It's also an evolutionarily stable strategy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
> Strategy for the iterated prisoner's dilemma
...
> The winning deterministic strategy was tit for tat, which Anatol Rapoport developed and entered into the tournament. It was the simplest of any program entered, containing only four lines of BASIC, and won the contest. The strategy is simply to cooperate on the first iteration of the game; after that, the player does what his or her opponent did on the previous move. Depending on the situation, a slightly better strategy can be "tit for tat with forgiveness". When the opponent defects, on the next move, the player sometimes cooperates anyway, with a small probability (around 1–5%). This allows for occasional recovery from getting trapped in a cycle of defections. The exact probability depends on the line-up of opponents.
With VWP there is hardly any filtering of potential overstays so the rates might be higher than those through the visa process.
Also, it is perfectly fair because USA is dealing with entire EU here and hence can not treat Poland or Cyprus any differently than France or Germany because the stakes are exactly the same.
A more sensible policy should have been to publish the overstay rates every year and use that to determine VWP for the next fiscal year.
US states have no foreign relations. There's no Californian embassy in Sofia, but there is a Bulgarian embassy in Washington. No American travels on a Californian passport, but Bulgarians travel on Bulgarian passports.
If you want foreign countries to treat the EU as a single diplomatic unit, then all the EU member-state embassies should probably be closed and replaced with EU embassies, and all member-state passports should be replaced with generic EU passports.
As a practical matter, no country could subject citizens of different EU member states to different visa policies if they all had identical passports. That's exactly the situation with American passports.
Yep. And then you get disagreements and tit-for-tat. Just don't claim that the US's policies are in some way more legitimate.
> then it should stop holding
Says who? On whose authority? If the US wants its citizens to be treated uniformly, then it shouldn't give out per-state driver's licenses.
The authority or reasonableness and practicality.
> If the US wants its citizens to be treated uniformly, then it shouldn't give out per-state driver's licenses.
It may be news to you, but those aren't travel documents and are nonstandardized to boot. But if you think the EU should wade into that mess, I guess you're entitled to your opinion.
Also, it's probably worth noting treating Americans as citizens of their state and not the US for immigration purposes is totally unprecedented in the modern era of passports. On the other hand, the precedent over the same period has been to treat Europeans as citizens of their member states and not of an undifferentiated EU.
It's fairly close to how it works. If you live in Montenegro and need any EU visa, you go to Slovenian embassy. Even if you'll visit Spain or Ireland.
So does the European Union.
Though not too different from imposing trade sanction on those products that hit some states much harder than others.
Thanks for sharing! Probably the best explanation of classic game theory that I have seen.
It's not the same. When you are born in California, your citizenship is "US". When you are born in Bulgaria, your citizenship is Bulgarian, not European. If that happens, of course it'll be more difficult to prevent people from a single country to move freely.
This is one of the biggest differences between United States and EU. USA is one country, Europe is not.
> US uses its weight to exert its influence pretty much all over the world. Well, so does the EU in this case, whether the US likes it or not.
I am European, however this comment makes me laugh. USA can literally crash EU in a couple of weeks, if they want to. It doesn't mean I need to live with fear, for God's sake, but just saying.
This answer from the EU is just a show off, utterly useless, and obviously being two months before the elections it tells me something - we want to protect our borders from the USA? Finally we won't have anymore terrorists coming from USA. Thanks EU, I feel safer now. :)
That's maybe what the US believes (or some of the "America is special" hardliners) and if you believe it too I would say their propaganda did a good job. They can neither militarily nor economically do this, even if they wish they could.
Says who?
You don't need to crash a country just by throwing bombs at them. Just look at how dysfunctional the EU is.
Not exactly. As already explained in some posts below, the EU has a legal concept of "EU citizenship". So, from the legal point of view, Bulgarians in your example are both the Bulgarian citizens and EU citizens.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...
> This is one of the biggest differences between United States and EU. USA is one country, Europe is not.
Sure, but how relevant is that? At least in this case, I think the difference is more of a technicality.
By the way, EU is already more than a confederation, since it actually has many properties of federation (for example, if you will compare the political systems of EU and Switzerland, you will actually find quite a few key similarities). Although European politicians do everything they can to avoid these words. So, while EU is certainly not a country, it made quite a lot of steps towards becoming one. It's just a fact, regardless whether you are pro-federation or anti-federation.
> I am European, however this comment makes me laugh. USA can literally crash EU in a couple of weeks, if they want to.
.. inflicting huge damage to itself with very major repercussions to the US national security. This world is really not as simple as that. Is US much more powerful than the EU? Yeah, sure. Although even in terms of raw power it's not as dramatic (economy: EU is already of very similar weight as US in terms of GDP; military: combined EU forces would be very comfortably the second largest military in the world, both in terms of quality and quantity). Anyway, this is rather theorethic. There are many more complex aspects which matter in reality with a very subtle palance of powers, so "they can crash us" doesn't mean much.
> This answer from the EU is just a show off, utterly useless, and obviously being two months before the elections it tells me something - we want to protect our borders from the USA? Finally we won't have anymore terrorists coming from USA. Thanks EU, I feel safer now. :)
This was actually planned and made public years ago, at least as far as 2016, so nothing to do with the elections. As pointed out by others, it is not targeted explictly at the US. It's something what's going to be applicable for many other countries.
Stones in glass houses ?
Territorial restrictions The vehicle selection can restrict travel to certain countries. For a description of these restrictions on admission, the countries are divided into three zones.
Zone 1: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Vatican
Zone 2: Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia
Zone 3: All countries which are not in zone 1 or 2.
Jaguar, Maserati, Land Rover and Porsche cars as well as all luxury cars may enter only in Zone 1 countries. Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen cars up to group L are allowed to enter only in Zone 1 countries as well as Poland and the Czech Republic, while X* cars are only allowed to enter in Zone 1 countries. Vehicles of all other brands may enter only in the zones 1 and 2.
Trucks, vans, people carriers and minibuses of all brands may only be driven in zones 1 and 2.
Entry into any country in zone 3 is not permitted.
In case of offence against cross border and territorial restrictions all insurances lose their validity.
The car rental places dont want you to take their nice cars to countries that have a higher rate of car theft.
Pretending all of the EU is equal is silly.
- Tit-for-tat response is a geopolitical reality. Regardless whether you think it is pre-school model or not, this is what pretty much all countries do, as it is a perfectly rational way (and sometimes even the only way) to defend your interests. By rational I am talking about the Game Theory kind of rational. :)
- You suggest to look at each EU country individually (just also keep in mind that there are no border controls beetween the EU countries in the Schengen Zone). In such case, should we also look at each US state individually (because they are also not uniform, e.g. some are much poorer than the others)? EU as a whole has much greater weight and leverage. The point I am making here is that it is another geopolitical reality: countries use their weight and, for example, US uses its weight to exert its influence pretty much all over the world. Well, so does the EU in this case, whether the US likes it or not.
- Your point about the citizens of those countries being disproportionate overstayers is not true. As a matter of fact, the overstay rate of these countries is lower than some of those which are already in the Visa Waiver Program (VWP), e.g. compare those fives countries with Spain, Greece, Hungary, etc. So, if there is some kind of threshold they cross, then it should apply to the current VWP countries to, shouldn't it? Please the see offical US Homeland Security report as a reference here:
https://www.dhs.gov/publication/fiscal-year-2017-entryexit-o...