heads of state in a trenchcoat". Macron, Merz, etc
And yet this is an EP maneuver
And let's not forget on the American lobbyists pushing for it (Including Big Tech)
It’s a maneuver between the council and EPP
It's mostly a lack of properly descriptive words in the language. I think "totalitarian liberalism" or the "managerial state" is probably closer to what we're talking about here. Power is not concentrated in one individual; responsibility and accountability are diffused so far that it is impossible to find someone who actually can do or change anything. "Rational systems" of business process and rigour serve to remove individual wisdom and intuition from the equation entirely. Adding AI on top of this will probably only further entrench it - walls of words protecting people from really improving anything meaningfully.
In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people. Trouble is, the people are seldom even morally aligned with each other in a unified way, so a dictator cannot easily represent their conflicting interests. Representative democracy does at least take a step towards solving that issue.
The current term seems to be “guided democracy” (formerly “managed democracy”): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_democracy
Although I’d argue it is often just as much a failed technocracy.
> In some ways, the concentration of power in a dictatorship might be better, if the dictator was well morally aligned with the people.
This is pretty much the exact argument that Hayek makes - socialism leads to fascism through political gridlock.
Did you mean to say liberalism?
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It has more terms as well: neoliberal encasement, depoliticization or post-politics, it's designing a system in such a way as to protect private property, international trade and other economic orthodoxy from democratic influence. That is an incredibly potent theory to understand the EU by. Lots of work in academia on the subject as well, for instance:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/45129546
https://lpeproject.org/blog/neoliberal-encasement-infrastruc...
It's not, not everything need to be a single word, because the world is full of nuances.
Calling everything fascist, nazis, communists, etc. is making actual fascism, nazism and dictatorship more likely.
Because you can't raise the attention of people to the absolute priority those needs when the time come if you just wasted it on stuff that were not it again and again.
We are crying wolf, and we'll pay the price.
Tell me the difference please. Which country we compare to?
A dictatorship has a dictator. Who doesn't know that?
TBH modern dictatorships are a lot less obvious in the way you describing.
There are dictatorships, where a very select few people have absolute power, but there’s no visible dictator.
Iran is a country like this. There’s no visible dictator. It’s a game of power between the clergy, the military, and the civil government.
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I lived in a dictatorship, I can’t tell the difference. Is exactly the same for the average Joe.
What? Tell me the similarities :) There is not strong-willed, controlling figure or imposed ideology, the financial institutions are fairly independent, in general journalism is relatively free to choose topics, the federal states can be pretty independent from the central power if they choose to do so, and all the rest I already wrote in a sister comment. Note I did not compare this to any country, just applying criteria for dictatorships.
No, I think the term applies very well. That there are worse dictatorships does not really nullify the statement.
Even "democracies" have death penalties and commit to genocide. See the USA as an example here. One can always reason that there are worse countries in this regard - nobody rejects that either.
We need to have a much more nuanced view on democracy. The EU presently is not one.
If the decision-makers are elected by the people, it's not a dictatorship, no matter how many atrocities the nation commits.
You can have some gray area I guess, with unfair elections or whatever, but when the bad decisions are made by leaders who keep on getting re-elected in reasonably fair elections, we do not have a dictatorship.
Many dictators were democratically elected, this is not a sensible approach.
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I think you mean something different than I when we think of dictatorships. I agree in being unhappy with this decision and maneuvering, but we do have to keep a watch out for actual, in the political sense, dictatorships and not mix them up with other concerns.
What relationship does the death penalty and genocide have to democracy (or lack thereof)? That seems orthogonal to the definition.
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I suppose you know?
Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
> Now go enlighten us on how the EU is super democratic and way better than the worst dictatorship that ever existed, so we may be happy we are not the worst.
Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet. Or using "criminals" as enforced organ donors. I suppose there's that.
The EU is being a bit short-sighted and shit with regard to Chat Control but let's not loose perspective here.
> Well they're not rounding people because of their religion or sexuality and putting them in "retraining" camps yet.
Right. They pay Turkey to do that: https://www.rescue.org/eu/article/what-eu-turkey-deal
I don’t think the EU is a classic dictatorship, but it’s a colossal failure nonetheless, has a severe lack of democracy and acceptance. And their personnel is mediocre, not like the US administration but it’s closer than ppl in this forum realize.
And you don't see the problem with allowing processes like this just before the extreme right might gain control of the French presidency AND gets a shot at the German chancillary (even if, yes, it's likely to fail)? The ability to make laws for the entire EU, overriding popular opinion ...
You really have trouble imagining what this could lead to?
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c70yk5xjyl1t
https://www.politico.eu/europe-poll-of-polls/germany/ (the biggest party gets first shot at providing the chancellor and government)
And while Hungary's Magyar is a huge improvement over Orban, let's be honest here, he's extreme right too.
Anti-immigration rightist parties are the norm across Europe nowadays. The center is shifting right in a big way, and the current "sanity" coalitions are forced to make deeper and deeper cuts in government services. They will keep losing popularity for another decade or so.
The extreme right's message of "let's kick immigrants out so we can instead spend on normal, good people" is total bullshit of course, it doesn't work like that. But voters are going to be more and more desperate for anything that stops the government service cuts, for a very long time yet.
And the problem is that the base part of the argument is true. Immigration was supposed to save Europe's collective economic ass and has utterly, completely and totally failed to do that.
And, of course, like the UK has demonstrated, the sad truth is EU governments are going to cause a lot of social problems through ECB-enforced spending cuts. They'll be looking for someone to blame and ... well we all know where that leads.
We could easily see a repeat of Trumps wrecking ball, enforced by the EU, in Europe.
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Oh please. That is not and never was my argument. I just said, it is not a dictatorship. No Fun discussion anything with you.
If you'll indulge my argument: I have a fair amount of confidence in the stability of the system and fairness of elections. It may be rigged in favour of some interested parties, but there are solid ways to get the people currently in power to be replaced by others and still retain stability in the system. Not so in any of: Iran, Russia, Albany, Eastern Germany, The phillipines, China, Belarus, Sudan, ... That is my whole point. The rest is a different topic, but cynicism usually does not help in doing something.
It's much more of an oligarchy where even though the members of the elite are elected the body of them as a whole appears to have enough influence over new members to force them to act in accordance with an ongoing plan. It seems like any real change would require a very large super majority of new members to be elected at the same time in order to change course. Even a country like the UK seems to still be under their influence after leaving the union which speaks volumes about the amount of backroom dealing that must be going on.
You think the UK is influenced by backroom dealing and not just the fact that they want to trade with the single market, which is the whole point of banding together as the EU?