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So they should have something like EU without having something like EU.
True, but a political structure like EU solves a lot of problems when you think about cooperating: without EU every cooperation agreement would be a bilateral agreement between two states, and every pair could (and would) be different.
I am old enough to remember how it was to do business before the current EU, not to talk about travelling.
You are right, sorry.
I was saying that in the Élysée Treaty, the US, NATO or any other country or organization were never mentioned and the US president at the time (Kennedy) was not happy about it.
Yes. We started with Hungary blocking the EU. The countries could just have continued their EU behaviour outside of the EU.
It does. Which makes blocking the EU inconvenient but it doesn't block the countries.
The question is why? Did he just want the best for Europe and Nato or was the US losing too much influence?
Which is why the unanimity rule is obsolete in my opinion. When EU was smaller, it made sense, now not anymore since there is no way that every decision is good for everyone.
Even a single state that had the unanimity rule would be problematic: no decision could be made since nothing will be good for everyone. Same for EU, if we must decide on something and it need to be good for everyone there are 2 cases: 1) your result would be useless since it would be watered down in many ways or 2) you don't decide.
They did, but they did not used the weight of EU, which is bigger than the sum of the single states.
Again, it is true, you are not blocking the countries. But they have not the same weight of EU.
Obviously because they lost influence.
If you had not noted it, after the Brexit charade (which, btw, demostrate why it is important that EU work as a single entity) EU started to move faster (not always in the correct direction in my opinion) exactly because the United States' Trojan horse in the EU, the UK, was out of the decision process and cannot block things anymore.
In a good faith situation, people make compromises. The EU is first of all a trade union. If it is maliciously blocked, just wait it out.
To protect against bad faith actors, only the rule has to be changed that one other complice country can block a voting power reduction. That should be part of the discussion.
If the US does control the EU, and China and Russia know whatever it is, then it is smaller.
Germany is also a Trojan horse, and I have read comments about other countries, too.
I don't know the inner workings, I can't even say anything about the speedup, but the UK preferred free markets whereas France prefers state companies. That must have been an endless source for conflicts. I wouldn't ascribe the entire slowdown to US influence.
I think the Hungary situation was milked to establish the need for a reform. As I wrote at the start, without veto powers, we get closer to the USE. For the USE, that means more power but for the citizens it means less power.
The problem was that UK had a special status, it was a full member but they had a list of exceptions (like the currency, they still used the pound) and in the EU they always were considered the frontend for the USA. It was the UK that blocked some reforms that passed the moment the UK was out.
Maybe, but unanimity was not manageable anymore, too many states with too many different interests. It is not realistic that a small state could hold back EU just because, the decision process became longer and longer and any decision is watered down.
And I'd like to see something like USE, in my opinion EU is still not integrated enough but I understand that a lot of people need to start to think in a very different way.