mepassistants

Huge subject, but some quick points :

Brexit is a great act of self-harm that took many by surprise in Brussels (and the rest of Europe). Personnally, even if I was expecting the Remain campaign to win, I wasn' that surprised in the end. We are talking about a country which have been told almost everyday for 40 years that the EU is a terrible thing. So you can't expect people to vote to stay when suddenly the same people that were trashing the EU tell you that we shoudl remain in that, especially when the EU is a terribly complicated thing to explain and the anti-EU campaigners had some very charismatic people and some stroke of communication genius on their side. So overall this is a terrible waste for the British, especially the younger generations but if it is what it takes to "reset" the bad blood of the UK with the EU, well so be it. Nothing will prevent them to come back in 40 years if they wish to.

Now that we are here, the most "terrible" thing is to see how much the UK government is unprepared for the negotiations with the EU and is paying the price for thinking that they could shatter the unity between the EU27. Because of that, they are unable to bring realistic proposals at the table nor a clear political mandate for the negotiators, which is good for the EU because the UK is no match for us and the results of pretty much all the negotiations that took place ending up being almost word for word what the EU wanted : UK didn't wanted to pay a dime to settle their financial commitments, they will end up paying between 40 and 50 billions €, they didn't wanted to guarantee the rights and free movement of EU citizens, they end up guaranteeing it until 2021, they wanted to have a full access to the single market without being submitted to its rules, they will have an access but the obligation to follow all the rules without having a say on them, etc.

Brexit is also taking its toll on UK influence now (because legally they are still members of the EU, with the same prerogative as any other member) because no one want to do them any favour. Why would one change a policy point because of the specific need of a country that will not be there in 2 years ? Plus, there is a general feeling (even if no one will publically say it) that it is in the interest of the EU not to give he UK an easy time (while not punishing the British), because why would a country stay in the EU if you can get a better deal outside of it ?

From a EU perspective, I take Brexit as an opportunity to relaunch a number of initiatives that were blocked by the UK (among others), such as the social or defense policies.

/u/dns99 from **/**r/AskEurope asked : How does EU look at further unification i.e. federation: one central bank, one military...

Federation is a whole debate, but I’d say it’s very unlikely even in the long run. You have some very hardcore federalist like Verhofstadt, but even among those who are in favour of a very deep level of integration, very few want (or think it possible/realistic) an EU that would end up being somethink like the US or Germany or any other federal state. Because it doesn't correspond to what people want and you would have a shitload of problems (different culture, languages, need to have the approval of all the current countries, etc.) to deal with.

Nonetheless, many in the Eurobubble think that the EU should be deeper than what it is currently, notably because in some sector an EU approach would make much more sense and also to build a direct link with citizens (90% of what the EU does is invisible to the average citizen). But you don't need a USA-like state for that.

On the central bank, the Eurozone already has one, the ECB, whose main role is to ensure the financial stability of the monetary union.

The one military, you can forget it (sorry-not-sorry for all those who believed the EU army scarecrow was a thing) beyond some very symbolic things, because it would be unpractical and almost impossible to run. The Member States have very different level of military power, different military doctrines (from the traditionnaly neutral states like the Nordic states to the heavy-weight like France), different strategic priorities (the Eastern and Nordic states being focused on Russia, Greece and Cyprus focused on Turkey, Italie on the Mediterranean, France on the Middle-East and Africa, etc.) and the list goes on and on. That being said, Brexit (since the UK has always been reluctant to any kind of EU defense policy) and the panic that Trump created when he more or less threatened to pull the plug on NATO (that was the sacred thing for a lot of EU countries, especially those in the East who are scarred shitless of Russia) created a vaccuum that allowed the EU to relaunch its defense policy, by deepening the level of military cooperation between most EU countries (which disappointed France, who would have prefered far more tight group of countries but that would be ready to get their hands dirty and put boots on the ground to support the French army). In practice the EU now will finance some military relevant research, encourage European military projects (for instance the Franco-German future airfighter or the European consortium for military drones), increase the security/military effectiveness of the Galileo satellite constellation (aimed at making the EU independent from the US GPS and the Russian GLONASS), etc.

Apart from that, there are many things the EU could and wish to unify further, where national approach would be meaningless, either by having common laws, approaches or bodies: EU digital policies, fight against climate change, the European prosecutor (to prosecute some crossborder or EU-threatening crimes), fiscal rules, etc.

The main EU idea is to act where it would make sense to act together. Otherwise you leave it up to the Member States. That’s a subsidiarity principle, which is key in European law.

/u/horatiowilliams from **/**r/AskEurope asked : Will it be possible in the future for non-EU citizens to apply for EU citizenship directly without going through a member state?

Nope, I don’t see how it could be possible, unless the EU becomes a fully fledge state (which is not even nearly on the agenda). The EU citizenship does not exist on its own (one could even argue that it has only a political existence and not a legal one), because the EU is not a country, it’s a (sort of) international organisation. That’s why the EU citizenship can only exist complementarily to a (EU) national one, mostly as a political statement (to create a European state of mind for citizens) because the rights that goes with it (freedm of circulation, mandatory assistance from other EU countries, etc) are in fact attached to the national citizenship.

If you wanted to get a self-standing EU citizenship, it would be an absolute nightmare for thousands of reasons of different reason, practical, legal and political.

/u/aanzeijar from **/**r/AskEurope asked : I don't know if you have numbers on that ready, but I'd like to hear a bit about the regulatory weight of the EU. Specifically, a while back Tesla tried to introduce their custom charging stations and Germany shut it down with a figurative "our way or the autobahn, fuckers", but Germany alone can not establish standards on an international level. The EU however can. How much of a say does the EU have in international standardization situations? I doesn't seem to work out very well in the automotive industry from what I hear.

The regulatory weight of the EU is huge, just because of the size of its market. The EU single market is the biggest economic area in the world, with 500 million potential customers. And to get access to that market you must respect the EU rules, so it will be interesting for companies or countries to adapt themselves to the EU regulatory framework, especially if they see that it is efficient.

To take a recent example, the scandals about personal data on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica put the spotlight on the EU Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that will be applicable from next month and which is the most advanced and citizen friendly in the world. Because of that you have more and more countries that are reforming their data protection rules and taking the EU law as a model (even the US, which has been highly critical of this EU law is now looking at it). The same goes with security measures in manufactured goods, health standards, etc. Because a good legislator will always look at what other countries do, to see if it works and if having the same rules would make thing easier for his own country. And a legislator knows that if he makes a good law, it can be used as a model by others and thus give his own country a comparative advantage.

This regulatory weight is also at the core of the EU trade agenda. Because trade is about recognizing the standards of the other and impose them as a model. Meaning that if you have a very important part of the economic market that decides to trade on the basis of a set of regulatory standards, the other countries will have no choice but to follow these rules, in order not to be cut from these huge markets. Basically all the trade negotiation made by the EU (whether with Canada, Mercosur, Mexico, etc.) is a race to determine whose regulatory model will be the world reference/standard in the future : European, American or Chinese.

On trade, the EU is having a field day ever since Trump got elected because he scared off many commercial partners of the US, that preferred in the end to get deals with the EU instead of an unpredictable and protectionist partner. That’s why you have negotiations with the EU that were advancing slowly (Japan, Mexico, etc.) before Trump that suddenly hit the full throttle and got concluded super fast, with the non-EU countries being ready to suddenly accept demands from the EU that they were refusing before. That allowed the EU to score some serious victory about the protection of their regional products, for instance to ensure that only Parmigiano cheese (Parmesan) produced in Italy can be sold under the name Parmigiano in Canada or Mexico.

/u/konbini_man from **/**r/AskEurope asked : I want to know why you guys seem to work so few hours a day and still get paid a whole lot of €€€

You can insist on the word “seem”. It depends of course of the kind of job you’re having (civil servants being in a different category than assistants), but if you take the example of assistants, we are far from chilling at work. The key word for our job is “flexibility”, meaning that you arrive and you leave work when it is required, no matter if it’s 18:30, 03:00, a Tuesday or a Sunday. When it’s crunch time, you can forget your weekends or any kind of free time. It happened lots of times to me to be at the office from Monday to Sunday for a month and a half straight, to work without sleeping for several days or work/get calls until very late in the night. And you don't get “bonus” time-off to balance that, you make do.

For civil servants it’s different, they have a more “regular” schedule, but they’re not working “so few hours”.

On the pay, it’s true that you can be really well paid (at least in the institutions themselves), but it’s a usual thing in international organisations, because those jobs require highly skilled people and because it’s a way to “ensure” the loyalty (you don’t want them to work for their own country or someone else because they give them a check) and keep these people and their knowhow within the institution. That being said, it’s true that you can sometime have truly ridiculous pay that don’t match in any way the work that is actually done, even if there are safeguards to avoid abuses.