cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18077343
While most European countries firmly back Ukraine, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is seen as having comparatively close ties to Russia, prompting a war of words with Poland.
A diplomatic spat has erupted between Poland and Hungary that lays bare the deep tensions within Europe over how to deal with Russia as it continues its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The issue with removing consensus is that consensus leads to stability, and stability is perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the EU (just look at how much war Europe saw before the EU). By enforcing consensus, we can have slow but steady progress, rather than the current people in power spending a bunch of time just undoing what the previous people implemented. I’m a big fan of consensus-oriented political systems.
With that said: It should be possible to take away a countries rights to influence decisions, either based on some pre-defined criteria, or on a vote requiring something close to unanimity, where the offending country is of course not allowed to vote. We can’t have someone like Orban holding up and disrupting the entire EU pretty much on his own, while holding on to power by flagrantly violating principles at home that countries need to follow to join the EU in the first place.
Stability is indeed a strength of EU - effectively averaging over all the countries smooths over political oscillations - which is useful for tackling long-term policy problems (like climate). I’m not advocating majoritarian voting where 51% overrides 49%. However with ± 30 countries, one or two should not block the rest - the current system leads to transactional brinkmanship where the last hold-outs get some prize in return for postponed obstruction. I’ve seen similar (worse) problems in UN climate negotiations - also due to “consensus” principle.