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Comment by edarchis | Hacker News Reader

Please stop saying "Brussels" to mean the EU. It's a nasty trick to give the idea that it's some kind of external entity forcing your country to do something. It's not. It's an assembly. And it's insulting to people from Brussels. I don't want this any more than you do.

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It’s very common throughout English. The Russian government is refered to as Moscow, US as Washington. It’s the same and doesn’t refer to residents. It’s known as synecdoche.

In other words, sorry but it’s here to stay.

No, it is not quite the same as Moscow and Washington are capitals of centralised states who give orders to the whole nation.

The EU on the other hand does not have a common constitution, army etc. so is not a real state (yet). It is made up of soveraign nations who come together debate and decide there, but then it is still up to the members to implement that.

So the transition to the EU as one state is happening, but might never complete.

It doesn't imply that the EU is one state. It's just the place where the decisions are made. If Brussels didn't like anyone knowing that, I'm sure other cities in the EU would happily take the gobs of free money showered on wherever the EU is headquartered.

You mean like Strasbourg?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_of_the_European_Parliamen...

Spoiler, the parliamanet moves once a month between Brussel and there. That's how centralized the EU is, we cannot even decide on one fixed place to meet and decide.

Yes indeed - the gobs of money know no bounds.

I’m not sure you realise that this is a far more generic rhetorical phenomenon that encompasses all kinds of situations. Like referring to the FBI as Quantico.

Or Scotland Yard for the metropolitan police in london. They were commonly known by that name almost immediately after their founding in 1829.

Perhaps the earliest example is Pharaoh. It originally referred to the royal residence.

TIL Scotland Yard is the Metropolitan Police. I thought it was its own thing named "Scotland Yard" for some reasons I never bothered to investigate.

Which kind of proves your point.

> TIL Scotland Yard is the Metropolitan Police.

It is not? But also it is.

You are right that when people say "Scotland Yard" they do frequently mean the whole Metropolitan Police. And you are also right that there is no other police entity (that I know of) which would be associated with that name.

But also, "Scotland Yard" was just the address of the original headquarters of the Metropolitan Police. Even then it wasn't the whole organisation, just the address of one of the buildings. Then they got a new headquarters and called it "New Scotland Yard". And to confuse matters further they repeated this multiple times. Which means there are 3 buildings which were called "New Scotland Yard" at various points in time.

And today of course the MET occupies far more real estate than just the famous "Scotland Yard". For example if you look at this FOI request[1] you can see that there were 226 other buildings the Metropolitan Police used in 2023. (Not counting covert/sensitive estate).

1: https://www.met.police.uk/foi-ai/metropolitan-police/disclos...

Scotland Yard was originally the name of the street in which headquaters of the Metropolitan Police.

Right. What I meant is, until today I believed that "Scotland Yard" was an entirely different law enforcement agency from MET.

Oh, or using building names like White House and Kremlin?

Yes, I heard of the concept. My point was just that many have a misconception about the nature of the EU.

The European Commission is in fact empowered to boss member states around, it's one of the things that give EU law teeth rather than it being like "international law" (unenforceable anarchy). It also acts much like a government (in the sense of executive, not in the sense of state) when it comes to EU lawmaking, and has various government-like powers in fields like competition law for example. And the European Commission is based in Brussels. Saying "Brussels" to refer to Commission activity is as natural as saying "London", "Downing Street", "the Cabinet Office", "Whitehall" etc to refer to British government functions. And that's without getting into all the other EU institutions that are based there!

It is true that the EU institutions are ultimately subordinate to the member states in a way that, say, the US federal institutions are not, but the EU is still very much is its own thing. It even has legal personality these days: you can sue the EU and the EU can sue you.

If there was a major event in Belgium, which city would the news outlets refer to in order to avoid ambiguity?

They might say "The city of Brussels".

It's usually used in place of a person/active participant in something.

So ‘Brussels suffered a deadly fire’ will always refer to the city. ‘Brussels decides on new aircraft regulations’ will almost always refer to either the city government, the Belgian government, or the EU Parliament headquartered there. Brussels is just an exceptional case because there is so much based there, as opposed to the Hague or the Vatican.

It's more a metonymy than a synecdoche

The problem here, and the source of OOPs annoyance I think, is that the governments of the constituting member states have the habit to present unpopular regulations as 'from Brussels' while taking credit for the popular things as from 'Den Haag','Berlin' or 'Paris' or whatever the local capital is. This habit is the main driver of anti-EU sentiments across the whole of europe. Which is a pity, mainly because it takes the attention away from highly needed reforms in the EU structures because people who could drive the reforms now just want out.

So while linguistically it's the same system as using 'Washington' or 'Moscow', Brussels is specifically in the bad spot where it gets blamed for impopular stuff but never praised for popular things.

I think it’s actually incredibly similar to Washington’s situation, since DC residents have pretty much nothing to do with the federal government residing there, just like the Bruxellois in Brussels

No, Brussels is Belgium.

And Brussels is not the capitol of the EU because the EU is not a country.

Being belgian I thought that the city of Brussels did something. Using the term EU is more precise I guess in this case. For us, Brussels is just a town in our country, not the EU or representing the EU.

It's a figure of speech called metonymy. I agree Brussels is not very precise, a better word would be Berlaymont to refer to the EU commission specifically as there are a lot of institutions that could be meant by Brussels (Belgian federal govt, Brussels regional govt, EU commission, EU parliament, EU council, ...)

more precisely, it is synecdoche!

It definitely forces countries to do things they want to do, generally via compliant leadership of those countries. See the last 15 years of UK voters being worried about immigration levels, vs immigration levels.

> See the last 15 years of UK voters being worried about immigration levels, vs immigration levels.

Look, let's be clear here. The UK (as a member state) was concerned that the EU was becoming too federal. Therefore (following Machievelli) they decided to push for new members, mostly the eastern bloc countries.

Then, politically, it was difficult for them to refuse to allow immigration from those countries (many of the other members had a moratorium for a few years post-accession). This lead to lots of British people becoming very upset, at the EU for some reason (even though their government had done this).

It's also very common inside the EU. Brussels is not an internal entity either, it's seen as distant eurocrats by most EU citizens. Only those interested in EU funds know about them really. It's not seen as a representative assembly

The assembly seats in Brussels, so the decision comes from Brussels (geographically).

It doesn't imply that people from Brussels are the ones to decide, not everyone has the same idea anyways. Though, as citizens of a EU member state, they have some responsibility, at least indirectly.

Brussels is the seat of five governments: the city itself, the Brussels-Capital autonomous region, the Flemish Parliament and Government (luckily the Wallon Government seat is in Namur), the Belgian Federal Parliament, and the European Commission and Parliament.

The "Brussels" metonym is probably the most ambiguous reference to a government body on the planet.

When discussed on an American tech forum, or even in Poland, it is fairly unambiguous though.

>The assembly seats in Brussels, so the decision comes from Brussels (geographically).

Except that half the time the assembly seats in Strasbourg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_of_the_European_Parliamen...

The EU can force member states to do things though, what do you mean?

> It's a nasty trick to give the idea that it's some kind of external entity forcing your country to do something

Which it is. How nasty to engage in wrongthink.

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