V. Illych L. posted:

the US has more active state capacity than the EU does, which for various historical and political reasons tends to operate in a highly bureaucratic, rules-following way. that means that when it's time to mobilise large amounts of resources to achieve some ad-hoc end, the US is better positioned to do that than is the EU.

to some extent this can be considered as the different projects' commitments to neoliberalism - where in the US it has been the unquestioned political paradigm for decades, the modern EU is in effect constitutionally neoliberal. the US state has always maintained the theoretical ability to commit to major interventions, but it has been kept off the table because of effective vetoes from the interests in the driver's seat. in the EU, that ability doesn't exist by design.

what, precisely, one chooses to call "left-wing" in this context is not necessarily straightforward. it is clear that the US market manipulation schemes are aggressive acts for which the ideological justification has been building for a long time (thence the disucssion of the weird conversation between that senator and scholz). it is also clear that the europeans have no good answer to it. i don't subscribe to the view that simply using state intervention is inherently left-wing, and my impression of the IRA is that it's a neoliberal/bourgeois-technocratic measure primarily meant to siphon off industrial capital from europe to the US. still, it's hard to imagine a serious left-wing industrial transition happening without this kind of state capacity.

His Divine Shadow posted:

To be precise with that complaint thing I wasn't singling anything you said out, but what I read the EU response was in several articles.

The EU could indeed borrow half a trillion or even more, I think they almost did so for covid. With the correct external pressures the EU seems to be able to overcome it's "ruleboundness", almost. Perhaps the IRA can be the pressure we need.

BlankSystemDaemon posted:

gently caress my brain, I keep reading it as Irish Republican Army then doing a double-take before remembering that it's short for Inflation Reduction Act.

Issaries posted:

Thank you. I guessed the 'some protectionist american thing' meaning, but had no idea what this Uspol thing was actually called.
Also not Individual Retirement account...

His Divine Shadow posted:

uh I dunno, I do know about that. Germany is a gently caress. I guess I believe that things can change regardless though. But Germany is the biggest obstacle for sure.

V. Illych L. posted:

the US has more active state capacity than the EU does, which for various historical and political reasons tends to operate in a highly bureaucratic, rules-following way. that means that when it's time to mobilise large amounts of resources to achieve some ad-hoc end, the US is better positioned to do that than is the EU.

Antigravitas posted:

I'd like to explicitly point out that you are comparing a nation state's state capacity with that of a peace project and trade union where individual members have retained sovereignty. The EU isn't even a federation (yet, inshallah). Considering the wildly diverging interests of individual members it's remarkable how unified the EU can be at times, but it's still 27 countries navigating their differences, not one country.

His Divine Shadow posted:

To be precise with that complaint thing I wasn't singling anything you said out, but what I read the EU response was in several articles.

The EU could indeed borrow half a trillion or even more, I think they almost did so for covid. With the correct external pressures the EU seems to be able to overcome it's "ruleboundness", almost. Perhaps the IRA can be the pressure we need.

V. Illych L. posted:

those are among the "various historical and political reasons" referred to in the quoted segment

Antigravitas posted:

Fair enough, but you have to admit that's a pretty huge apples to potatoes comparison .

It is of course easy to overcome rules when everyone in the room who made the rules in the first place agrees to do so. That's true in contract law, and it's true in international treaties. Getting 27 entities to agree, that's the tricky part.

Making the EU more able to respond will require ditching unanimity, and I don't think morphing the EU to something approaching a presidential system is going to go down well. The European Parliament needs to be empowered, because there is no way people will accept wide-ranging decisions that can overpower individual countries without direct democratic legitimisation. That is, in my eyes, the only road towards federalisation.

Glah posted:

The solution is of course for the proletariat to get hold of EU's executive organs, unite the continent through interests of the working class and actually make the epithet that populist eurosceptics like to throw around true with the creation of EUSSR

Glah posted:

The solution is of course for the proletariat to get hold of EU's executive organs, unite the continent through interests of the working class and actually make the epithet that populist eurosceptics like to throw around true with the creation of EUSSR

Antigravitas posted:

Fair enough, but you have to admit that's a pretty huge apples to potatoes comparison .

It is of course easy to overcome rules when everyone in the room who made the rules in the first place agrees to do so. That's true in contract law, and it's true in international treaties. Getting 27 entities to agree, that's the tricky part.

Making the EU more able to respond will require ditching unanimity, and I don't think morphing the EU to something approaching a presidential system is going to go down well. The European Parliament needs to be empowered, because there is no way people will accept wide-ranging decisions that can overpower individual countries without direct democratic legitimisation. That is, in my eyes, the only road towards federalisation.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Similar thoughts. Despite deeming myself to be at least somewhat of an EU understander, I'm not going to presume that I have even a partial idea of the side effects it would have, but I would work this question through a reform of the EU parliament first. There are a few problems

1) It's a lovely parliament where the average member is some kind of political undesirable domestically
2) It has rather limited privileges
3) It has a bad reputation in member states, often seen as undemocratic or otherwise illegitimate (even pre-Qatar that is)

All of these are overlapping, and need to be unfucked simultaneously, basically. How they are elected is a poo poo show, and while that remains so there's no point in talking about giving them (more tangible) power. I would argue basically to start from the basics, with a review of EP quotas to reduce the power excess of smaller states, by increasing the per-state cap and the total cap on the number of MEPs. With that established, write a single pan-EU electoral law for the EP elections. The law should cover literally everything – from the electoral mechanism, to counting votes, to the allowed advertising, to the candidate funding, to everything else your average national regulation covers for running an election in Europe. Crucially, these should be run by a central EU body, e.g., with EPPO in the enforcement capacity, and candidates should only be allowed to use funds out of the EU budget. Obviously, a few cans of worms to explore too, like Spitzenkandidat or making the EP bicameral.

Undoubtedly, I'm forgetting or overlooking at least several things, but that's the idea here, I think that for any positive movements in this direction the EP needs to be reformed to not be this second-rate, backwater institution that it currently is by design so that it's easy for member state governments to have an endless source of semi-dumb poo poo that can be pointed at with "EU bad".

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Why do you believe they should increase the power of larger states? I could maybe see it if the same expansion of EP power also effectively curtailed the informal power of Germany, but I don't really see how this would serve the interest of the people of Europe. Hell, not even the Germans.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Why do you believe they should increase the power of larger states? I could maybe see it if the same expansion of EP power also effectively curtailed the informal power of Germany, but I don't really see how this would serve the interest of the people of Europe. Hell, not even the Germans.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Apportionment of the EP seats doesn't presently follow any specific formula, and the worst discrepancy has a ratio of ~11 (Germany vs Malta for population/MEPs). I think that it would end up being a major source of procedural friction, and it should be alleviated by 1) introducing a single apportionment formula and 2) constraining the ratio to an explicitly substantiated and less conventionally ridiculous number. Until this happens, I don't see a reason why, e.g., Germans would want to federalize with the rest either. Since this is a highly speculative exercise with no clearly defined “target powers” for the EP, I'll say that I'm not at all precluding here a concurrent establishment of further checks against the EP's power, if the consensus feels that the Council and the EUCO aren't enough. For a really lazy take, let's make like the Council, but permanently represented in the conversations in the EP, so like the U.S. Senate – let's do hmm, 3 people per member state, and call them the Council of the European Parliament, to trigger just about everyone.

His Divine Shadow posted:

America gets a lot of poo poo (by americans) for having small states get unfair representation, but if the smaller nations in the EU want to avoid being run over by the germans and french I think something like that is required, for it even to be remotely acceptable to federalize.

Personally from a finnish perspective, the EU mainly brought in more neoliberal policies and attitudes and replaced more socialist ones.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Why is eliminating procedural friction necessarily a good thing? Supreme Dictator von der Leyden could get a lot of things done, but it's not necessarily in anyone's interest.

I mean, I am seeing what you and Lenin are saying, I just think your posts seem kind of focused on the formal nature of the thing as opposed to the potential purpose. In particular, in a way that ignores the very real issue that the most obvious role models for parliamentarism assume some form of unity in the population. With no strong cultural bonds, the risk of a powerful subgroup within the European superstate treating other parts of the state as essentially colonies is not insubstantial. Like, that is basically already how the EU functions, but at least Germany isn't fully in charge.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Well, there's a clear debate ongoing to claim that the IRA has inflicted no damage upon the European economy, and this looks like a bog-standard entry to that.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

A bit of funny neolib maths would be to use GDP per capita in the apportionment of the seats. Money obviously is matters in politics, so we should divide the final seats by median EU GDP per capita divided by the member state's. Now, Luxembourg could become even more upset with this, but thankfully for their national pride I'm just shitposting.

Also, I'm not sure that everyone is ready for Romania's super-delegation to the EP.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

I think that the Council and the EUCO are decent enough safeguards against EP, and I'm not proposing to abolish either. Council has a clear definition – a minister from every country, and thus it's fair to me. EUCO does also have a clear definition – every head of state, and thus it's also fair to me. EP, on the other hand, is “well we negotiated” + chaotic mishmash of accession-time agreements between the EU and the individual member states. I don't think it's fair to any given member state excluding like Malta and Luxembourg, maybe the Baltics. In particular, given other safeguards in place, I think it's relatively unfair to countries like Germany and France. If I were to try to sell to them (both to the national governments and to the population) an expansion of power of the power of the EP, I would expect them to take an issue with this. Especially as the scope of this hypothetical expansion of the EP power would to entrust them with a limited ability to compete with or supersede the national parliaments in some area of policymaking.

Simultaneously, I don't think it's practical to make this truly proportional, e.g., 1 candidate for 500k people, meaning 1 for Malta, 1 for Luxembourg, and 166 for Germany. I just want so that no layperson could say that 1 Luxembourgish vote equals 10 German votes. 3 maximum (sorry Antigravitas), taking U.S. Wyoming-California ratio in the Electoral College for the upper bound, and with uniform logic for everyone. For instance, let's have 1 MEP per 200k for Luxembourg, and 1 MEP per 600k for Germany, meaning final MEP counts of 3 for Luxembourg (-3/-50%) and 139 for Germany (+43/+45%). Some sort of sliding population scale between the two extremes (well, minimum population would be Malta, but you get the point) defining the population ratios for everyone else.

Furthermore, it's obvious that at least some smaller member states would be unhappy about that. To which end, I would be fine with implementing additional country-proportional checks. For instance, to make the EP bicameral, with 3 or 5 would-be senators per EU member states. Importantly, however, checks on a properly proportional parliament. My argument is that the EP is a proportional parliament done poorly, and that it's unreasonable to dare expect a consensus on expanding its powers before it's redone correctly.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

You've got a decent idea going here I think, though I fine-tuned the formula a bit:



(Seats increased to 764 to match the ideal population^1/3 number of seats). It does still have the least represented get only about a seventh the representation of the most, but the Irish have had it too good for too long, while Bulgaria deserves its spot in the sun.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

That's fair. I do like the idea of transnational lists, which would perhaps also facility letting Germans have more of a say? Like, in a more integrated Europe, even just cross-border regional lists could break up the idea of parliamentarians serving specific countries a bit. Like, sometimes the development of certain regions matter more to neighboring states than the state they're a part of. I'm thinking specifically parts of northern Germany from the perspective of the Danish state, but I'm sure there are other examples. Seven regions where Germans have a lot of influence, but with different focuses, might be a lot more palatable to other European states than one united around whichever parts of Germany that has managed to dominate its politics.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

That's fair. I do like the idea of transnational lists, which would perhaps also facility letting Germans have more of a say? Like, in a more integrated Europe, even just cross-border regional lists could break up the idea of parliamentarians serving specific countries a bit. Like, sometimes the development of certain regions matter more to neighboring states than the state they're a part of. I'm thinking specifically parts of northern Germany from the perspective of the Danish state, but I'm sure there are other examples. Seven regions where Germans have a lot of influence, but with different focuses, might be a lot more palatable to other European states than one united around whichever parts of Germany that has managed to dominate its politics.

Communist Zombie posted:

Has there been any serious considerations for changing EP elections so that countries elect their MEPs at the same time as their general election? At the very least it would help increase participation. Or is there some flaw with it that Im not seeing?

cinci zoo sniper posted:

His Divine Shadow posted:

I do wonder if the EU would've been better off not expanding in the 90s and then instead worked on consolidating the members it did have into something closer to a federalized state.

e:
Then once that's "matured" it could start expanding. Then anyone joining would have had to vote for "will we join this federation?". The current method does feel shifty, like we're joining on this premise and then changing it once in. I can't say I liked or like the idea of federalization much tbh given my perspective on the EU and general world view (which is an odd one), though the russian invasion, and the world changing into what looks to be a US and chinese block and them likely carving everyone else up between them, I kinda feel the need now for a somewhat unified europe.

His Divine Shadow posted:

I can't say I liked or like the idea of federalization much tbh given my perspective on the EU and general world view (which is an odd one), though the russian invasion, and the world changing into what looks to be a US and chinese block and them likely carving everyone else up between them, I kinda feel the need now for a somewhat unified europe.

mobby_6kl posted:

How did the US get to this point? It also started out as a loose union of colonies, with many famously lovely compromises and weak central government to get everyone onboard. The outcome is also pretty sub-optimal as we can see though.

I can't really think of any shortcut but slowly eroding the importance of the nation states over time, otherwise there'll always be some euroskeptics ready to derail everything.

Nothingtoseehere posted:

Civil war is the answer - the indervidual State governments were more important than the Federal governments for most citizens, and defined their identities more. Then the ACW happen, and the federal government expands massively to fight the war and try and govern the Southern states afterwards.