Thread

EU chief opens door for Canada to become 'associate member'

693 points · 905 comments · hackernj

softwaredoug · 1789557035 · focus · HN ↗
I’m not sure this is a good thing for Canada.
The EU feels like an incomplete experiment. Not strong enough to actually be a single market. But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones.
The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
1. lnxg33k1 · 1789557188 · focus · HN ↗
  I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing, uniformity doesn't work because not all populations have the same needs/expectations
  1. softwaredoug · 1789557398 · focus · HN ↗
    Maybe, but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU.
    Not because I think regulations are bad. But regulations need to be well designed with clears lines on what the Federal / State are allowed to do.
    Epa095 · 1789557820 · focus · HN ↗
    Its hard because its 27 different countries, but they are working on making it less hard. Many startups are made in Europe, but then bought up (often by Americans) or moves to USA when its time to expand outside the single countries boarders. Canada has the same problem.
    Canada has made it pretty clear that they do not want to be part of the big country south of it, so they will have to find a way to create large companies that stays. Doing this together with a market of 450 million people seems like a good idea.
    _ink_ · 1789557849 · focus · HN ↗
    > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU.
    They are working in it: <a href="https://www.eu-inc.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eu-inc.org/
    I have no clue whether that will be a success, but at least they have recognised that problem as well.
    anonzzzies · 1789557924 · focus · HN ↗
    > but it’s way too difficult to do business in the EU
    Been doing it for decades. Not a billionaire and not interested in becoming one; in the US I would've been one. But never had issues.
    mitxela · 1789562564 · focus · HN ↗
    You can't deal with 27 different groups of people without dealing with 27 different groups of people or forcibly unifying them to become 1 group. I'm sure you agree the latter is bad.
    softwaredoug · 1789563376 · focus · HN ↗
    That’s obviously reductive. They don’t have to be forced. They could mutually agree to unify more strongly
    mitxela · 1789567299 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes, and they have in some ways, and that's called the EU. They have not unified in every way. For example the French people have not agreed to start eating Surströmming, they do not want to start eating Surströmming, I don't know whether it's even legal there to possess it, and that decision should rightfully be up to them. If you want to sell your Surströmming in France you have to take France into account, you can't just assume your business will be the same everywhere in Europe, and that's not just limited to laws, but also all other facets of culture. For a basic example, you have to have a version of your packaging written in French.
    lnxg33k1 · 1789595019 · focus · HN ↗
    It's easy to do any business in EU, it's hard if you want to do business in EU over multiple countries, but if you are planning to do business over multiple countries then you're already extremely rich so you can afford staff to navigate regulations
    you don't get it, americans are shallow people with no culture or background whose biggest achievement is saying I am 1/8 irish or something, but countries over here have millennial of culture
  2. bitcurious · 1789563789 · focus · HN ↗
    > I am not sure, if I see the example of US as federation, it might work well for corporations only, but people have nothing,
    What does this mean, concretely? What do the people not have? Who are those people? What would they have in the EU?
    There is this odd fatalistic attitude about the US in this thread that seems divorced from the reality I’ve experienced in my travels.
    lnxg33k1 · 1789564415 · focus · HN ↗
    universal healthcare, paid time off just to cite two
    work/life balance?
2. cbg0 · 1789557628 · focus · HN ↗
  > The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
  EU already has uniform regulations, what are you talking about? It's also the third largest economy in the world, as uncompetitive as it is.
  1. cowboy_henk · 1789557849 · focus · HN ↗
    The EU is not a fiscal union. It is also not yet a single capital market.
  2. jcfrei · 1789558088 · focus · HN ↗
    No it does not. There's a lot of gold plating happening at the national level that goes beyond EU regulations. It's EU regulations + 27 national regulations in reality. The EU economies are still too different and the population too unwilling to have a truly US-style single market.
    etiennebausson · 1789559349 · focus · HN ↗
    You seems to be arguing that a U.S. style single-market would be an improvement.
    But for whom, people or companies?
    jcfrei · 1789560888 · focus · HN ↗
    It's an improvement for the economy and that mainly benefits the shareholders. How you redistribute those gains more broadly is an open question. But keeping inefficiencies in place to protect workers is a losing strategy in the long term - see: Soviet Union.
    Maskawanian · 1789561570 · focus · HN ↗
    Unsurprisingly, people in different parts of the world hold different values. Europe is generally more focused on actual people and how their lives live, than simply accumulation of wealth among the few. It is unsurprising that they focus on different things.
    jcfrei · 1789562533 · focus · HN ↗
    That's easier said than done when you are competing in a global economy. The US is actually getting more consistent here: It starts to become more isolationist (through the trade war and specifically tariffs) and as a result will have more leeway in choosing their own mix of workers rights, compensations, taxation, etc. Sidenote: Of course consumers will be worse off as a result.
    The EU however is in this weird spot where they are pushing for a more integrated global economy (thanks to all kinds of trade deals) with fewer hurdles while at the same time making their own companies less competitive with all these regulations and internal hurdles.
    Maskawanian · 1789562707 · focus · HN ↗
    Thanks for replying to a comment I didn't make. It is clear that your mind is full of American exceptionalism, I'm done in this comment thread. Thanks for your contribution.
    jcfrei · 1789563263 · focus · HN ↗
    FYI: I'm European and worried about our competitiveness. It appears you didn't get my point. You can have different values like you said but then you have to be consistent with this on all levels to make it work. And that means less EU integration into the global economy - the EU doesn't have a clear vision where it wants to go.
    hhh · 1789559621 · focus · HN ↗
    What exactly is the difference between that and 50 states having their own regulations?
    jcfrei · 1789561400 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    peebee67 · 1789562740 · focus · HN ↗
    The absence of a central bank.
    goobatrooba · 1789572073 · focus · HN ↗
    EU has two main legal instruments, regulations and directives. One applies directly, the other needs to be transposed into national law which indeed often ends with gold plating, but the tool is there to give uniform legislation- if all countries agree.
    In addition there are plenty of technical standards which are agreed in expert committees, and these too apply directly. I'd expect Canada would join at least those technical processes and the two sides align technical standards over time.
  3. hobofan · 1789564069 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's also the third largest economy in the world
    If going by GDP (which this claim usually does), the EU as a whole beats out China for second place by ~10%. When going by individual countries Germany alone is the third place behind China, though with a large gap between the two.
3. luckystarr · 1789558302 · focus · HN ↗
  Consider: the US is a (somewhat) greenfield project, while the EU is a brownfield refactoring.
  These sorts of refactorings take time, even more so if done by "committee". The good thing is that explicit interfaces have to be created thereby (hopefully) increasing adaptability and resilience over time.
  1. mcv · 1789559866 · focus · HN ↗
    The US was greenfield 2 centuries ago. It currently has a lot more technical (political?) debt than the EU. Some reforms are long overdue.
  2. softwaredoug · 1789560388 · focus · HN ↗
    I want this one to succeed, but refactors often fail and revert to the original code structure :)
4. nickslaughter02 · 1789558551 · focus · HN ↗
  [dead]
  1. akie · 1789558973 · focus · HN ↗
    We disagree.
  2. [deleted] · 1789563978 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
5. graemep · 1789559353 · focus · HN ↗
  > The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
  I agree, but there are huge barriers to taking this step. You need a common identity to create a nation. Americans have one, so do other large nations. The EU does not.
6. hilbert42 · 1789559866 · focus · HN ↗
  "But still able to create additional annoying regulations on top of nation level ones."
  It seems to me the EU is overburdened with trivial regulations (like regulating the maximum power consumption of domestic vacuum cleaners) rather than prioritizing core issues of its single market, manufacturing, trade, etc.
  Trouble is small vested interests hold overly powerful sway over EU-wide policy. The example above is a case in point, individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.
  You're correct, annoying regulations are bloating the EU bureaucracy making it lethargic and uncompetitive.
  1. prof-dr-ir · 1789561665 · focus · HN ↗
    > individual member states should be able to set their own regulations independently if deemed warranted.
    People proclaim this with such confidence, especially in the UK before the Brexit years I must say, and yet there are so many arguments against it.
    First, accepting this goes against a core tenet of the single market, since the single market for vacuum cleaners is now split into 27 little markets. We thus need 27 regulatory bodies to each investigate, and then make a political decision, on the maximum power setting of domestic vacuum cleaners. Then, producers in China will have to make (up to) 27 different models of vacuum cleaners. This is certainly not going to be cheaper, completely destroys the famous Brussels effect [0], all for some token amount of "sovereignty".
    Nations states can sovereignly decide to delegate this process of rule making to Brussels, and domestic vacuum cleaners are a perfectly mundane "case in point" to showcase the benefits of this process. The EU is far from a perfect union, but throwing these frankly naive arguments around will not help it much.
    [0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect
    mitxela · 1789562505 · focus · HN ↗
    Nation states are also free, in practice, to ignore any regulation they don't like and implement their own. Hungary did this for a decade. They usually don't, because there is no benefit to ignoring the more widespread setting on maximum vacuum cleaner power.
7. rich_sasha · 1789560362 · focus · HN ↗
  The EU is an ongoing experiment as well.
  Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo. There’s plenty of good ingredients, plenty of challenges too. It can still go either way. Hell, at this rate it might outperform simply because US and China blow up due to domestic problems.
  The thing about mojo is that it’s super hard to predict. It might stay where it is and Europe’s share of global GDP might decline to nothing. Or it might rekindle out of nowhere due to some impulse.
  Either way, middle democracies are a somewhat threatened species now, and from their individual PoV an imperfect union might be much better than efficiently staying on their own.
  1. amelius · 1789560823 · focus · HN ↗
    > Europe’s biggest problem, I think, is its lost mojo.
    Europe's biggest problem is that every decision can be vetoed by one of the member states. Which in practice means that the EU has very little power.
    mitxela · 1789562395 · focus · HN ↗
    No, not every decision made in Europe can be vetoed by any EU member state. Only EU decisions can be vetoed by EU member states.
    amelius · 1789562797 · focus · HN ↗
    This was implicit ...
    mitxela · 1789567426 · focus · HN ↗
    Not really! People think everything is about the EU, but that's like an American thinking everything is a UN decision.
    rich_sasha · 1789563096 · focus · HN ↗
    It’s effectively the same as what I mean - or a part of it. You fix this with either better "alignment” (ugh!) ie conviction of going in a particular direction, leading to a consensus. Or in turn, a conviction that the veto is bad and needs to be curbed for the overall benefit of everyone.
    mike_hearn · 1789581304 · focus · HN ↗
    That's not been true for a long time. About 80% of EU laws are passed by qualified majority voting.
  2. hermitShell · 1789561492 · focus · HN ↗
    There are deeper structural problems when you look at the incentives inherent to government driven society.
    While I do appreciate and even support the idea that the immense wealth available on planet earth should be more evenly distributed, and people should mostly be focused on raising families, deepening their philosophy, and perfecting their craft... (some societies in Europe are pretty laid back in terms of hyper-productivity culture)
    Regulation is possible without paralyzing industry. Laws about the internet are possible without stifling freedom. Central planning is possible without crashing the economy so bad you end up with a regime change. It all comes down to execution and for the most part, it's been a series of failed experiments.
    As much as I want a happy future for Canadians and Europeans, I just don't see the odds being super favourable.
    rich_sasha · 1789564180 · focus · HN ↗
    Dunno. My impression is that with the EU, we pick its suboptimal parts and compare them to what they could be with optimal execution.
    We don’t look either at the successful parts, not at the world where it is wholesale gone. My gut feeling is that EU members are, on the whole, much better off for being in than out. One natural experiment is the UK - opinions differ, but the drastic accumulation of problems coincides with Brexit timings.
    I’m all for improving the EU! And for sure there are bad bits. But when your car AC is doing badly, you don’t write off the car. You try to fix the AC…
    hermitShell · 1789583066 · focus · HN ↗
    People sometimes call EU the sleeping giant. Big potential compared to the actual results.
    I'm more aware of what Canadian government does with its tax dollars. And I'm just assuming that the EU is similarly quite expensive for what it achieves, and the budgets only change in one direction.
    rich_sasha · 1789583808 · focus · HN ↗
    EU budget is actually quite small - about 1% of GDP.
    That’s very small compared to EU members states national budgets, which sit at around 35% of GDP, apparently. Canadian federal government apparently spends 18-20% of Canadas GDP, topped up by local governments.
    This is all very apples-to-oranges but doesn’t support the thesis that EU budget is particularly bloated.
8. mitxela · 1789562286 · focus · HN ↗
  The EU shouldn't become the US. EU countries are sovereign, with the practical right to completely ignore what the EU tells them to do, and this is a good thing for now. If an EU country legalizes weed, federal troopers do not march in, arrest all the weed dispensary owners and march them to federal prison because those things don't exist.
  1. softwaredoug · 1789562673 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok but you have to accept that means an EU country works with a hand tied behind its back.
    In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare. That company will have a lower upper bound on market size.
    The EU might be a success in coordinating on regional issues, but I don’t think it’s yet an asset to the European economy.
    mitxela · 1789562857 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you propose forcing 27 groups of people to become 1 group just so it's easier to sell them things?
    Culture in Europe is more on sustainable business rather than hypergrowth, but you can expand to other countries too. You just have to have a business strategy catering to all the groups you want to cater to.
    I think it's good the supermarket chains in France and in Germany are mostly disjoint sets, it keeps competition around. Pan-EU Supermarket Inc would be bad.
    softwaredoug · 1789562989 · focus · HN ↗
    I’m just telling you the tradeoffs you’ve chosen. You can’t be an economic superpower in the current regime.
    Without your own “hypergrowth” you’ll always be dominated by the hypergrowth of competitors like the US and China. You’ll be in orbit of other powers instead of creating your own gravity.
    Where am I wrong?
    Waterluvian · 1789564582 · focus · HN ↗
    To pivot a bit from the point above: I'm not sold on the core premise of the need for "hypergrowth." I think the American economy has been an incredible engine for productivity and I mostly agree that there's a lot of things that get in the way of the same in the EU and other countries. But I look around the U.S. and wonder what exactly the goal is if it's not actually giving everyone safer, more comfortable lives.
    mitxela · 1789567455 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think they are bad tradeoffs. I think there are problems that need to be fixed but the core principles are fine.
    foldr · 1789638940 · focus · HN ↗
    Didn't the US also used to lecture China on how it would never be an economic superpower if it didn't adopt liberal democracy and US-style free market capitalism?
    I think the world is less and less interested in the concept of securing economic growth by copying the exact US economic and political model. Different parts of the world are going to figure this out in different ways.
    dpc050505 · 1789658595 · focus · HN ↗
    When you take the eurozone as a block it puts it only second to the US in terms of GDP, with much better QOL indicators. I don't know how you can think this doesn't place it very much within the realm of economic superpowers.
    Being a superpower doesn't mean much to the americans that live in a town that looks like Gummo. There's a lot of them.
    mitxela · 1789782472 · focus · HN ↗
    Do you propose forcing 27 groups to become the same just so it's easier to sell them things?
    bryanlarsen · 1789583676 · focus · HN ↗
    It's a mixed bag. A European or Canadian company generally builds products for export from day one, giving them a market size of 8B and avoiding surprising and expensive footguns the American company hits when trying to expand outside America.
    bean469 · 1789723364 · focus · HN ↗
    > In the US I can start a company and instantly have a market of 350M. Start a company in an EU country, then try to expand to another country, it’s a nightmare.
    This is not exclusive to the US, though. NordVPN is an example - it launched in Lithuania and now has global reach, and thousands of EU companies have went that path as well. I am not saying that it is on par with the US on this metric, but let's not pretend that such things don't happen in the EU
9. tokai · 1789562349 · focus · HN ↗
  You guys are clueless. Just because you don't understand the org and why it isn't exactly like the US doesn't make your vague misplaced opinions valid.
10. Waterluvian · 1789564420 · focus · HN ↗
  What alternative is there? The Americans are not an option anymore. It seems sensible to me that we want to get very close to one major power, and more close to everything else. Diversification.
11. usernametaken29 · 1789564851 · focus · HN ↗
  > The EU needs to be truly Federal to succeed economically. That might create uniform regulations with more uniform regulations and actually make Europe competitive.
  But also: > The European Union has a nominal GDP of roughly $20 trillion, placing it closely on par with or slightly ahead of China ($19 trillion), but smaller than the United States ($30–$31 trillion)
  I don't know about you but the same GDP as China sounds economically successful... or not?
  1. goalieca · 1789565639 · focus · HN ↗
    It is and it isn't. Around 15-20 years ago, the EU economy was actually bigger than the US economy in total terms (not per capita). The issue is that the EU has stagnated, as has canada while the USA has been pulling away. Growth has been pretty terrible for both for a long time.
12. bryanlarsen · 1789649990 · focus · HN ↗
  It might not be a good thing, but it's likely the best thing. Canada does not have a lot of good options. Doing nothing is a far worse option.
13. gdilla · 1789656465 · focus · HN ↗
  ok, but Carney has always said it's better than being continually threatened and betrayed by Americans. He's right. I agree that it'll be hard to be beneficial to the EU and Canada, will take decades, but the cost of doing nothing is higher. And people are forgetting this isn't just economic but there's security aspects as well.

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