What makes this really complex for the EU is that they have tried to punish Poland for this and other various things, but a sanction requires the agreement of all member states, and a certain state named Hungary has an implicit agreement with Poland to never vote in agreement with the EU, and Poland the same for Hungary.
As a result, the EU tries to sanction Poland, but Hungary won't agree and so the sanction fails. Try to sanction Hungary? Poland is out, sanction fails. I have to admit that it's clever on Poland and Hungary's part, as it lets them selectively ignore some of the EU's more (from their perspective) overbearing rulings.
It is also a realisation that with ambitious projects you need to give up some sovereignty. All trade deals do that - swap some economic benefit for some legal commitments.
It’s not even like the EU has big expectations of Poland. The sticking point now is an independent judiciary and free press. Seriously, it’s embarrassing that Poland has to be strong armed into these!
In any case, Poland freely signed up to these commitments, it’s just bad form to eke out of them like this. Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland.
"Not to mention the actual damage politically-corrupted courts do to the people and economy in Poland."
Who voted them in? If you say that the people voted them in, it's painful, but it is the politics of the region. One of the terrifying parts of democracy is that the people have the right to vote for their leaders, including leaders who will actively undermine their own democracy, and they can be content with that because that's what they wanted. In which case, democracy has done what the people wanted, by ruining democracy.
It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy. Similarly, the ability of a democratic people to vote to end democracy is democracy working even though it is also an awful necessary loophole.
And if you say that we must take effort to prevent a democratic people, legally speaking, from democratically voting to end democracy, you are now technically anti-democratic. That's a weird place to be.
Aspiring dictators don’t run on abolishing democracy. It is not helpful to frame it like the people chose to ruin democracy.
Democracy depends on a strong free press and independent courts. A strong free press is not just one part of a country’s businesses, it is quite literally the fourth pillar of democracy.
> It's kind of like Jury Nullification, where Juries do not strictly need to vote on the merits of whether a person is guilty or innocent, but can vote against the law and know the law can't punish jurors for a "wrong judgement". Judges hate that loophole but know it's a necessary part of democracy.
Juries are not a thing in most countries that are generally considered democracies, so jury nullification can't be all that neccesary.
The EU is a very interesting thing to watch as an American because the EU has parallels to our Federal Government in scope, but is almost like an alternate history where States had the right to secede and retained nationhood unlike our states.
Also, if the political tensions in our nation continue to increase and don't stop, I would not be surprised in a decade from now if we start talking about replacing the Federal Government with a more EU-like arrangement.
I’m not an EU expert so hopefully someone can correct me if I’m wrong. But I think the USA-EU comparisons are superficial at best. The EU has half the states the USA does but 50% more population.
Unlike the USA—which has a really strong executive branch—there is hardly any executive branch in the EU. Instead the executive powers are held almost entirely by the member states. The EU does have a legislative branch (just like the USA) with around 650,000 people per representative. USA has around 750,000 but that number is further devalued by the USA senate (3,500,000 people per representative) which can hold a lot of power over the congress. I’m not aware that the EU has any equivalent.
The scope of the two systems is also vastly different. The USA federal government represents the foreign policy of each of the state, funds a military which answers to the government, finances much of the infrastructure within the USA, etc. In the EU foreign policy is largely held by the member states, there is no EU military, and funding for infrastructure projects is more likely to come mostly from the member state it self, then from the EU. The USA collects federal taxes, while the EU gets their funding from the member states.
Both have a federated court system. The USA have federal criminal courts which I’m not sure that the EU has, or at least not in the same way the USA does.
To summarize: The US federal government and the EU have in common that they both have a democratically elected legislator (both with relatively low representation) and they both have a federal court system. But this is where the similarities end.
There was a period in American history, the Articles of Confederation, which is more similar to how the EU works today.
> The Articles of Confederation created a loose union of states. The confederation's central government consisted of a unicameral Congress with legislative and executive function, and was composed of delegates from each state in the union. Congress received only those powers which the states had previously recognized as belonging to king and parliament.[15] Each state had one vote in Congress, regardless of its size or population, and any act of Congress required the votes of nine of the 13 states to pass;[16] any decision to amend the Articles required the unanimous consent of the states. Each state's legislature appointed multiple members to its delegation, allowing delegates to return to their homes without leaving their state unrepresented.[17] Under the Articles, states were forbidden from negotiating with other nations or maintaining a military without Congress's consent, but almost all other powers were reserved for the states.[18] Congress lacked the power to raise revenue, and was incapable of enforcing its own legislation and instructions. As such, Congress was heavily reliant on the compliance and support of the states.[19]
Of course, the EU functions better since it has its funding sorted out, whereas the executive under the Confederation more or less begged for money every year and did not usually get its requested allocation.
They don't have much similarities right now, that's agreed. However, I still think it's interesting because imagine if US States retained their sovereignty and the ability to secede at the US Founding. We might have ended up with something much closer to the EU today.
It's basically why the Articles of Confederation failed. The federal government was too made to weak to achieve much - each region (New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Carolina) was individually powerful enough to ignore it.
Although, the EU is a lot stronger than the Articles of Confederation ever were, given that the EU has sorted out how it gets funded from year to year.
And the EU should be free to insist on terms for membership of the organisation. If Poland/Hungary don't want to follow the terms they should just leave, like the UK just did.
But they don't want that hassle, and they want to keep the EU benefits, so this mutual veto of sanctions is definitely a loophole to keep as many benefits without meeting the requirements.
The EU is not the UN, while the UN's goal is to have every country in membership, and so it doesn't expel dictatorships just for being dictatorships, the EU is pretty explicit about democracy and human rights being requirements, which is why e.g. Turkey has not been allowed in so long.
Had Orban had the level of control when Hungary joined that he has now, Hungary would not have been allowed in. PiS is probably not yet at that level, but it's clear they would like to be.
And in which case, I would say this requirement, in practice, wasn't a requirement. I don't blame Hungary and Poland for gaming the system as much as I blame the EU for having this loophole (or feature, or necessary evil, depending on view).
There are many cases in life where, it seems, the best state is not a Nash equilibrium. Still, I don't think it's fair to say "just game it then". That's a quick race to the bottom.
The constructive equilibria in political systems appear to be unstable, and need active work to keep them there. The EU is in fact born out of that very realisation - its earliest seeds are in binding France and Germany in an economic union so they stop going to war with each other!
It‘s very simple. The EU was originally a market union, which every member state profited from. For some reason, the EU has been adopting more and more powers completely unrelated to international trade, and it shows because you will never get 27 different nations to agree on controversial issues.
And this is why I don't think that the ability for a few states to group together and ignore the EU's rulings is an automatically bad thing. States know that this protects them from becoming the US and losing most of their sovereignty.
Hungary and Poland both joined when the EU was in its current form - they knew what they were getting into. It's not liked they joined the EC or ECSC and just got pulled along for the ride into the EU's current state.
Generally these sorts of organizational problems are resolved by having different thresholds of consensus required for adopting different kinds of policies. Majority, super-majority... Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
> Consensus minus one, on the other hand, is another way of saying 'Impossible'.
No it isn't. Some 30% of decisions are made unanimously in scotus, and this is hardly an outlier. Requiring unanimous consent makes things way slower, yes, but it doesn't prevent them. Not all organizational changes need to be controversial. Several conservative programming languages did well by requiring unanimity in initial years - only adding what all could agree was good. It only requires those members to exercise good judgement.
It depends on what you think the design should have been. Some might look on and say that the ability for states to group together and not permit what they view as an overbearing ruling as a feature. Others would call it dissent.
On the other hand, EU states retain their national sovereignty, and could leave the EU if they disagreed with the EU that deeply, which the UK has currently done. The ability for states to group together and buck rulings, in a sense, makes it less likely for states to leave the union entirely. This ability may also have helped convince states to join the EU in the first place.
If you think that the EU (which is primarly Germany and France) are giving out free monies to Eastern Europe just like that, then you have fallen victim to Berlins propaganda.
In reality, what Germany and France buy with that „bribe“ is being able to freely export their goods (cars and retail items via international supermarket chains in particular) to Eastern European markets, while making sure the profits go back to the motherland (and are taxed there by the German/French government, leaving nothing in Eastern Europe).
This is not about money flow. I'm fine with that. What is not fine is the state capture this money flow facilitates. The state capture propagates a crony system, that will lead to a reduced economic output from what it could have been, and hence requiring more support in the future. The situation is both economically and politically untenable.
Ah ok I see, could you explain what exactly you mean by „state capture“? That the money goes to the state instead of private companies and the state is inherently wasteful etc?
I advice you familiarize yourself with the state capture in Hungary by Orban and his Fidez party. The ruling party has eridacated free press and is close on ending judicial independence. They remain in power mainly because they funnel EU money to their voters. Poland is on it’s way in copying this system.
But to update the law (because this sanctioning mechanism is so deep in EU law), you would need agreement from all member states. You can see where this is going... The EU won't try it because Hungary and Poland would obviously vote against it. And the cycle continues.
The current EU plan is to hope that Hungary or Poland's governments get replaced with one that won't support the other, and then consider doing the sanctions.
The other EU plan is to pursue other punishments that don't require a full sanction and basically cause as much hurt as possible even if they can't do the ideal remedy.
They already tried to do a runaround when Poland and Hungary threatened to veto a Covid recovery fund - basically, just set it up anyway for the rest of the 25 as a side deal that wouldn't involve the two and they wouldn't get any funds. In the end Poland and Hungary acquiesced, yet in a petty dictatorial fashion claimed they had won by forcing the EU to include them.
Let‘s not use the word „dictatorial“ in an extremely inflationary way. You can call it a government PR spin if you want, but I think no country in the EU is anywhere close to anything like North Korea or even Belarus.
If anything, it's "dictatorial" in the Sacha Baron Cohen "The Dictator" sense: "Victory! We won! We forced them to include us ...by acquiescing to their demands."
Thanks to those who downvoted showing the continued idiocy or lack of many people on HN who can't see the value that a simple comment can have even on triggering replies; and reaffirming why downvotes are stupid and lazy.
As a result, the EU tries to sanction Poland, but Hungary won't agree and so the sanction fails. Try to sanction Hungary? Poland is out, sanction fails. I have to admit that it's clever on Poland and Hungary's part, as it lets them selectively ignore some of the EU's more (from their perspective) overbearing rulings.