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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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We're 100% better off in the EU than we would be out of it, but there is a lot of favoritism and "Rules for thee but not for me" shit that rolls eastward.
Romania and Bulgaria are now suing the Austrian government for blocking our entrance into Schengen despite fulfilling every single point asked of us, and they still turn around and go "Lol no, you're not western EU, you don't deserve to be in this club".
Also, wtf is this shit France is talking about with tiered membership? I fully suspect they'll use this to try and strip poorer EU countries of voting rights if they get their way.
Exactly, like, the EU is not perfect, shit sucks sometimes, internal conflict is frequent. But let's not pretend like the alternative being turning into a soviet vassal state is all roses and singing.
The cherry on top is that poor EU states are almost universally those that were under USSR subjugation, so we know full well both sides. Unequal treatment is better than subjugation.
To be fair countries like Hungary and Poland have exposed the obvious weaknesses of a fully equal partnership that's present in the EU, it's all nice and stuff untill the whole EU pulls together, once you have bad actors fucking up quasi dictatorships like HUngary can stop your shit way too easily.
I feel like that would exist regardless of EU or not and while present in the EU it would be worse without it.
I mean don't get me wrong, the EU isn't perfect, but the person I replied to is clearly doing a false equivalence shit, comparing an imperfect EU with the fuckstorm that is russia.
That can be solved by removing the veto, but it's pretty telling that France wants to replace that with a tiered system rather than accept that they might get overruled by a majority if they do fucked up shit like Hungary was doing.
Completely agree. However many problems I have with the way the EU runs, it's infinitely better than living under a boot.
I've seen European history summarized as "everything was going well until one day a Frenchman had an idea and things went disastrously bad for everyone".
Isn't that just a function of small numbers of dissenting countries being able to gum up the entire EU more than favoritism from the organization itself, though? I feel like I hear similar scenarios from the EU all the time.
Partially true, but you almost never hear about Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, etc vetoing shit because the retaliation would be harsh. It's almost always rich countries doing the vetoing (notable exception of Poland and Hungary's former mutual defence pact to prevent sanctions on each other, and that did cause retaliation).
I do agree that the veto system needs to go though.
Lifting the veto is more problematic than it might appear. Each country having a veto lends a lot of legitimacy to EU, without it you'll see a lot of discussion about loss of sovereignty which is bound to be explosive. If countries don't have veto and still are strictly against some measure, how does the EU actually enforce it? Will "EU police" enter Hungarian parliament?