We have our own issues, including voter apathy, political corruption, unsustainable economic policies, extreme inefficiency and the occasional batshit crazy tech laws being pushed by politicians who probably never touched a device with more than two transistors. But I still love it here.
I would say least evil significant power... I believe their intentions are mostly good but that kind of paternalism in such a powerful entity can be a kind of evil.
The EUs fight against encryption is a good example
That's the whole point of a democracy, you vote on things like this. The flip side is that anyone can put to a vote all sorts of stupid things they don't understand.
The EU is ridiculously pluralist and consensus-driven. This makes it a sort of small-c conservative; it's not prone to whimsical bad ideas and grandstanding. Its failure mode is in the opposite direction of just gradually over-regulating small business out of existence.
The EU's behavior during the Greek debt crisis was pretty evil.
Imagine if a US state were in serious debt, and the US federal response were to slash Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare benefits to the state. The EU view was that Greece should get out of debt by massively slashing government spending, including on virtually all social services, which sent the country spiralling into a Great-Depression-level economic collapse. That made repaying the debt even more difficult, which necessitated even deeper cuts, which made the economy collapse even further, and so on for years. Greece endured years of 20+% unemployment, and GDP/capita has fallen to the level it was 20 years ago.
I agree that European lenders went overboard, but I can't blame them for requiring strict measures after the corrupt government of one member state threatened the economic stability of the entire EU bloc.
Years of government mismanagement and fraudulent reports had put Greece in a state where nobody reputable would lend them money, in extreme debt, and without an economy to recover by itself any time soon.
Greece could've decided not to take up the bailouts, of course. All austerity packages were passed by the democratically elected Greek parliament.
The EU would've liked Greece to magically go out of debt, but it's not like they were just going to hand the Greek government hundreds of billions of gifts and a pat on the back with a quick "try not to go bankrupt again, OK?". If you lend someone money, you want some kind of guarantee that you're going to get it back. The EU wasn't being evil, it was watching its own back while the worldwide economy took a hit. They weren't alone either; the IMF also demanded reforms to ensure their loans got paid back down the line.
At every step along the way, the Greek government was involved, including causing the instability in the first place. There are plenty of evil things the EU and its many bodies do, but this wasn't a good example.
> Greece could've decided not to take up the bailouts, of course. All austerity packages were passed by the democratically elected Greek parliament.
When the elected Greek government put the Nth austerity package to a popular referendum, the EU began cutting Greece off from the international banking system (one effect was that people were unable to withdraw more than a tiny amount from ATMs), in order to put pressure on the population to vote "yes." The population voted "no" anyways, because Greeks were massively against austerity by that point. The EU then put enormous pressure on the Greek government to ignore the result of the referendum, threatening to intentionally destroy the Greek economy. The Greek government caved and agreed to the new austerity package. This was extremely undemocratic: a popular referendum was simply ignored, and the government - which had been elected specifically to reject austerity - basically had a gun to its head.
> The EU would've liked Greece to magically go out of debt, but it's not like they were just going to hand the Greek government hundreds of billions of gifts and a pat on the back with a quick "try not to go bankrupt again, OK?".
If this were an American state, the citizens of the state would have received massive Federal transfers, in the form on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and unemployment payments. Instead, the equivalent of all of those things were massively slashed in Greece. This is the equivalent of throwing debtors in prison. In punishing them, you destroy their ability to pay back their creditors. It's an insane thing to do, even from the point of view of the creditors.
What the newly elected Greek government (not the old, corrupt government) was proposing was for the creditors to take a hit, and for stricter tax enforcement (particularly on the wealthy). It wasn't just saying, "Give us money and we'll do nothing." It was saying, "Don't force us into an artificial economic depression, and give us breathing space to reform the corrupt system we inherited."
The Greek government specifically asked the EU not to keep lending Greece money for the purpose of paying back creditors. The Greek government correctly pointed out that the inherited debt was unsustainable, and that you don't lend a bankrupt person money: you force the creditors to take a hit and create a realistic payment plan.
> There are plenty of evil things the EU and its many bodies do, but this wasn't a good example.
Imposing a completely unnecessary Great-Depression-level event on a member state - while running roughshod over that country's democratic system - was pretty evil. Greece went through years of massive unemployment, people's pensions and healthcare were slashed, and young people left the country in droves as practical economic refugees. The reason why the EU took this hard line was that some of the member states (like Germany and the Netherlands) wanted to send a message to the other financially weak states (like Portugal, Spain and Italy). In Germany, there was also a lot of populist politics involved: bashing "lazy Greeks" was good politics, and plenty of politicians made a lot of hay over being tough on the Greeks.
It's interesting that post-New Deal US is much more redistributive between the states than the EU has yet managed to achieve. Probably due to not having any direct taxation power of its own either.
EU "fiscal discipline" combined with bank bailouts looks so harmful in retrospect.
Greece has not been treated well, but you should also admit that Greece really fucked up. They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro.
> Imagine if a US state were in serious debt
Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances. The EU has a limited jurisdiction. E.g. taxation, education and defence are not part of it. Being part of the Euro zone does bring certain obligations.
> They even falsified their stats to adopt the Euro.
"They" is ill defined here. The people who falsified the finances were not the people who suffered under austerity.
> Except the EU is not responsible for and does not control their member states' finances.
During austerity, the "troika" (which included the European Commission and the European Central Bank) micromanaged Greece's finances. The Greek government was basically held hostage and forced to take very specific measures, down to which tax to change by which amount and which state assets to privatize in which way. The EU publicly aspires to be much more than just some soulless customs and currency union, and throwing a member state under the bus in this way and immiserating its population goes against what the EU supposedly stands for.
You're justifying a policy that heavily punished the Greek population by pointing to the actions of a small layer of elites (i.e., investment banks that aided corrupt politicians in cooking the books). You're doing this by conflating this small group of people with the entire Greek population, as an amorphous "they."
It's a mixed bag, really. They come up with great legislation I wouldn't have thought possible like the GDPR, but then they go and try to ban E2EE messengers. They set up accountability for tech giants, but then add upload filters. They try to ban ICE cars, but extend the deadline for many years because of automotive lobbyists.
Every good EU idea seems to come with a terrible idea. On average things seem to get better, but it's a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of progress. It's better than an all-bad government, but they do plenty of shitty things. I'm very happy to live in the EU, but it's certainly not for everyone.
The EU has made a deal, investing massive amounts of money into North African countries to keep refugees from crossing the sea. The EU representatives negotiating the deal knew exactly what was going on, even before the deal was happening.
There's no easy solution to the mass immigration problem, but this "solution" makes things worse for everyone.
We're massively cutting back on our business with Russia over their atrocities in Ukraine, but when it comes to human rights in Tunisia, we're willing to let this stuff slide. Sure, there's no war, but handing a country money to enforce their deadly anti-refugee violence is very bad.
