Stardate 20020826.1241

(Captain's log): Porphyrogenitus writes:

On Sunday you commented how institutional culture is shaped by the society that its people are drawn from. Discussing how this affects militaries, you pointed out that what works for America's military wouldn't work for Britain's, and vice versa.

Applying the concept more broadly - beyond militaries to other institutions - how do you think this will affect the EU, which attempts to govern many very different nations, with one EU institutional culture? (And here I mean the EU as a political, rather than economic, union).

I bring this up because I have a friend in Britain who said he believed the EU would fall apart sooner rather than later for this very reason - it cannot succeed in governing so many very different cultures with one set of institutions.

I said I disagreed, because the culture of the elites involved has a unity of outlook - they have more in common with each other (an "elite culture"/shared ideology) than any of them have with the bulk of the people in the societies they were born in. I figured the EU will last at least another 30-40 years (as a political entity in the form it has now; a top-down "Impersonal Bureaucracy/Self-Perpetuating Oligarchy"). He thought only 5-10 years more. What's your take?

Success and Failure describe the end points of a continuum, not a digital quantity. History is replete with organizations which were seriously dysfunctional which lingered on for decades. I agree that there is going to be that kind of cultural problem in the EU, but I don't think it will kill it.

The original United States had an even greater cultural gulf, which nearly did destroy it in the 1860's, but it survived (after a bloody war), and what has happened since is that we've grown together. Given the range of languages in the EU that process will be somewhat slower, but I think that this particular issue isn't going to be fatal.

I do think that the EU will fail, and eventually be replaced by something else or outright dissolve, but I think it's going to take decades and I think the reason will be something else entirely. What I think will kill the EU will be the failure of its economy.

What I see happening with the EU is a deliberate attempt to try to separate the decision makers and wielders of power as far as possible from the voters. The system right now is very indirect, and I think it's going to get worse. What you have is the representatives of the voters selecting others, who meet and in turn select still others, who meet and... Once you finally come to the end of this process you get those who actually will make decisions and they're so far removed from the voters as to feel they can ignore them. Which many there see as a feature, not a flaw. It means that the EU can do what's right instead of what's popular.

For many who believe in the EU, one of its goals is precisely to try to cease letting the shortsighted unwise plebes influence important decisions, and instead to let the enlightened and educated and sophisticated few make those decisions the "right" way, for the common good. Like all utopians their intentions and goals come from the highest ideals and they really do think that this will lead to a better and happier life for everyone. (They might as well have named the new organization "Eutopia".) But the practical effect of it all is going to be that the EU will move, all unknowingly and in small steps, to what amounts to a centrally planned economy. (And we all know how successful those have been.)

The event that to me shows the potential future for the EU was the regulation on disposal of refrigerators. It's a minor case, but the EU is only just gearing up, and it's symptomatic of deep problems to come.

As we all know, excessive release of certain chloro-fluoro-carbons represents a threat to the ozone layer which protects us from the Sun's ultraviolet light. The insulating foam used in many of the refrigerators sold in the UK can release CFCs if the refrigerator is not salvaged carefully at end of life, and so the EU bureaucracy issued a regulation forbidding any salvage company from accepting refrigerators unless they had the proper equipment to dispose of them without excessive release of CFCs. (I gather that what they did was to classify refrigerators as "hazardous waste".)

The EU bureaucrats who wrote this regulation didn't feel any need to concern themselves either with how it would actually get implemented, nor with how implementation would be paid for. Like good idealists everywhere, they assumed that making a rule would cause a solution to appear out of thin air, and it's necessary to do this in order to protect the ozone layer.

Idealists everywhere are frustrated by the fact that they can't convince voters of the fundamental rightness of their cause, and the fact that they don't have the ability to impose those policies by force. They would, if they could, but especially in the US our system doesn't give them that power except in really exceptional cases. But once they actually get such power, they immediately use (or abuse) it to "do the right thing", such as making it illegal to sell any kind of brewed coffee in Berkeley unless it's certified as being either labor frien