Yet...How can the same organization be behind this? Is it a result of the sheer size of the org, with malevolent people reeking their ugly heads? A more cynical "privacy legislation as a smoke screen with totalitarian measures in the backend"?
In the case of privacy laws, they sometimes don't even follow their own laws. E.g. as participants in an H2020-funded project, we were asked to add google-analytics to our website, because for EU officers, social proof is very important. We still have it btw, even though it's likely illegal. The privacy laws were enacted because some groups (led by german greens) were pushy about them -- there was very little push from the populace to enact such a kafkaesque system, and I am sure, that , if the populace were asked, the police and other authorities would not have been exempt from all these laws.
I think it's popular in american (left) media to deify the EU as some kind of wise leader, while it's just as susceptible to corporate lobbying (and bribes , as shown recently) as any other government. This depiction of sainthood has not helped the EU evolve to fix its own problems.
Recently in a podcast i heard Eric Schmidt admit that they were successfully pushing back against privacy regulation for at least 7 years.
Ok: We shouldn’t allow abortion beyond trimester.
Better: We shouldn’t allow abortion beyond trimester, that’s how it works in most EU countries.
Ok: Vaccine mandates are not cool.
Better: Vaccine mandates are not cool, just look at Sweden.
Ok: Voting should require IDs.
Better: Voting should require IDs, just look at EU.
My country has a deep malaise of insecurity and inability to rationally think for itself. We were leading our ideas with basis of good arguments in 1950-1980s, then came all the things we want to idealize about EU.
Nothing against EU, they should be promoting independent thought and not copy Americans either. Please don’t make arguments about what specific examples I gave. They may not be accurate but there are many more like this. The point to argue is not about vaccines or whatever, it’s about independent thought and policy.
I remember reading an article about about some Roman writer - Tacitus? I don't remember who - who was describing the German tribes. The article though questioned just how much we could really learn about those people from the Roman writer because it seemed like they were just using the Germans as - like you say - a crutch to make an argument about how Romans should be.
The Germans respect their parents. They serve in the military. they're brave and loyal. They're not merchants - etc. etc.
And heck, it's an effective argument - this isn't just what I think, look with your own eyes at those people who aren't us that do this thing so well. Sometimes it's ever true. :-)
Very easy. The organisation is huge and composed from 100000s of people working on different goals. They don't have any supervision, no democratic vote and if they decided they want to grow 400% in one year, they simply could and would, because no one feels like EU is "their government" they could easily protest against. If they want to create EU-Online-Child-Safety-Agency, they would just take our tax money and create it. What could you do against it? Shitpost online that you don't like it? It's too big and broad to control by citizens.
The government of Sweden alone employs more people for a population of only 10M. The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages. National governments are responsible for implementing almost everything agreed by the Union members.
The only real difference is that EU gets very little media attention.
Something like that doesn't happen in the EU. Every language is like an entirely different political sphere.
US presidential elections (and the party system) add another reason for politicians to care about what the voters in another state think. If Democrats look bad when handling an issue in South Carolina then it can end up costing them votes in other states too.
Any reference on that? I used to work for EU and I never had this impression while there or never read about how lean the EU is.. would be interesting to know more about it.
The relative leanness of the EU is a result of its unique structure. It has almost no executive authority on its own except in specific transnational cases like antitrust where it can fine large corporations. On the level that citizens interact, everything is delegated to national institutions. It's nothing like the federal states that exist elsewhere. For example the US federal government employs almost 50 times more people than the entire EU system, yet EU population is 30% larger.
> For example the US federal government employs almost 50 times more people than the entire EU system, yet EU population is 30% larger.
but is that comparison not like comparing apples to oranges? You should add EU system + Federal System from all countries together, to get a better picture, no?
Well, so maybe the EU is not fairly lean, since they don't do any of the work the national governments are doing?
At least it is not an argument, that they have less employes than sweden.
In the entire Union, about 16% of all employees work for the governments. That's 30.4 million people.
60,000 people work for the EU directly, which is 0.2% of the total. To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker. Is this the tail wagging the dog? 0.2% is not even the dog's tail, it's a piece of hair on its back.
"To put it another way, there are 500 national government employees for each one EU worker."
And they simply don't have the same scope at all, so any direct comparison doesn not make much sense.
The actual work is done at the national level. They work on coordination, which is important, but very vague.
BTW, EU budget was available in XML format for a while. Easy to parse. The first years they did not publish it, a FOI request would get you an electronic copy rather quickly.
IIRC, there was little interest in the machine-readable budget because the published version does not go too far into the details of budget lines and one has to have specialized knowledge to read it.
Still, one could make some interesting conclusions, e.g. that the Ombudsman had much higher HR budget per head that the rest of the pack, the Commission included.
This created internal tensions, but no substantial change in the follow-up.
It's a pity there is so little interest in EU Budget that they can just stop publishing machine-readable copy and get away with it.
"The revenue and expenditure shown in the budget shall be in balance."
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_...
"First half of 2023: Commission to issue up to €80 billion to finance economic recovery and support for Ukraine"
An analysis of the treaty problem is here:
https://reconnect-europe.eu/blog/new-generation-eu-a-constit...
It's written by a self proclaimed EU fan who says:
"When the COVID-19 crisis hit the Union, the Treaties did not change, but the political circumstances surrounding them did. Building on a Franco-German plan, the Commission came forward with a proposal for Next Generation EU (NGEU), to be financed through borrowing € 750 billion on the financial markets and primarily used as grants to Member States. In other words, the EU issues debt on a massive scale to finance itself. It does exactly what we thought it was prevented by the Treaties from doing.
I do not question the need of solidarity, but rather the legal techniques applied to deliver this solidarity.
Soon after the adoption of the Commission proposal, the Council website was updated and the reference to the prohibition of debt financing was removed. Apparently, constitutional change was about to take place, however, without a formal constitutional change."
Here, "legal techniques" is a euphemism for ignoring the law. Give it 20 years and Brexit will seem like a genius move, assuming EU loyalists haven't managed to undo it by then.
It is a different kind of organization, and there is no mechanism for EU citizens to assign blame to the EU politicians. Practical example: the EU handling of vaccines, with the EU leader still refusing to make public their messaging with Pfizer.
The 60000 people of the EU manages a 1 trillion budget. The budget for the 60000 people is 11 Billion/year. That's average spending 183333/person per year
This is not just salaries, but cost, including building, services schools, pensions and god knows what.
P.S. As I noted elsewhere, if you want to voice your concern about eurocrats' pay, start with Ombudsman office. They spend much more per head.
Given how many it employs you can’t have both.
MEPs are voted in by their compatriots.
The things the EU commission can legislate are restricted by treaty, I've no idea what these restrictions are something I suspect that I share with 99.999% of people in this thread.
So I would argue that the EU commission is less democratic than a directly elected EU parliament with the power to create any legislation it wants, but more democratic than say the House of Lords in the UK or the Supreme Court in the US where members are chosen by the elected government and can only be removed if they die, resign or commit some kind of heinous crime.
And the supreme court justices have to be approved by the senate. Of course you do have a point about them serving for life.
In theory yes. In practice not really. The EU has a long term goal of getting rid of veto and there's hardly anything left of it now. Also, even when votes take place they are often secret and there's no way to know how countries voted. Also the countries are supposed to nominate whoever they want as commissioners, but Juncker talked about how in reality there's a secret veto and the head of the Commission ensures they only get the Commissioners they want. We can infer that they get commissioners who are on board with their agenda and more loyal to the EU than their host nation.
To ensure that loyalty they have a lot of other tricks up their sleeve, like enormous "pensions" that are contingent on continuing to demonstrate loyalty to the EU after leaving the job i.e. they're not really pensions, they're bribes. They also pay much better than host nations can, and have a special tax deal such that they pay virtually no tax at all so their comp at the EU is sky-high compared to what they could get working for their own government.
So national control over the EU is really extremely weak in practice.
"The things the EU commission can legislate are restricted by treaty, I've no idea what these restrictions are"
Again in theory anything not delegated to the EU is controlled by the nations. In practice, again, that's not really true. The EU Commission is a master of reinterpreting the treaties to mean whatever they want, backed by the ECJ. For example corporate taxation is not delegated to the Commission. They fixed this by re-interpreting their powers to stop state subsidies as a general control over all corporate tax rates, by arguing that a tax rate lower than e.g. France was the same thing as a subsidy. Normal people know that a tax is not the same thing as a subsidy, but the ECJ disagreed and thus the Commission took control over corporate taxation across the EU without any treaty change.
That story has been replicated numerous times. Regardless of what the treaty authors thought the treaties said, the court is packed with judges who are ideologically committed to the EU as a project, and who will happily engage in judicial activism to extend its powers.
Are you sure you're not misrepresenting her views?
So I’m not sure what other way there is to read this.
That's not specific to the EU. When it comes to national governments, each ministry/department often has conflicting goals. So, when digital issues are tackled by the Interior Minister, you get this type of law proposal, but when it's handled by the Digital or Justice Minister, it's (generally) a different story.
- Jean-Claude Juncker 1999
Though I would also add a lot of it was about growing protectionism, in response to the EU not investing enough in the internet and acting surprised when USA's investments puts its companies on top.
And that's the point of EU bureaucrats. To gather as much power in their fight against both outside forces (e.g. US-based multinationals) and inside forces (member states).
Also this is proposed not passed law. But you already have conclusion about whole org.
I'm not blaming every single bureaucrat. But direction of the organisation is pretty clear. Just like I don't blame every Facebook worker, but direction of that company is pretty clear too.