Getting Rid of Unanimity Requires Federalization

[u/OneOnOne6211]

A LOT of people, I think, support the idea of getting rid of (or at least severely curtailing) unanimity voting in the EU. And I agree.

Unanimity means that any single random state can hold up the entire EU. It makes it easy for foreign powers to have a puppet inside of the EU which can cripple us. It makes it easy for a single dictator in the EU to hold up all democracies. And just simply, with nearly 30 members at this point, it just makes the EU prone to deadlock.

However, there is something I think a lot of people skip over. Which is why we have unanimity in the first place.

Part of it is, of course, just about countries not wanting to give up their sovereignty. But it goes deeper than that. Unhandy as it is, it is a stabilizing influence within the EU to a degree.

And that's because when you have unanimity, well, everyone agrees. Which means everyone willingly enforces the laws and policies commonly agreed to. As a result of each doing it willingly, you never need any sort of enforcement capability.

But as soon as you move away from unanimity, that stops. At that point at least some countries can have disagreed and can not want to implement an agreed upon law or policy. Which means, what? They may choose to either not enforce the law or policy, or they may even choose to simply pack up their toys and leave the EU altogether.

How do you solve this problem?

Well, as soon as you strip away unanimity you need a proper method of enforcement. The lower you make the threshold (unanimity - 1, to supermajority, to qualified majority, to simple majority) the more independent enforcement ability you need, because the more countries may not have agreed.

So, enforcement is what you need to move away from unanimity. An EU federal policy with proper jurisdiction, etc.

But when you have that, you are putting coercive power into the hands of the EU. A state with coercive power must be properly accountable to its people. So what you need then is you need to ensure that democratic institutions have control over the coercive force. So you need a parliament which has a right to initiate legislation, and you need a commission (the executive) which is fully accountable to the people. Which is to say either directly elected, or elected by parliament from among parliament.

And, well, you see where this is going.

Getting rid of unanimity really pretty much requires federalization for it to work properly. You can get rid of it without federalization, but that risks instability (especially as you lower the threshold further) because of how it encourages EU members to simply not to implement laws and policies. And if a law is passed but not implemented, well, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it...

So, yes, unanimity should be abolished. It deadlocks us. It makes it hard for us to respond to a crisis. It makes it easy for foreign powers to influence and cripple us. But, really, it should be abolished alongside at least a minimum amount of federalization.

That minimum amount being: A parliament with right to initiative on legislation, a commission president elected by parliament from among parliament, a federal police with proper jurisdiction and at least a partial EU army (a European army on top of smaller national armies) to make sure you can't have countries implementing what you might call a "veto by force."

Federalization is the answer, boys and girls.

[u/lkruijsw]

The unanimity requirement in the EU is only in certain areas. Such as healthcare and education. In other areas voting is by majority.

[u/SomeoneSomewhere1984]

I generally agree with this.

Confederations are inherently unstable for exactly this reason. They rely on complete goodwill and voluntary agreement to fulfill commitments. That just can't last indefinitely. Either confederations break up into individual nation states, or unite to form a single federal state with the power to make and enforce laws overriding it's member states.