Given the almost religious attention the term limit of sitting presidents of the US has it is interesting that so very little attention is given to the fact that the EU structure has no effectual limit at all; if the current EU President were to be nominated by the European Council in a circular manner she will effectually serve for perpetuity (while the Parliament can in principle say no they are only ever given one candidate to vote for (...) and has thus far never said no to any nominee).

The United States is religious against kings and genuinely thinks they have a holy mission of humans right, freedom, democracy, and liberalism.

Obviously this doesn't always happen, but there's only an extremely small minority that think otherwise.

Maybe put me in the otherwise camp. Disappointed democracy produced Trump. Maybe we need a technocracy to defend the world from China.

I don’t think the average American voter “genuinely” thinks that they’re on a Blues Brothers-style mission from god to deliver liberalism and freedom to the world. I would be surprised if that’s even a minority view among voters.

Did you go to k12?

It's indoctrination, math, and reading.

The average American voter does think the USA play a positive role for the world, while the average non-American think otherwise. In details, a 2026 study from the Pew Research Center states that:

- 57% of A. think the USA contribute to peace in the world a great or a fair amount.

- Republicans and supporter think so at 82%.

- Outside of the USA, the median is at 35%.

As a country, we sure do think it is our mission/duty from god to "save the world from communism" (or whatever it gets called today). I think one movie that shows this is High Noon. That 70+ year old movie shows that it is "not all Americans, but always an American".

> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

As much as I hate the political leaning of the Commission, this is complete bullshit.

The commission is named by the member states' head, with the head of the commission and the individual commissioners' nomination being validated by the European parliament.

Yes they aren't elected, but that's no different from a minister in most country, nobody elected the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK, the Secretary of Defense in the US or the Ministre de l'Intérieur in France. But we don't call them wannabe dictators because that would be silly.

That's equally silly when talking about the European commission.

The dictators part is false, the EU is not a structure you can easily dictate. But this encryption backdoor thing is somebody's pet project and extremely alarming. The UK has a similar bend they've already put in place with IPA and TCNs. The US is way gone on decrypted stored data and metadata, but not on encryption backdoors yet, though legislators have tried.

You can. The way this works is via something called money. Or more generally, financial incentives, kickbacks, you name it.

Using the UK as bad example, which it is, does not excuse the EU being bad too (or rather here, the EU commission).

Can you please explain to me why you think this is the case? Can parliament make law or not? Why is the commission the only body that can make law? Its staffed with people that appear to serve special interests. I saw this during the Stop Killing Games Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative. If there is no way to challenge the EU commission's practices that are not democratic, how can you consider the EU commission a body that actually works for I members?

EU is less of a dictatorship and more of a technocracy. Where they rely heavily on experts to define policy rather than a democratic system. As you said:

> Where the EU commission meet with the game industry privately in EU before the decision on the Stop Destroying Video games Initiative

The experts they choose can just be anyone with a bit of authority whom the bureaucrats can find to support what they already want to do. Plus lots of paid expert consultants to make plans after the policy is enacted who know to tell them what they want to hear.

It's similar to the US media when they bring expert talking heads on their shows (academics, ex-military, etc). They come prepackaged with views the network's want.

The word for what you just described is not technocracy…

In practice it is. The whole idea of technocracy comes with a bunch of levers you can easily exploit with a bit of power and money (not just external corporations or donors, but internal like intelligence agencies). As long as you make an appearance of following the process of evidence being collected and experts being involved. And there is never a careful process to check if it was actually done right after the fact. Just the usual political election risk which is even more obscured by the extra layers of descion making and consultancies. It's just democracy with less public accountability. Particularly, with as I said, how it's implemented in practice (rather than technocracy on paper).

no true technocracy/nepotism wearing a cloak.

“Experts.” Sorry, but they aren’t. I know enough people advising policy, working for external agencies, staffed on projects on a “who’s available to work on this?”-basis without any relation to their expertise.

The commission is the only body able to initiate legislature, but it cannot pass this legislature without assent from the European Parliament and/or Council of the European Union.

The EU has plenty of deficiencies, but calling it a dictatorship is wildly inaccurate.

A dictatorship needs a dictator. The EU parliament is made of several bodies. There never can be a dictatorship. People who claim "dictatorship!" should learn to express themselves properly

The US has CLOUD Act, it has a backdoor in almost every data center on Earth. Because:

"The CLOUD Act allows United States authorities to request data from cloud providers and other covered service providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. The act is not limited to companies based in the United States. It applies to "all electronic communication service or remote computing service providers that operate or have a legal presence in the U.S". Courts can require parent companies to provide data held by their subsidiaries."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.

Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat

This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.

The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)

The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).

There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.

The more democratic the EU the less sovereign legitimacy countries have. That's the tension that makes Euroskeptic parties oppose reforms.

There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").

But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.

>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.

What kind of loss of power are you referring to?

The UK was one of the largest members of the EU, and as such had a substantial say over it's direction and policies; and as the EU is a major economic power, consequently that is power in the world as well.

That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.

Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.

Thanks. Interesting points. Not sure I quite understand it, but I will think it over.

Look to the Westminster system for the true solution to the Commission’s lack of accountability.

Let the MEPs of each country vote on who amongst them will sit on the Commission.

Member states will veto it because it will shift power from national governments directly into a separately voted parliament, changing the current approach of "EP is where we can drop someone if they lose national election as a reward for being good little soldier or to make them pay half the money to party coffers"

because it is a perfect tool for all governments to 'wash' unpopular political bills that would be a political suicide in local politics.

You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it.

That is also true - national countries sabotage any reform.

Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.

I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.

Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.

EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.

The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.

I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.

Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.

The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.

Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.

Or maybe it's impossible to satisfy desires of such culturally diverse populace as EU citizens.

Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling. Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.

Which why originally much more was decided by consensus and if there is no consensus then simply every country can do their own way. I feel like a lot of things actually reached a local optimum in the 90s in our approach to improve things, we left that.

It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.

This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.

Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.

The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.

That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.

So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.

And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.

This is not exactly, both french and dutch referenda were

> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?

There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).

There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.

Until they come up with a procedure to workaround the fact that there is no majority in the EU parliament and push it through anyway (like they did a couple of weeks ago with ChatControl 1.0).

"ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.

There was opposition in parliament, though. It was only passed because they snuck it in while MPs had left for summer vacation, and the parliamentary rules are absolutely pants-on-head iditioc and default to passing proposed legislation if a majority of all MPs do not vote it down (rather than merely the ones present). In other words, they passed it by default without achieving any kind of majority, because there weren't enough people physically present to vote it down.

The EU never delegitimised itself more than it did with that act. Actively undermining parliament to knowingly impose legislation the population absolutely does not want is validated every concern anti-EU advocates ever had.

I still dont understand how a thing that passes this way has any legitimacy? Cant the EU just not allow it to be enforced?

That's a bit of a touchy subject that exposes the fact that the EU has repurposed a system for designing industry standards (not laws) and has a shaky legal foundation.

To some extent countries are bound by EU law, but what this means depends on the institutions and legal structure within that country. Although the EU tends to claim they have final say, but how can someone interpreting national law agree with that if the EU goes against the law they are interpreting? Even if the EU is right they can only ask members to acoid contradiction, they lack the force to demand it.

Yeah this sounds like another scam. I big one. We should really find another way to govern societies.

The EU is not a government. It's a standard body for countries and their governments.

Ohh. But doesnt it push and control legislation? If it was just a standards body, couldn't countries governments just approve or deny recommendations at will?

It seems like its operating as a government too me, but maybe I am not seeing the whole picture.

Some of its standards supersede national law (I think it was the regulations that did so, amd standards needed to be built into national law, could be the other way around).

And this makes a lot of sense with rules about food safety, product standards etc. It almost makes sense for privacy protections. It makes very little sense for surveillance laws.

Governments also codify into law that everything X standardizes is automatically a regulation for other standard bodies. Road and building standards work that way: they are just standards issued by a random association and the government has stated, that all developments in their jurisdiction need to follow this associations standards.

The government could also do this for the EU, it's called leaving the EU.

Chat Control 1.0 is not at all voluntary for those controlled by it.

For example: there is no setting in Facebook Messenger where users can enable or disable Chat Control.

This is like saying that private prisons are voluntary because the corporations that run them were not forced into the market.

There's no setting in Facebook where I can tell Meta to bake me a cake either. But I'm still allowed to buy cakes.

That would be more like there being no setting to tell Meta to stop sending you cakes, but them continuing to send cakes. Except they take something from you, instead of giving.

Who picks the comissioners are the national governments.

It's important to lay the blame on who is actually pushing this crap.

It's little coincidence that the EU parliament, who actually represents the people, that keep shooting shit like this down.

> In reality, they want to be dictators.

Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.

Very funny if it weren't so true!

I‘m not being ironic. With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person. Bureaucracies are the opposite: they’re intentionally setup to diffuse responsibility as much as possible and hold no one accountable. Instead of a single guy, you now have to fight something resembling a fungus. This is much harder: instead of a decapitation strike, you face an enemy that is more resilient and resistant to change, and near impossible to kill.

Are you saying that historically very bureaucratic countries have been worse to live in than dictatorships? Not sure I follow actually. It sounds very strange to me. Isn’t also the first move of all dictators to take over all institutions with their own people?

They are saying that in bureaucratic countries there is not a single entity that can be held accountable, which means that "bad" decisions, are not easily undone. Likewise it means that "good" decisions are hard to change. It is a statement about the momentum of change, not about it's worth or intention.

There is no further comparison made between these governmental forms and how they affect their subjects.

Why would you create such a blatant red herring?

Very well put.

Red herring how exactly? The conversation is literally:

”> In reality, they want to be dictators. Its much worse than that. They want to be unaccountable bureaucrats.”

Edit: to expand on what I mean. I read so much negativity and hyperboles here on the EU. It is full of problems absolutely but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame. EU has problems but what large organization works better? US? India? China? Brazil? I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.

A red herring is a bait planted specifically to derail a conversation. I will make an example to demonstrate this in a setting which is less loaded. Beware that all analogies are flawed in essence, so a direct transfer to our conversation will be difficult, especially since I am trying to be blatant. But since I want to answer your question of where the red herring lies I feel like that is the easiest way:

A (raising an issue): This hole in the wall sucks, I can't stand it. At least if we were in a tent we could sew it shut.

B (planter of herrings): So you'd rather live in a tent than in a house? Don't you know that tents are generally worse than houses?

C (the innocent bystander lead astray): I also much prefer houses. You hear so many bad things about them, but in the end nothing is better. No caves, no huts, and certainly no tents. I'd pick a house any day of the week.

Did you notice that we are no longer talking about the hole in the wall? The hole could be required for mold-prevention, it could just be an oversight that is actually fixable, it might be a trade-off. But since we are no longer talking about the hole we will never know.

> ... but ”With a dictator you have full responsibility concentrated in a single person” is simply not true. Dictorships are master minds of shifting blame.

This is you talking about the hole in the wall. I am also not convinced by the original argument, but I do believe that there is some substance to be explored.

> ... I’m obviously biased as a European but I’d pick the eu any day.

This is you falling for the red herring. We don't know if the original poster lives in the EU. We don't know if they prefer it to a dictatorship, but it also does not matter. The original qualms are that there is seemingly no single point you can go to to stop the endeavor once and for all, which in this context is encryption backdoors within the EU. We could be talking about how the same mechanics that make this so frustrating are useful elsewhere; find out or explain why the things are the way they are. We could be uncovering a valid flaw in the system just waiting to be fixed; conclude that things don't have to be this way. Instead, we ask ourselves if we like living in the EU better than in other places. We've lost the plot, so to speak: There is no more insight to be had.

This is what makes a red herring so obnoxious to deal with. It is an easy trap to lay if you don't want to think about something or hinder someone, but takes so much effort to recover from. In the tent-example it is easy to see that we completely derailed and stopped talking about what matters. Unfortunately, reality is much more subtle and not everyone has the same goals in mind. At least on HN I'd like to try and keep discovery in focus and once we reach the stage where it's only about opinions there is nothing more to discover.

That is the structure of the EU. Wannabe fascists propose all kinds of laws, then a democracy chooses which ones it wants.

Secret Hitler(the boardgame) fan?

Wait, Hilter made a boardgame? I'm... curious. (Looks around with apprehension)

"Secret Hitler" is a social deduction game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Hitler). You can find various games of it on YouTube.

Or democraticallly rejects them, but trough unbelievable trickery they still become law. See Chat Control, which never had majority support in parliament.

Democracy with Brussels characteristics.

Chat Control 1 isn't a law, it's the lack of a law. Chat control 2 is a law and it was profoundly rejected.

This its more like an oligarch edict with democratic dressing. Its set up so the European elite can force political chance without having to deal with annoying things like democracy other than in name

I agree, but to be fair, the US constitution is set of limitations on democracy from beginning to end, and I do support that document.

The U.S. constitution would be a much better constitution for the EU than what we have now.

But the US doesn't follow it.

This is actually what peter Thiel described in his plans.

I don't think it is too much power or even the wish for more. It is IMHO more the disconnect of EU beaurocrats and the Brussels bubble. We need more direct legitimation given the amount of power they have (actually down to the DGs).

The wild part is that both the United States and China will get the decryption. There's too much money and corruption in the world.

Maybe local(European states) won't care as long as they can use it against their people in their feifdom.

I understand this setup was likely necessary to get countries to join initially, but it no longer makes sense & should be abolished, with all power of the commission given to the parliament.

It's unfortunate that some of us have been warning and shouting this for years, before it got to this place, and before they amassed all this power, and now that it's almost too late people are catching on.

I'm a little hazy on how this gets enforced. I thought the EU made rules, but then those rules had to be ratified and implemented by the national governments of the member nations (and historically, some of them have been very lax about implementing and enforcing those rules).

Will we end up with a hodgepodge of national rules from each EU country that is effectively unenforceable? Or is there a different mechanism that allows the EU to enforce a blanket rule over all the EU nations?

> The European Commission has far too much power, and answers far too little to the populace. In reality, they want to be dictators.

This is an incredibly uninformed take on how the EU is structured and completely undermine the argument you’re trying to make.

Ursula is 100% a dictator and the EU as well. All in the pockets of Bibi. Every time I hear it's a democracy I want to gag. We have a huge issue with fascists again and it won't solve itself.

Some argue the commission still has democratic legitimacy through national governments. In my opinion that is simply not the case for several reasons.

The EU has never been a democratic entity, As a French, I still remember the so-called "2005 French European Constitution referendum (Do you approve the bill authorising the ratification of the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe?)

55% of voters voted no despite the constant propaganda on TV nudging people to vote yes.

In 2007, the new French president was elected, he was very pro EU (like the vast majority of French politicians), after several meeting behind closed doors, it was decided to bypass the will of the people though the ratification of a treaty without a referendum. The Lisbon Treaty, was voted by the Parliament.

We can argue that this was decided by the French politicians and not EU politicians but we are now two decades into it and the same playbook have been used over and over.

The EU constantly dilute responsibilities. Our local politicians will claim they can't do much, this is now decided in the EU and the EU politicians will claim that the national governments decided to adopt this on their own terms.

We are now completely deprived of any freedom and I personally made the choice to leave the EU because it gives a bad taste to live in a place where everything is decided behind closed door without any possibility to vote on anything.