I am the first person to appreciate the pro-online-privacy legislation from the EU in the last couple of years.
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"?
The effectiveness of EU machinery is overrated. EU is a large organization with lots and lots of money. The people who go there are largely unaccountable to their countries, and are likely to do things that are popular, and they like to show off their work. There is no repercussions for the decisions taken though, because the only elected positions (the parliament) are far removed from legislating and limited to just approving what other people promote.
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.
It troubles me deeply that we in America often cannot make an argument about advocating something without using EU as a crutch. Both left and right wings of the political sphere. Examples:
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 don't think that's just America. I think everyone in world and throughout history uses foreign countries as a stand-in to make an argument.
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. :-)
You’re right. Let’s be better, especially people that are enamored irrationally with the EU (or country X's policies) without arguing the underlying rational and objectivity.
>Yet...How can the same organization be behind this?
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.
I'm afraid all of this comment is essentially nonsense. For starters, the EU system (including the Commission, all the various agencies across the Union, all courts, etc.) employs around 60,000 people.
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.
Also, they can not grow by 400%. There are rules in place that limit the budget and the maximum change per budget chapter that can be executed at once. These rules are made and by member countries.
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 EU budget in theory is funded by money allocated by member states and can't go beyond that level. This is fixed law by treaty, Article 310:
"The revenue and expenditure shown in the budget shall be in balance."
But nothing about EU treaties means anything in practice. This article holds back the EU's power and they can't be having that, so what actually happens is ...
"First half of 2023: Commission to issue up to €80 billion to finance economic recovery and support for Ukraine"
The money isn't even being spent on EU member states! Raising money via debt this way is illegal but the EU is not a system of laws, it's a system that does whatever it can get away with politically. That's why it's dangerous: it is a dictatorship that's rapidly growing in power, and it's on track to completely destroy European democracy.
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.
Is it? I would rather say it is maybe too democratic. For an EU law to pass, both the EU parliament and EU council need to approve. So that means people vote for parties, that in turn are the EU parliament. Plus the EU council, which consists of the heads all the EU countries. That is a double layer of democracy.
The only real difference is that EU gets very little media attention.
The EU has a language problem though. If there's a problem affecting Lithuania there's very little that voting can do to solve it. Lithuanians don't have an impact on the politicians voted in from other countries, because the politics don't overlap due to language. Lithuanian voters would have to convince German politicians, that campaign in the German language to German people, about Lithuania's issue. How likely do you think that is going to work?
How does it work in the United States? Let's say there's a problem affecting South Carolina. How would South Carolina voters convince Californian politicians about South Carolina problems? If convinced, what actions would Californian politicians take?
Problems that are affecting South Carolina will be spoken about in English. Californians will hear about it here and there. They can be seen as national problems.
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.
Well, ok. Let's consider the total number of employed people in the EU, around 190 million.
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.
Every month, the whole parliament is moving fron Straßbourg to Bruessel and then back. That is not a sign of an efficient organisation, despite the fact that the numbers could be worse.
"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.
> The EU is in fact fairly lean given its scope and the number of languages.
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.
I'm not saying there isn't waste. It develops in every large organization, public or private. (I sometimes wonder about people — Americans mostly — who want the government to vanish, but also complain loudly about how their phone operator, insurance company, etc. are the worst. What do they expect to happen if the private sector took over everything?)
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?
But the EU is not a government. It only does funding, almost nothing else. They are all administrators, members of committees, managers of members of committees and so on and forth. The EU won't put out the fire in your house or send you a doctor. What's the purpose of comparing it to sweden?
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
183_333 per head is a lot in Romania, but pretty much in line public administration spending in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and France where the bulk of the staff works.
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.
No the national governments choose the commissioner to send to the commission. A nation in the EU can recall its commissioner. The commissioner acts in the interests of the Government of the nation that sent them to the EU commission. The national governments of EU nations are all elected by their citizens so the commission is indirectly democratic. It is arranged like this because individual countries in the EU don't want to give up sovereignty to the EU parliament.
This is probably the biggest issue with having an executive which isn't formed by the actual members of parliament, particularly if that executive has powers that the parliament either cannot challenge by design or can't really challenge in practice. The EU commission really isn't democratic at all, and this is by design because of both the origins of the EU as a technocratic-economic project but also the EU parliament just sucks and doesn't really act like a parliament that governs. Because it doesn't really, the EU commission is the only thing people really talk about when it comes to the EU doing stuff. Sometimes the EU parliament will kick up a fuss but it's rare. The real fusses get kicked up in national parliaments.
It's arguably still democratic in that each country, through its EU commissioner, gets one vote and the power to veto unless they've given up that veto for a specific issue which is done at a summit of all the national leaders of EU countries by signing a further treaty. If a country doesn't like what is happening they tell their elected national government to do something about it then the commissioner acts on the instructions received from the national government. Going from admittedly hazy memory from back in 2016, commissioners have a fixed term, I believe, and a national government can recall their commissioner if they are not doing what they are told. I think the EU parliament can also veto legislation proposed by the EU commission, but cannot create its own legislation.
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.
"each country, through its EU commissioner, gets one vote and the power to veto"
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.
I mean, we sent Ursula von der Leyen as head of the commission to the EU who became infamous in Germany for rather having CSAM stay online as long as she could prevent Germans from seeing it…
The debate was going on a bit like this:
"We should force DNS providers to block CSAM!" Internet activists: "Maybe it would be a better idea to ask the providers hosting this stuff to delete it?" - "WE SHOULD FORCE DNS PROVIDERS TO BLOCK CSAM! THESE INTERNET ACTIVISTS ARE SUPPORTING PEDOCRIMINALS!" (completely ignore what internet activists said)
People were begging her/them back then to, as a first step, include a requirement to send some kind of deletion request. Nada. Their list of CSAM that were apparently undeleteable (hence requiring internet blocks) were to a huge percentage deleted within days by Mogis (a German group of abused children against internet blocks) by simply mailing the provider where it was hosted.
So I’m not sure what other way there is to read this.
I'm baffled that you give that woman the benefit of the doubt who literally earned the nickname Zensursula with her hide-instead-of-delete antics in 2009.
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.
“We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.”
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.
Are there any Europeans here that don't agree with where the EU/WEF/etc agenda are going? Sitting here in US, it appears to be homogeneously moving in ever increasing regulations and hamstringing progress, but I am sure there is a great deal of debate about it? Are there groups in EU that are pushing back?
Both pro-privacy and anti-privacy have one common theme - more power to the state.
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).
When this (as well as other similar laws) are pushed other and other again... I remember that saying by Juncker... We'll try again, and again, and again till it passes one time :)
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.
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"?