This has a lot to do with it.

The EU has mismanaged the Greek "Crisis" by not actually having a true crisis but rather having a crisis every six months.

In a world where threats are coming from Russia, Syria, etc. it would be in in the interest of Europe to have Greece be stable and they really should have made everybody feel some pain, write off part of the debt, and take the punch bowl away.

The biggest threats to the EU are not external, but internal.

In a nutshell:

- not enough buy-in of the population

- too much corruption

- too many languages

- too many EU politicians getting 'money for nothing' (further reducing buy-in)

- too many countries that slip their own protectionist measures in under the radar and get away with it

- no unified tax system

- way too many horses pulling in different directions at once

And we don't have a slavery problem to get rid of so there most likely will not be a unification by force happening any time soon.

Don't forget double standards, or at least the perception thereof, particularly in the application of the Stability Pact.

+ massive bureaucracy

How anyone can write a 4 page essay on the EU without mentioning the absurd bureaucracy and regulatory hell it has introduced to small businesses is beyond me.

People outside of Europe may not be aware of how bad it really is, so just let me point you to the perhaps most prominent example, the "Commission Regulation (EEC) No 1677/88 of 15 June 1988 laying down quality standards for cucumber" [1]. Let me pull some money quotes from the text:

- "Slightly crooked cucumbers may have a maximum height of the arc of 20 mm per 10 cm of length of the cucumber."

- "Cucumbers grown in the open must weigh 180 g or more. Cucumbers grown under protection must weigh 250 g or more. Moreover, 'Extra' Class and Class I cucumbers grown under protection weighing: 500 g or more must be not less than 30 cm long, between 250 and 500 g must be not less than 25 cm long."

[1] http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELE...

The point of not including this is that every time it is mentioned people cherry-pick sentences from that regulation without context just as you do. What we see here is a regulation of cucumber labels not cucumbers itself. Your quotes are minimum standards for certain classes of cucumbers. It's still fine to sell other cucumbers but you just can't sell them as e.g. "Class 1".

The regulation was abolished in 2009 because it was mentioned in every debate the public had about the EU. Guess what happened then? Almost every contract of cucumber merchants now contains a verbatim copy of that regulation.

Merchants love that kind of standardization (and if not, they were free to ignore it by not using the defined labels). It makes it easier to transport produce and allow for better planning. If there is no central definition of quality classes everybody is creating their (likely slightly incompatible) ones. That's not less bureaucratic, it's more bureaucratic. Now every small business has to deal with dozens of different company-made regulations.

Because we are on HN think of it as an RFC standard with the addition of being legally bound to it as soon as you declare conformity.

> Guess what happened then? Almost every contract of cucumber merchants now contains a verbatim copy of that regulation.

> Merchants love that kind of standardization.

Indeed; so much so that (as you've demonstrated) they can establish it themselves without needing government help to do so.

Because if it is decided that (example off the top of my head) "cucumbers grown in the pesticide Toxiciomosis cannot be sold as 'Class 1' cucumbers", there is just one place which needs updating, rather than K contracts.

DRY applies to more than code.

Please read the rest of the paragraph.

I did. Your post provided a specific example where merchants have standardized on a compatible standard despite the regulation no longer existing.

What evidence do you have that merchants will standardize on incompatible sets of standards? Compatible standards benefit them.

Of course they are standardizing on that. It's what they have been using for 20 years.

Naturally compatible standards benefit them as a whole. But that does not mean someone is actually going to develop them. In fact, trade groups specifically asked the EU to create that cucumber standard.

It's also important note that such standards don't fall from heaven. They are the result of long consultations (often taking up to a decade) with all stakeholders. It's also not an EU-exclusive thing. I would be very surprised if there were no similar standards in the US.

A one-minute search has led me to this US government standard from which I can cherry-pick similar sentences:

https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Cucumber_...

> The maximum diameter of each cucumber shall be not more than 2-3/8 inches and the length of each cucumber shall be not less than 6 inches

> "Injury caused by scars" means scars which aggregate more than the area of a circle three-eighths inch in diameter on a cucumber 6 inches in length, or correspondingly greater areas of scars on larger cucumbers.

Implementation of that is (as far as I understand) voluntary but if you label your cucumbers "U.S. Fancy." you have to adhere to those standards. That's exactly the same as with the quoted EU regulation.

There is a reason why countries around the world develop such standards and it's not their love of bureaucracy.

A deep, significant secret of modern society as we know it, all around us:

Modern technological society is not a product of technology alone. We've had relatively intricate mechanical devices dating back to the Roman Coliseum, and before. Suits of armor had hasps, fasteners, catches, and wingnuts.

Modern society is a product of technology crossed with cheap flow of information crossed with interoperability standards. The suits of armor had wingnuts, but the wingnuts had individual faces carved onto them, because not even the left and right shoulder wingnuts were swappable. Common standards have built the shipping, transportation, telecommunications, and computing infrastructures that heavily define modern society today.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6481969.stm discusses this and some other urban legends of British-EU compliance.

Notably, the fruit and vegetable size/shape standards declare three categories for each item, and a producer can then advertise them as such and a seller can rely on the product being as advertised. "Extra" class conforms completely, "Class 1" mostly conforms, and "Class 2" is much looser.

Pretty much every western country has similar standards for economically important agricultural produce. They just specify what you're buying if you buy Class 1 Cucumbers. If your cucumber is too curvy, you can't sell it as class 1, you have to sell it as class 3 or unclassified. That's all.

"that's All".. Because Europeans are too stupid to classify cucumbers on their own.

I have heard an explanation for these vegetable regulations is that all the member countries had their own rules anyway, so having a single EU rule was better than what there was previously, and the EU wasn't getting involved in vegetables where previously government wasn't.

I have also heard that these standards only apply if you want to describe your vegetables as meeting the standard. If you don't then I have heard that they don't apply.

I don't know if either of those are true or not, or if it's a meaningful excuse for anyone, though. You could argue the EU should have got involved and got everyone to agree to abolish the regulations, or you could think that a common way of describing vegetable standards is good.

An analogy from the United States: after the September 11th attacks, one of the side-effects was standardization of the emergency responder radio codes at a national level. Previously, each jurisdiction had its own radio short-number codes; they worked in the jurisdiction just fine, and were incompatible cross-jurisdictions. This was generally a non-issue, until the friction from NYC first responders and Jersey first responders needing to inter-operate under a shared command structure revealed what a problem it was.

There's a perhaps surprising number of things that are not done in a standardized way. Firefighting in general is still done in a very local fashion vis. best practices, equipment, etc... With the exception of the radio codes and the national / international standards for labeling shipping containers (necessary because if a firefighting team rolls up on an overturned tractor trailer engulfed in flames, they need to be able to tell quickly whether the trailer contained the sort of thing that pouring on water will douse or the sort of thing that pouring on water will cause spatter or (much worse), violent combustion / polymerization reactions.

This is a real flip-flop problem.

One day is it clearly obvious that you should let people self-organise and let good ideas float up without regulation.

The next day it is clearly obvious that everyone should standardise.

I have this vague recollection that one of the reasons Denmark never joined the EMU and kept the kroner as their currency, had something to do with arcane regulations regarding cucumbers.

Possibly, and it's a perfect example how the right-wing exploits the stupidity of people.

- The cucumber regulation has nothing to do with the Euro – it (was) in effect in Denmark anyway.

- It wasn't arcane.

Well may they can write 4-page essays because:

- That regulation is no longer in effect

- How was anyone negatively impacted by that regulation? It was actually demanded by the merchants.

The UK doesn't feel that way either. The country is largely run by, and for, a small sliver of our society and does little to help vast swathes of it.

Of course you have bickering, because you have different interests, just as with any group where number of members > 1.

So if it doesn't feel that way, yes, because (a) you're looking at it from the inside and (b) we're not particularly integrated, yet.

But the main question comes from (b) - will we ever be integrated? Ignoring Britain and the rest of non-Euro countries, Germany and their unwillingness to even consider a fiscal union seems to be the main stumbling block. Can you imagine the US government introducing capital controls only in Alabama?!

Huh? I am fairly certain that fiscal union was always the plan, not achievable politically, so left for later introduction when it became obviously necessary.

Anyway, I don't buy that it's Germany that's blocking. Of course, fiscal union means giving up a good chunk of sovereignty, which is where many of the member states balk. Fiscal union is OK if it means we get money, not so OK if we are no longer allowed to spend any way we want.

The question is, what is good for the others?

Germany has the biggest population and the most wealth.

The smallest countries seem to do well, too.

My answer: all or nothing, not something in-between like now.

Either disintegrate the currency union, possibly Schengen as well, and let each country govern itself as it sees fit (seemed to work quite well 20 or so years ago) - simply by the virtue of common European heritage and values (at least compared to the rest of the world - China, US, Muslim countries), we'll end up collaborating quite well.

Or establish a United States of Europe, where the federal government takes care of the budget (no more "Greece defaulting" and "Cypriot capital controlls"), military (no more "UK intervention in Syria") and probably a few other things. Of course, to implement this, we need to agree on a common set of values from the beginning, which IMO we should model on Germany/Switzerland/Denmark (i.e. direct democracy, strong military but non-interventionism abroad, publicly-funded schools and healthcare but allow private services as well, strong consumer and environmental protections, flexible employment but with a strong social net). Personally, I'd add freedom of speech and the right to self-determination (secession) as well, but most of Europe seems quite opposed to that...