How Brussels writes so many laws
siliconcontinent.com
siliconcontinent.com
"The result of this volume bias in the system is an onslaught of low-quality legislation. Compliance is often impossible. A BusinessEurope analysis cited by the Draghi report looked at just 13 pieces of EU legislation and found 169 cases where different laws impose requirements on the same issue. In almost a third of these overlaps, the detailed requirements were different, and in about one in ten they were outright contradictory."
Whenever I hear a politician patting himself on the back for how many pieces of legislation he got passed, I cringe at the thought of all the junk in it.
The fundamental problem, in my view, is that any significant reform of EU procedures would mean strengthening the European Parliament. In other words, EU governments must be persuaded to relinquish some of their sovereignty. Since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty in 2007, there has been no significant progress in this regard. This is also related to the fact that, unlike 20 years ago, many center-right governments are now in power in many EU countries, and strengthening the EU is not on the agenda of most of them—often quite the opposite. France is an exception, but Emmanuel Macron's initiative was met with little response.
Until 2004-07, the EU was an economic and political union for Western, Northern, and parts of Southern Europe - all of whom are largely aligned from a developmental, economic, and social perspective. It was after the rapid Eastward expansion of the EU without updated checks and balances that dysfunction arose.
The EU will remain dysfunctional as long as CEE countries that are not aligned with the core mission of the original EU remain politically relevant. The only way to reduce this dysfunction is to either decouple the policy component from the economic component, or reduce the amount of nations that should have a say in policy to those that are aligned with the EU.
The fact that the government of an EU member state like Hungary still has political privileges yet is clearly preparing for some form of economic [0][1] warfare and potentially actual [2][3] warfare highlights how tenuous the project is as it stands today.
First it's Hungary, then it's Slovakia, then ...
Clearly the EU status quo is unsustainable and needs to be reformed ASAP.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/hungary-has-financial-shield-a...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/orban-is-...
[2] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202405/10/content_WS663d3b83...
[3] - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
The continent should be tightly linked together so that war is unthinkable, and so that the pluralistic and very factional nations of Europe can negotiate as equals with other great powers.
Compare the UK pre-Brexit and post-Brexit for some evidence.
I truly hate how this buzzword is misused with regards to the EU. Voluntarily delegating authority is not the same as losing sovereignty. If you can un-delegate the authority at your own prerogative, you have not lost sovereignty. If the UK, for example, had genuinely lost its sovereignty, it would not have been able to voluntarily withdraw from its participation in the EU.
However, there is also a use of the term “sovereignty” in the sense of self-determination over one's own state structure and the ability to ward off external interference. When a state transfers certain sovereign rights to the EU, this is more than just delegation. In German constitutional law, for example, this means that the transfer of such rights to the EU has constitutional status.
If there is a lawsuit before the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that challanges an EU law or regulation, the court first examines whether the EU law in question regulates something that actually falls within the EU's area of responsibility or whether it is something over which Germany has reserved its sovereignty.
The most prominent example of such a ruling is the PSPP (Public Sector Purchase Programme) case from 2020, where the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that another ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the European Central Bank (ECB) program of purchasing government bonds is not binding in Germany because the CJEU exceed its judicial mandate and violated the sovereignty of the German Bundestag. The case was "solved" when the European Central Bank provided the Bundestag with additional documentation regarding the program and the Bundestag concluded that everything is in order.
For the decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court see: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit... (in English)
In this decision the term "sovereignty" is explicitly used to outline the case: "In particular, these [complaints] concerned the prohibition of monetary financing of Member State budgets, the monetary policy mandate of the ECB, and a potential encroachment upon the Members States’ competences and sovereignty in budget matters."
The decision later concludes:
"This standard of review [in the ruling of the CJEU] is by no means conducive to restricting the scope of the competences conferred upon the ECB, which are limited to monetary policy. Rather, it allows the ECB to gradually expand its competences on its own authority; at the very least, it largely or completely exempts such action on the part of the ECB from judicial review. Yet for safeguarding the principle of democracy und upholding the legal bases of the European Union, it is imperative that the division of competences be respected."
This is also relevant in debt-brake discussions. Many who want a smaller government support limits on debts, but a smaller budget leaves passing laws as the only way for politicians to assert themselves. Often, spending money is a less harmful way for a politician to get a headline then passing a law.
The ability of the governed to remember and attend to them all
The resources of the government available to explain, interpret and enforce compliance
The willingness of the governed to obey them without a gun being brought out
The willingness and ability of the government to bring out a gun to enforce them
As a Belgian, it does frustrate me that this is what we’re getting known for.
Waffles and domestic terrorism.
I'll take waffles and domestic (the best kind) terrorism over "you got a license m8?" and bad food and day.
I highly recommend the book “King Leopold’s Ghost”. (Or the fictionalized “heart of darkness” by Konrad if fiction is more your thing).
Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.
This source [0] suggests around 300k if we count everything.
It looks like you are just counting the core "civil" servants and defence maybe?
[0] https://publicjobs.ie/en/information-hub?view=article&id=247...
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/04/15/more-than-5000...
It seems that this innovative process eliminates a lot of "gridlock" and is too efficient for the liking of the author, a strange complaint.
That the legislation which emerges from this is sometimes flawed, or contradicts other legislation, is not a reason to introduce less efficient processes, but to allow greater scrutiny of that legislation which does emerge from the "trilogues". The normal parliamentary mechanism for this is to have several "Readings" where the legislation is scrutinized by different groups of legislators, e.g. an Upper and Lower House.
Otherwise, perhaps Brussels has found something useful with the "trilogues", and other national parliaments should adopt a similar process?
You generally don't want someone with a 50.1% (or a 48%) mandate to turn everything upside down as soon as they get elected.
But yes, there's some middle ground between that and endless gridlock.
Economics @ University of Chicago Professor @ LSE
Various memberships at pro American institutions
Expect deregulation narratives, freemarketeering dogmas and how lobbying is actually good for democracy.
Various memberships at pro Science institutions
Expect inertia narratives, gravity dogmas and... wait, do you believe economics science is pro lobbying?
If there is an academic you want to listen to in order to understand how to better reform the EU's institutions, it's definitely Luis.
[0] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197554/LUIS_GARICANO/...
Wasn't collaboration at scale the reason Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web at CERN? :)
And I’m sure the 32,000 EU Commission employees are being fairly and responsibly advised by the 30,000 paid lobbyists from those 15,000 lobbyist organisations registered in Brussels.
plus Brussels is a boring place, not much else to do other than LARPing as law makers
What I mean to say is that the whole EU political system is an epitome of citizen alienation, and it is like that by design. It is the purest faceless Kafkian bureaucratic machine. And, by the way, I think it works pretty well for what it is. I don't know how to measure it, but I suppose the overall quality of legislation is higher than what, say, Russia or USA produce. But the fact it is completely opaque by design, that no one is ever truly accountable for anything, I think, just isn't what anyone would willingly accept, and it's only a matter of time when the critical mass of people truly "notice" the fact.
You can often hear how some guy on the internet calls POTUS "the most powerful man in the world", which is always somewhat funny, because, of course, anyone sane understands how far from truth that is. It's laughable, how little he can really do as a president, how powerless he is to change something he truly wants to change. He is more of a glorified clown, than a ruler or a politic. But I come to believe it's really important to have a role like that in the government, somebody who ignorant people believe to be responsible for everything, somebody they can hate and blame for all that is wrong around them. It is important for the silliest psychological reasons, just by human nature.
Anyway, the comment is too long as it is, so I know I won't be able to properly explain myself, but the thing is I don't imagine things like the meaningless cookie-notification, or that idiotic bottlecap thing being possible almost anywhere but Brussels, certainly not that often. It is both ironic and very characteristic of the system, that both are only some very minor footnotes in an Appendix to some enormous legal package that is "mostly obviously good", and are about the only thing from the whole package that most people notice (and obviously are very costly in the end).