Gaia-X is a disaster. The article misrepresents it. Gaia-X is not a framework for what a European cloud should look like. This would be useful.
In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.
It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.
It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.
As others here have pointed out, Gaia-X successfully funnels money to EU cloud companies and maybe this is what it's supposed to do. The deal is: company agrees to write some bs on how it contributes to this project and they get the money. The point is to get local cloud tech sector to grow here in the EU and maybe it's too difficult politically or otherwise to just give money to the companies directly.
This also blows my mind, instead of adding more berucracy to apply for funding to review funding to give funding.
just give tax credits based on innovation / investment criteria, to both companies and employees, Europe needs digitalization so badly, yet they find more complex ways to enable it.
Tax credits make sense for companies already with a steady profit margin. Cloud in particular is a capex heavy business so for a new company that is not very useful for at least the first few years.
Just give it to the companies. That still incentivises equity investment (it lowers risk and raises the potential upside of profitability). It also make underwriting standard loans easier too.
Yeah, I feel that a lot of EU projects work that way.
I've participated in a bunch of EU projects in the academic space. Most of them were catastrophic failures if you just looked at the direct outcomes (few of the lofty goals were actually achieved). But they did provide much needed funds to participating institutions, and I think they were an overall win.
They come with a lot of overheads (some had 10% or more of the funds go to a lawyer who managed the project). But they are a lot more effective than all the "unbureaucratic" Covid aid payments that mainly went to companies with close ties to political parties...
I've also known people who have participated in some EU funded research programs. The consensus among the researchers who apply for those funds is that you write whatever bs gets you the funding and then you do whatever research you were going to do anyway.
I've joined some large EU efforts in the past, and it's always like this. Lots of different parties involved focused on producing tons of absurd documents, and nothing else. Some have good intentions, but it doesn't matter. There's a great thread on X now discussing the same topic:
"25 years ago each major US company had a German and/or French equivalent. Today equivalents of US tech giants are in China and Europe is on its way to become an open-air museum. What happened?"https://x.com/MichaelAArouet/status/1827588190342979934
Some of the top replies:
"Bureaucracy, Regulation, Aversion to Innovation, Green myth of degrowth etc happened"
[...] Europe’s challenges are significant, but not insurmountable. To regain its edge, Europe will need to foster a more dynamic business environment, streamline regulations, and encourage risk-taking in its startup culture. Without these changes, Europe may continue to fall behind, watching as the U.S. and China shape the future of technology.
The EU has a lot of talent, but it lacks good leadership and good priorities.
In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
As for Gaia-X itself, governments are always on the hunt for programs to justify their spending of tax and debt money. Favorable outcome is the spending itself as a mean to subsidize this and that group.
> I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use
Beliefs like these are common in Europe and I absolutely despise them. Inefficiencies in IT exist for boring reasons like requirements that are way too complex or that keep changing, internal politics, and inexperience. If you add more regulations that don't move the needle you just get more politics, more middle men that seek to profit from the regulatory capture (advisors, consultants, resellers), and you distract industry from focusing on those things that matter most.
Complexity is the enemy of progress. IT systems fail when they attempt to codify contradictory bureaucratic processes that make no sense. The solution is to simplify. Businesses that refuse to simplify get eaten by hungry startups, and deservedly so. What do you think will happen to a continent that refuses to simplify?
You are confounding the environment we are part of and the so called “free market”. Also interests of titans of the industry, the “free market”, and general interest of the population. Mixups like these are common in developing countries.
> In a finite resources world, with unsustainable levels of pollution and soon of climate change, I don’t understand why much more of EU regulation and enforcement resources are not spent towards mandatory hardware re-use. All computer vendors know 90% of IT users never even scratch the surface of computational power and functionalities.
well, newer hardware is more efficient than older hardware, but the cost and e-waste resulting from replacing working but older hardware with new stuff is also non-zero.
desktop usage sure, it makes sense to keep it a good long time. in datacenter, for many situations the cost is not worthwhile because DDR5 is substantially more expensive for a given tier of memory, pcie5 is way more expensive to implement, etc. the newer platforms are really also higher-cost ones, due to the complete collapse of moore's law and hitting the limits of physics in link rates etc. On the other hand power does matter and datacenters are highly power-constrained etc.
it's completely application-specific, maybe if you do something that benefits from AVX-512 it's super worth it to upgrade, but for a lot of people it isn't, so it isn't something you can make a blanket regulation on when is the Right Time to upgrade.
MLID has good guests on sometimes and this is an interesting one. Just before this he's talking about the power issues ("they just can't get power into the datacenters quickly enough to keep up with needs"), and he balances this concern against the massive price factor confounding the newer DDR5 stuff.
This engineer is a good reality check on a number of sacred cows with the AMD fanbase too - for example he is excruciatingly negative on AMD's Platform Vendor Lock. He was asked if the AI market dumped if they could scoop up any cheap gear and the answer is no - they don't use GPUs currently, and they wouldn't even be able to benefit from (eg) epyc cpus being dumped because of the platform lock. They are basically e-waste (by design) once they hit the market unless the provenance is known, and even then it destroys the market efficiency (by design) since now you have separate market for Dell Epyc, Lenovo Epyc, HPE Epyc, etc. Once the value drops, surplus places won't even bother parting them out and basically the channel for that stuff dries up and they become actual e-waste.
And remember, this affects Ryzen processors now too, and platform lock is becoming much more common now as AMD makes the deals with OEM providers to get them into work desktops etc. In 5-10 years there probably won't be too much of a secondhand market left, largely because of AMD... and there's really not much that can be done since this is all hardware-locked/physically fused, short of just pushing a firmware which disables the whole thing.
He also is not mincing any words about the Sinkclose/Ryzenfall exploits where an attacker can escalate from a VM guest to jailbreak/control of the PSP and BIOS persistence. Obviously that's a huge, huge issue for datacenter operators and it's bullshit that AMD just basically decided not to patch it for older chips. The amount of handwaving and corporate defense the AMD fan club runs is silly, of course those are major issues and need to be patched ASAP.
I remember the "root password lets you do root things, where's the exploit" and other insane cope/handwaving from HUB and GN and other tech media and social media. Shockingly, the people who actually own the servers aren't as keen on a VM guest being allowed to `sudo jailbreak psp`. And AMD just wanted to leave that unpatched on a huge number of chips, even though they had a working fix for that uarch they were already deploying!
It's unfortunately the same level of security focus that AMD has given to other exploits like the cache ways vulnerability or the PREFETCH+cache eviction vulnerability ("worse than meltdown", discovered by one of the researchers who discovered meltdown), which AMD simply left unpatched and insecure, and (very) quietly told people to enable KPTI if they cared. "Insecure by default" corporate mindset.
OP is EU has become an open air museum and all the good companies are now either American or Chinese.
> Boeing makes the comparison easy for Airbus.
What else to compare against this claim ?
Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry. It is not just aerospace, even auto is still über competitive, European manufactures are on par or perhaps better than anything Ford and GM have to offer. I am sure Europeans can come with good examples for every bad one.
The point it is easy to paint a narrative however reality is lot more complex and doesn't match with sweeping generalization .
Tech companies are getting insanely large valuations (I work in tech, and I think they're absurd). Europe doesn't have many large public tech companies, therefore Europe looks bad in terms of the "industries of the future"
Plus a bunch of angry USians really irritated by the anti-trust stuff the EU has been doing (DMA etc).
It's not even all tech either. Europe has some big players in silicon or biotech for example. It does however lack giants that introduced major disruptions in the way things are done, like cloud services, social networks, gig economy etc.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
First of all this is an empty statement that reeks of rhetoric. You don’t have the full grasp of the picture to quantify if a company is miles ahead of the competition. Nobody does. Ahead in terms of what? Even if we want to compare companies in more specific aspects (for the sake of comparison) — be it revenue, vision, innovation, supply chain, or efficiency — Airbus is not ahead of the pack (which includes the likes of Lockheed Martin, GE Aerospace, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Rolls Royce).
Airbus is half of the commercial airline market duopoly with Boeing. Customers really have no other choices. Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball. Simple as that.
Passenger safety for starters, passing safety audits, units shipped or sold, not having a 60 year old airframe to iterate its product with [1].
> Airbus benefits when Boeing drops the ball.
It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers. Duopoly doesn’t mean it has to do nothing.
[1] MCAS was needed after all because Boeing decided to stick a big new engine on a low sitting 1960s 737 airframe, instead of developing a new airframe.
> Airbus is by no means perfect of course, but it is still miles ahead of the best the Americans or the Chinese have to offer in a very complex large scale industry
So now you don’t claim Airbus is “miles ahead” of the best that US and China can offer, moving the goal post from that very generic statement to just comparing A32X with B737MAX?
So why not comparing 787 vs. A350, or C130 vs. A400, or Sikorsky vs Airbus helicopters? They’re comparable products that Airbus offer vs the competition. Did you know that 787 has got 1,900 sales and 1.300 deliveries, whereas A350 has 1,300 sales and 650 deliveries in the same time frame?
> It also has to build airplanes of quality, price and on time that can fly economically for its customers.
Did I say it doesn’t? Still, customers don’t have a choice. Boeing has been doing badly, yet the backlog of 737MAX is still more than 4.700 units and growing. No meaningful cancellation despite its problems.
Here is what happened: fear. Fear of patriotism getting us a second Hitler. Fear of war.
This is IMO the root cause of why most public services are going down the drain in most Western Europe: people are there to work for themselves, not for their country. And the higher people are, the worst it is. Keep the status quo, embezzle if you can and shut your eyes to not see we're in economic and cultural wars against the rest of the world.
Reminds me of a lot of the initiatives coming out of big companies. The grander the vision, the more vague they are, the more money and time they hoover up as people try to rephrase the initial vague aims in different ways.
And, bless they even have an architecture document which does nothing to bring this blurry vision into focus.
As I get older and a little lazier, sometimes I think I might want to find a way to get a completely pointless job that gives me a paycheck where all I have to do is write documents that nobody ever reads.
Then I look at something like this Gaia-X "milestones" list and think "Meh, this is probably not the job for me..."
I was involved in an EU funded software research project related to air quality [1] around ~2008. The bureaucracy was very real, we had to produce a boatload of paperwork (including a literal, on paper, printout of the source code, for some reason?). But aside from the weird paperwork overhead, we were fairly free in how we approached the project, and we got a lot of shit done. This was software R&D in the true sense. I don't know what happened to the project after I left, but I suspect the universities involved benefited from the research and some of it was probably spun off.
That is to say: it's not all just paperwork and paychecks, it can be greatly rewarding work.
[1] Strangely enough I was just talking about another aspect of air quality in another HN thread. Never noticed this was a theme in my life before.
Any suggestions on how to land such a role? I've had the last 48 hours off work, which I think is the longest stretch in the last month, but I'll be working this evening, and tomorrow, and tomorrow evening, and Tuesday, and Tuesday evening, and...
Look for companies that are funded as part of long, multi-year projects. I have been funded by institutions like the NSF, NIH, and a bunch of smaller philanthropic foundations. After leaving SaaS-world, I just went to LinkedIn and looked for a non-profit doing work I can stand behind.
The thing that makes it so chill is that we work on very long time scales, based on the length of whatever NIH (or similar) grant we're on. If you're used to building things in the private sector, the comparison I make is that what took us 3 months at my previous YC startup would take us 3 years at the non-profit where I work now. A lot of that is because there are many moving pieces to coordinate, and because you have to be careful when dealing with sensitive data and research ethics. Blah blah blah, at least part of it is also because the breakneck pace of VC-funded software hasn't got its fingers into this pie, at least not yet.
Downside: pay cut. I make $18k less than I did 4 years ago, despite having gotten promoted in this new spot. Also, it can be frustrating trying to actually produce software at a company with no culture for it. You find out that software delivery practices are something people have to learn, and at places that aren't software-oriented, they don't know about them.
What's to stop an American cloud hyperscaler from creating a "properly patriated" subsidiary that it simply licenses the tech to? Wouldn't that side step the "sovereign" protectionism?
An American company would run circles around this mess.
Google is doing this. German and French companies are building a datacenter to GCP standards, will license the code and run essentially whitelabel GCP under full jurisdiction of the EU company. Google can only push updates with their approval and has no visibility into the operations.
They get documentation and playbooks (which are pretty good), source code access, and of course direct channel to the "mothership" engineers for support.
I'm sure early days will be painful but there is no reason for this not to work.
Maybe you are misunderstanding the gravity of this problem. Thanks to US Cloud Act and the Patriot Act and similar acts, there is no way any US citizen or any US company may EVER be involved in such projects. It's completely legal for the US to rely on extraterritorial jurisdiction leveraging any US companies and US citizens they have access to.
But on the other hand, everyone else on out there will want to avoid that, so the only way to achieve that is to avoid involving any US citizens or companies for such sovereign projects.
Google will not be able to solve it via subsidiaries, and no nice promises from Amazon, MS etc. will ever change it.
Data sovereignity means all this.
This will probably escalate a lot more, it might involve the financial infrastructure used (SWIFT) or even currency used in the process.
This was a Microsoft 365 cloud hosted and operated by Deutsche Telekom in Germany. It was more expensive than the global version and had less features. It often took some years till new features were introduced.
They stopped this offering some years ago, I think they did not get as many customers as they expected, most of the German customers used the global version.
That's exactly what is going on nowadays, anyway. In Poland we have Chmura Krajowa (national cloud), aimed at public, non profit and finance companies. It's basically more controlled local Azure and GPC region.
In Hungarian the people I know use felhő and not cloud. I don’t know what they say in actual IT circles but to my ears “cloud” sounds very awkward if stuck in a Hungarian sentence.
It depends. If we’re talking about e.g. GCP we use “cloud”, but Chmura Krajowa is a Polish product and it has a Polish name, so we use “chmura”.
We basically use the original name in this context.
It seems to me Germans in general like to use English phrases, but on the contrary from other European places I know, they like to use the original pronunciation and spelling. Us, Poles, like to make it sound like Polish, add our own declension and so on.
> EU is a continent of old farts mostly reliant on Auto and Manufacturing industries and big burocratic corporations where there are 500 steps process to perform basic things and immensely risk averse to change to adapting innovation
You don't just sound like a cynic, you sound like an ass for basically insulting half a billion people.
Do you have much experience with big European bureaucratic corporations? I could tell you some stories of big American bureaucratic corporations. Old farts reliant on auto & manufacturing? By that token, the US is reliant on tar sands, fracking, and peddling SUVs.
So please, take a deep breath and try to find some more nuance to discuss, instead of producing a baseless cliché word salad.
Countries like the US and China are not afraid to subsidize strategically important industries in regions with proven capabilities.
Meanwhile the EU likes to waste resources on failed hopeless regions. For example the new investments into making EU independent on chip manufacturing is going to the failed hopeless eastern parts of Germany. I know East Germany had the strongest electronics industry in the former Eastern Bloc but nowadays it's a literal failed hopeless zombieland.
Countries like the US and China are not afraid to subsidize strategically important industries in regions with proven capabilities.
Meanwhile the EU likes to waste resources on failed hopeless regions.
The U.S. has a long history of subsidizing industries in so-called "hopeless" regions. For example, putting the FBI fingerprinting office in Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Doing things like that is how you keep "hopeless" regions from becoming even worse, and makes things better for the nation as a whole. You spend some money on jobs and opportunity, or you spend a lot more money on food subsidies and criminal justice.
Are you a European "Union," or not? If you want every region to fight for resources, then you'd might as well go back to feudal times.
Europeans on HN are always saying how it's the "civilized" continent. I don't see that in language like "hopeless zombieland."
..and, you know, maybe it's ok. Sometimes i fly over those countries and think to myself. Take Romania for example. Had a troublesome past. Currently not without problems I'm sure, but filthy rich by worldwide standards (not by US standards, but top50 gdp ppp per capita). Does some car stuff that got absorbed by France. Has some IT, some of it moves to/gets acquired by the US. Probably happy? why does everyone need to reinvent Google always.
The core feature of Gaia-X is that it makes it easy for small EU software companies to get up to €200k in "de minimis" tax gifts.
It also funnels money into open source office software and "European data spaces", which is (very loosely) tools to replace US clouds with open source. I would say it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do, making it easier for EU companies to ditch US cloud services.
And didn't exactly that happen here?
4 years ago, the "Schwarz IT KG" company was a day-1 member of Gaia-X. And now they have billions in revenue from AWS-like cloud services.
Need a third party citation on that. I'm highly skeptical by the press releases they bring out and seem to be taken over verbatim with very little due diligence.
Given the fact they don't even allow public signups outside of DACH im highly skeptical of their claim they're doing billions of revenue in public cloud. It wouldn't surprise me if there is some interesting bookkeeping going on to boost the numbers.
The current status quo is that people in this thread want to try this but fail to figure out how to even sign up.
Also could you explain what part of being part of Gaia-X contributed to their success?
As for the revenue, I would trust a multi-billion international company that if they say billions in revenue, that'll be halfway accurate. Or else, that would be massive securities fraud. Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: https://www.unternehmensregister.de/ureg/result.html;jsessio...
> Here's their (independently audited) tax filling showing 1.2 billion € in revenue 2 years ago: […]
Unfortunately, those links expire after a while. To everyone else: Go to unternehmensregister.de and search for "Schwarz IT KG" (located in Neckarsulm, registered at Amtsgericht Stuttgart, HRA 730995) and open the document "Jahresabschluss zum Geschäftsjahr vom 01.03.2022 bis zum 28.02.2023".
I used to work for a company that gets Gaia-X money. I will not mention concrete names, so you'll have to believe this anonymous source, me, choosing to remain vague to not be identified.
All we did for Gaia-X was the paperwork to get the money. It had zero impact on anything we actually did. Somebody I know who knew what other firms receiving Gaia-X funds did told me the others did even less than us. We certainly did not take it very seriously, apart from it being a great source of free money, and I say that as someone who reported quite a few developer hours for Gaia-X.
I think at most this project is about sending some money to some European firms, with little regard for actual outcomes, kind of as a concealed subsidy. I'm not sure if those who started the project actually wanted that outcome in the first place? A lot of these things are just ways to use the current system to achieve goals that the system does not directly allow. It could just be incompetence, but it could also be the case that somebody knows exactly what they created with Gaia-X and is perfectly okay with the outcome.
It's not great, but this is far from abnormal. I worked for a company (not my current employer) that got R&D grants or tax breaks (I'm not sure which) from a government. The engineers were asked to come up with defined projects that could be justified as R&D in the way the government wanted. We did, and we actually did the projects, but might have done them anyway.
Governments want to grow areas of their economies that they think could be beneficial. It's not acceptable to just hand out cash, and that can be trivially abused, so they put a little work around it to make sure the right companies are applying, and they tie it to token artifacts to make it seem more specific. Some companies commit outright fraud, but they're likely the minority and it's just a cost of the program, some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine, and the majority just carry on doing the work they were already doing that the government was trying to encourage, and they'll hopefully be just a bit more successful as a result of the extra cash.
It's all a bit silly, but I don't think it's malicious or actually that bad if you assume that the government isn't trying to achieve a specific outcome beyond growing a sector, despite what they say.
> some put in a ton of effort and do it properly, and that's fine...
I mostly agree with you, except with this statement. It's not fine, the companies that fall into this trap are wasting their time and resources on something that is not a real opportunity. This is the main source of waste imho and unfortunately happens a lot in EU projects.
The Australian government R&DTI operates this way. Nearly every job I've had I've had to fill out specific timesheets and project descriptions to fit the gov's reqs to get the tax incentive.
The wastefulness of EU is the real reason people want their countries out of it.
There seem to be zero journalists covering EU shenanigans so everyone just get the news from people in the trenches. While our local politicians gets fired for buying chocolate on the wrong account (true story).
I have met several Brexiteers on Quora, and not one of them could give a sensible reason for their vote. I don't mean a reason that I would like, I mean just a reason that could make any sense.
I still hope some smart Brexiteers exist, but I've not been lucky enough to meet any of them.
I have worked with Deutsche Telekom in the past and I'm convinced that every project that involves them will never get enough traction to beat US companies.
The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling, its like if everyone at that company still thinks they are the hottest shit and they know everything better. Sadly, they are a gatekeeper. Super frustrating partner to work with
> The entitlement and refusal to listen to other people outside their direct org is mindboggling
+1 on that. Same with the owner of the CSP mentioned in the article above.
It's weird because it was always only German companies that gave truly unreasonable feature requests AND were extremely pushy, despite not spending much compared to other customers.
T-Mobile is much easier to deal with, but they are also walking with their tail between their legs...
While most Western governments have gotten increasingly good at communicating with their citizens (i.e. making their web sites and forms accessible in human language, rather than bureaucrat language), and often even go so far as to offer versions in "Simple English" or local-language equivalents, the EU seems to be going the opposite way.
I'd consider myself reasonably accustomed to and able to deal with bureaucracy and formal language, and still find every interaction with official EU sites massively off-putting. Now imagine someone who isn't a native speaker in any of the EU's languages, mentally impaired, or generally quickly feels overwhelmed by bureaucracy.
Because the EU is not a national government. It issues no passports. It has no citizens. It levies no taxes. It has no army. It's an organisation that coordinates sovereign states. Often it doesn't even set the law directly but establishes a framework that allows it to specify some requirements that national legislative bodies then have to turn into actual legislation. Frameworks for how to talk about things is very apropos for what the EU is and for how it came about.
I am not defending this state of affairs. Simply pointing out that it's a category error to compare it to national governments. I think it would be good if we had more of an EU state. It seemed to be heading there 25ish years ago. But the nation states do have little appetite to cede authority to the central institutions, so that's probably not on the table. And it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful. The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
It's amazing the EU has lasted this long really. The USA tried something somewhat similar back in 1781, and it was a complete failure: they organized a bunch of sovereign states (formerly colonies, but they became sovereign states after the Revolutionary War just before) into a confederation, where the central government had no real power at all. The resulting country couldn't even defend itself against pirates. They finally got sick of it in 1789 and threw out this form of government in favor of a constitutional republic with a much stronger federalized government. Over 235 years later, that form of government still persists, though it's really showing its warts and the Constitution really needs a rewrite IMO, but despite its enormous flaws in the modern age it's still a lot better than the decentralized mess that is the EU. If you want real economic power in the face of competing superpowers, you need centralized policy and authority, not a bunch of semi-sovereign states all squabbling with each other and no one able to make a decision.
I agree that a stronger central EU government, more like a federal state would be highly desirable and more efficient in many ways today.
But you are ignoring a ton of stuff here, too. The EU comprises territories that are far more different than the territories of the US. The EU has 24 languages spoken, and its poorest member state has a GDP that is a factor of 9 lower than its richest (excluding Luxembourg). While it would be nice to have strong decision-making, how do you make sure that the decisions are also perceived as fair and democratically justified? Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country. Would that person be seen as legitimately representing the people? How do you even begin to organize public political discussions in a situation where most people can't read the same newspaper/watch the same content? It's far from obvious that any of this is achievable. It's easy to fantasize about a competent, legitimate central government. But how do you construct it from the pieces given?
The political analogue of the EU might be India rather than the US.
Historically, the EU also comprises the territories that for more than half the time period since the inception of the USA provided all the globally dominant economic and military superpowers, expanding the areas they ruled to the peak of colonialism in 1914 [1]. So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost). Contrast the Quing dynasty, that had a central government. At least some historians I've read argue that maintaining the central government consumed so many resources that it was a major reason for the widening gulf in economic and military might between European power and China during the 19th century.
These are all great points, and of course, I didn't mean to trivialize any of them. I can't say a federal state would actually work for the EU, precisely because of these issues.
>Imagine a president who doesn't even speak the native language of the vast majority of people in the country.
This actually reminds me of Spain. Their leaders, while they speak the native language of a majority, it's not a vast majority, with very significant minority-language areas (Catalan, Basque, Galician). And that country sometimes seems to be barely holding itself together, with Catalonia attempting an independence referendum a few years ago that didn't end well.
However, this is a quibble, but as an American I'd argue that if the EU did federalize, they shouldn't have a president at all. The US has a presidential system and it kinda sucks (see: frequent government shutdowns). I think a parliamentary system works better in practice, or perhaps something resembling Germany's system (since Germany also has a federal government).
>So the squabbling mess of European powers, barely coordinating under a balance of power system at home, was dramatically successful militarily and economically (at an even more dramatic human cost)
I really don't think those days are coming back. Europe was so successful back then because it was far more developed technologically. That advantage is long gone now. Plus, Europe's population just isn't what it was. And I'm not a historian, but I thought the reason China didn't develop as fast was all self-inflicted: they intentionally turned inwards and refused outside contact.
Anyway, perhaps you're right and the current state of the EU is the best they can do with their circumstances. Still, I suspect it's not enough: I don't see this as a stable system. They can't even keep one or two of their own member states from torpedoing all progress, and if the US weren't there to defend them from Russia, they appear to be powerless there too.
Having lived and worked in the US for a decade, as a German, and having had time to think about many things:
I think a key difference between how the US works and how Europe works lies in the private sector and the people. When you build a new company in the US, you have a lot of private infrastructure and people to be active in all of the states. In Europe, this does not exist in that form. Here, all the investors are focused on their own country. Sure we have plenty of firms active in many EU countries, but the level of support especially for new firms is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. From languages to social issues to attitude and expectations of common people, the EU is much more compartmentalized and it is significantly harder to have EU scale.
So there are two issues, and the side of the government is only one. The private sector and the investors have to do their job too and provide their own side of the EU wide infrastructure.
We also don't have EU-wide media that needs to support the development of a shared EU identity, and many other things that unite the US population as one people. Much of that has to come from the private sector, from the rich, from investors. But apparently they don't think big enough here in the EU?
Perhaps, but I wonder how much having so many different languages contributes to that. In the US, most people all speak English (though there's a growing Spanish-speaking population, but even here most younger ones probably end up being bilingual), so there's not that much to do for your company to do business in all 50 states, depending on just how much interaction with state governments you require. And state laws are all pretty similar usually. Not so in the EU.
Lack of a common language must be a factor in scaling - the amount of effort printing required information in different languages is already an overhead (e..g instructions on medications).
Also in the US, somebody in California can give telephone support to somebody in Rhode Island; not so easy to get somebody in Sweden to give telephone support to somebody in Italy though.
Glass half full. No civil war was needed to keep the EU together. It lost a member without any bloodshed. It's exactly the kind of imperfection we admire when we compare democracies to China - less effective than central control but more free.
Arguably, the US civil war wasn't strictly necessary. If it weren't for the slavery issue, I think it's would have been better for the northern states to just let the south secede. Even with the slavery issue, and if they had not bothered fighting a war to keep those states in the union, it's arguable that the south would have failed economically before long anyway, especially if the north had instituted sanctions.
As for comparing democracies to China, the democracies of the EU are lucky China isn't next door to them. They're already completely unable to defend themselves against Russia, which is also expansionist and aggressive, but at least doesn't have China's industrial power. If the EU were next to China, they'd be completely defenseless against Chinese expansionism.
> it's also undeniable that as a coordination mechanism the EU has been spectacularly successful.
I get you like the EU, but "spectacularly sucessful" isn't something many people would use. See covid response, and Ukraine war response. I would describe EU's mechanisms as moderately successful, i.e. somewhat better if states did everything on their own and bilaterally.
> The fact that people treat it as a national government is proof of that.
People with triste knowledge of how EU works do that. I do not think having most people in dark about how EU works is "spectacularly successful".
It all depends on what (or when) you’re comparing coordination between European nations to. Having a less than ideal response to COVID or the war in Ukraine is vastly different than the openly hostile relations between European nations experienced prior to the foundation of the CoE/EEC/EU.
To come to a decision is dangerous for a career in a bureaucratic monster. Its all about creating the most impractical swiss-knife of all trades with as little personal responsibility as possible. If the whole apparatus fails, that does not result in the whole apparatus being fired. Thats the crux.
That sounds like an EU success story - the bureaucrats aren't getting the way so Lidl is free to set up an AWS competitor. The EU isn't supposed to be a tech company, the point of companies is that they should be doing the part where services get provided. The US government was not a direct player in setting up AWS.
The danger would be if Gaia-X were kicking goals and laying down the law ... and had banned Lidl from setting up their own cloud until all the paperwork was signed off by 13 major committees, 666 undersecretaries of The Cloud and the High Bureaucrat was satisfied that there was a genuine market need for a new AWS competitor.
The EU has a lot of clever and motivated people. If the legal situation wasn't blocking success I expect they would succeed.
Living in the EU, and having by and large a meaningless job in a meaningless division of a quasi-government org... while reading the news coming from the East, I keep imagining how a war with EU will upend this little paradise of parasites and laziness, and it gives me nightmares :) Also, EU will probably kick me out before things will start getting more serious, I struggle to imagine any other sort of motivation less drastic than that to get things going in the "right direction" :(
> It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.
I think that the EU can very well find a consensus when it wants to, going so far to push for legislature that will be clearly thrown out by the ECJ or HUDOC (see Chat Control for great example).
It's just that we also have a lot of "token projects" which serve for virtual signaling for topics where there is a lack of domestic competence. Gaia-X is one of these things, the idea of a "european cloud" as laughable to begin with, due to dependence on foreign technologies to facilitate it.
I am not sure the job of the EU should even be to make technical standards in this case. The point is to develop strategy and to convince an endless amount of non-technical stakeholders on value, and that is something the EU usually does well.
EU: 440 million people, 60,000 EU bureaucrats. US: 330 million people, 2 MILLION+ US federal employees. Maybe what they need is more bureaucrats, so we don't get half-assed programs like this.
If you were not being sarcastic, it's not a fair comparison. Those 66k EU bureaucrats only deal with some of the stuff. You'll have to add some of the public administration employees from each of the countries that deal with things that in US would be considered "federal".
The flip side is a lot of governance in US which is typically centralized is distributed to states and yet there are 2M federal employees.
Also only country with comparable language complexity to EU is India, so many languages adds enormous amount of paperwork and bureaucracy, US does not simply have to deal with it.
1.4M of those are defense, VA, or homeland security. It's not much of a secret that the US has a large military, and it dominates employment numbers. The highest federal employment total was 4.4M at the end of WW2. It decreased to 2M after the war ended, with clear bumps for the Korean, Vietnam, Cold, and Middle Eastern wars.
In beautiful EU bureaucratic style It's a framework for how to talk about how a European Cloud could look like.
It's not about technical standards. It's about how we can talk about how we can think of maybe eventually deciding on how we can come up with standards that might one day lead to talk about implementations.
It represents to me everything that is wrong with the EU today. A bureaucratic monster that can't decide how to talk about things or come to any form of alignment.