Definitely not. The article does go on to acknowledge this:
"The result of this volume bias in the system is an onslaught of low-quality legislation. Compliance is often impossible. A BusinessEurope analysis cited by the Draghi report looked at just 13 pieces of EU legislation and found 169 cases where different laws impose requirements on the same issue. In almost a third of these overlaps, the detailed requirements were different, and in about one in ten they were outright contradictory."
Whenever I hear a politician patting himself on the back for how many pieces of legislation he got passed, I cringe at the thought of all the junk in it.
It’s amazing how similar legislation is to software engineering in that regard: It all comes down to managing complexity. A good law is achieving its effect with as little special case handling in as few lines as possible while covering most of the problem space.
That was meant ironically. The article explains in great length that this quantitative "productivity" does not result in qualitative "productivity".
The fundamental problem, in my view, is that any significant reform of EU procedures would mean strengthening the European Parliament. In other words, EU governments must be persuaded to relinquish some of their sovereignty. Since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty in 2007, there has been no significant progress in this regard. This is also related to the fact that, unlike 20 years ago, many center-right governments are now in power in many EU countries, and strengthening the EU is not on the agenda of most of them—often quite the opposite. France is an exception, but Emmanuel Macron's initiative was met with little response.
I truly hate how this buzzword is misused with regards to the EU. Voluntarily delegating authority is not the same as losing sovereignty. If you can un-delegate the authority at your own prerogative, you have not lost sovereignty. If the UK, for example, had genuinely lost its sovereignty, it would not have been able to voluntarily withdraw from its participation in the EU.
I would rather say that the term “sovereignty” is multifaceted. We have the concept of popular sovereignty, which means that political power emanates from the people and all other sovereignty is delegated.
However, there is also a use of the term “sovereignty” in the sense of self-determination over one's own state structure and the ability to ward off external interference. When a state transfers certain sovereign rights to the EU, this is more than just delegation. In German constitutional law, for example, this means that the transfer of such rights to the EU has constitutional status.
If there is a lawsuit before the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that challanges an EU law or regulation, the court first examines whether the EU law in question regulates something that actually falls within the EU's area of responsibility or whether it is something over which Germany has reserved its sovereignty.
The most prominent example of such a ruling is the PSPP (Public Sector Purchase Programme) case from 2020, where the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that another ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the European Central Bank (ECB) program of purchasing government bonds is not binding in Germany because the CJEU exceed its judicial mandate and violated the sovereignty of the German Bundestag. The case was "solved" when the European Central Bank provided the Bundestag with additional documentation regarding the program and the Bundestag concluded that everything is in order.
In this decision the term "sovereignty" is explicitly used to outline the case: "In particular, these [complaints] concerned the prohibition of monetary financing of Member State budgets, the monetary policy mandate of the ECB, and a potential encroachment upon the Members States’ competences and sovereignty in budget matters."
The decision later concludes:
"This standard of review [in the ruling of the CJEU] is by no means conducive to restricting the scope of the competences conferred upon the ECB, which are limited to monetary policy. Rather, it allows the ECB to gradually expand its competences on its own authority; at the very least, it largely or completely exempts such action on the part of the ECB from judicial review. Yet for safeguarding the principle of democracy und upholding the legal bases of the European Union, it is imperative that the division of competences be respected."
Because a disunited Europe was the cause of both World Wars and multiple genocides.
The continent should be tightly linked together so that war is unthinkable, and so that the pluralistic and very factional nations of Europe can negotiate as equals with other great powers.
Compare the UK pre-Brexit and post-Brexit for some evidence.
Cutting down scope doesn't necessarily reduce cooperation.
Until 2004-07, the EU was an economic and political union for Western, Northern, and parts of Southern Europe - all of whom are largely aligned from a developmental, economic, and social perspective. It was after the rapid Eastward expansion of the EU without updated checks and balances that dysfunction arose.
The EU will remain dysfunctional as long as CEE countries that are not aligned with the core mission of the original EU remain politically relevant. The only way to reduce this dysfunction is to either decouple the policy component from the economic component, or reduce the amount of nations that should have a say in policy to those that are aligned with the EU.
The fact that the government of an EU member state like Hungary still has political privileges yet is clearly preparing for some form of economic [0][1] warfare and potentially actual [2][3] warfare highlights how tenuous the project is as it stands today.
First it's Hungary, then it's Slovakia, then ...
Clearly the EU status quo is unsustainable and needs to be reformed ASAP.
> The Commission initiates legislation, but it has no reason to be reticent. It cannot make policy by announcing new spending commitments and investments, as the budget is tiny, around one percent of GDP, and what little money it has is mostly earmarked for agriculture (one-third) and regional aid (one-third). In Brussels, policy equals legislation. Unlike national civil servants and politicians, civil servants and politicians who work in Brussels have one main path to build a career: passing legislation.
This is also relevant in debt-brake discussions. Many who want a smaller government support limits on debts, but a smaller budget leaves passing laws as the only way for politicians to assert themselves. Often, spending money is a less harmful way for a politician to get a headline then passing a law.
In the same way that we budge the quantity of dollars we can spend, we should probably budget the quantity of laws we can create, and laws that can exist at any given time.
The budget is ultimately limited by the government's ability to extract value. There are no similar limits to the quantity of laws and regulations that can be in effect at the same time. Legislators can of course impose an arbitrary limit, but they can just as easily increase the limit or repeal it, if they don't like it.
The number of laws is limited by several factors, among them:
The ability of the governed to remember and attend to them all
The resources of the government available to explain, interpret and enforce compliance
The willingness of the governed to obey them without a gun being brought out
The willingness and ability of the government to bring out a gun to enforce them
For instance, when the rule of avoidance in late imperial China created a 5x increase in rate of new regulations, the result was up to 30% decrease in tax collections and a counterintuitive increase in the power and influence of local clerks, gentry and militias, laying the groundwork supportive of the eventual mutiny against and collapse of Qing rule
That’s true I suppose. Belgium had incredibly effective “PR” essentially turning “us” from the aggressor to the victim due to WW1 breaking out and effectively erasing Congo from the Zeitgeist.
I highly recommend the book “King Leopold’s Ghost”. (Or the fictionalized “heart of darkness” by Konrad if fiction is more your thing).
The key point here appears to be an innovation called the so-called "trilogues", which were introduced to accelerate the process of negotiation between the Council of Ministers (representing national governments),the EU Parliament (elected EU legislators), and the EU Commission (civil service).
It seems that this innovative process eliminates a lot of "gridlock" and is too efficient for the liking of the author, a strange complaint.
That the legislation which emerges from this is sometimes flawed, or contradicts other legislation, is not a reason to introduce less efficient processes, but to allow greater scrutiny of that legislation which does emerge from the "trilogues". The normal parliamentary mechanism for this is to have several "Readings" where the legislation is scrutinized by different groups of legislators, e.g. an Upper and Lower House.
Otherwise, perhaps Brussels has found something useful with the "trilogues", and other national parliaments should adopt a similar process?
Efficiency is not always desirable in legislature. It would be efficient if a political faction, as soon as it reached the threshold for being able to pass any of its legislature to immediately pass as much of it, as quickly as it can sign it.
You generally don't want someone with a 50.1% (or a 48%) mandate to turn everything upside down as soon as they get elected.
But yes, there's some middle ground between that and endless gridlock.
You do realize that Luis Garicano was an MEP who was the vice-chair of the RenewEurope [0] coalition and is a member of the pro-EU think tanks CEPR [1] and Bruegel [2] right?
If there is an academic you want to listen to in order to understand how to better reform the EU's institutions, it's definitely Luis.
Agreed. The EU institutions are remarkably efficient compared to their national equivalents. 80,000 civil servants is a tiny number for a polity of 450 million people. Ireland for example has 50,000 for a population of 1/10th the size.
Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.
Those 50k Irish bureaucrats exist in that number because the organizations they work for are tasked with, among other things, ensuring compliance with rules written in Brussels.
And I’m sure the 32,000 EU Commission employees are being fairly and responsibly advised by the 30,000 paid lobbyists from those 15,000 lobbyist organisations registered in Brussels.
Europe and Europeans are turning themselves into museums and museum showcase. What’s new? A defeated nation waiting for its death knell in the coffin by its unelected leaders.
I was pondering on this very thing not so long ago. I didn't discover anything new, of course, but I ended up convinced that the whole thing exists only because most people don't take a moment to think how absurd it is, and not so much time has passed since its somewhat forceful foundation (meaning, it wasn't something that "people of the Europe willingly decided to establish"). And, hence, it's only a matter of time it falls apart, and it may happen any time. Which is a pity, because I like open borders, I like EU as an idea, and I don't like wars, revolutions and other rapid changes, which I'd otherwise prefer to happen outside of my lifetime.
What I mean to say is that the whole EU political system is an epitome of citizen alienation, and it is like that by design. It is the purest faceless Kafkian bureaucratic machine. And, by the way, I think it works pretty well for what it is. I don't know how to measure it, but I suppose the overall quality of legislation is higher than what, say, Russia or USA produce. But the fact it is completely opaque by design, that no one is ever truly accountable for anything, I think, just isn't what anyone would willingly accept, and it's only a matter of time when the critical mass of people truly "notice" the fact.
You can often hear how some guy on the internet calls POTUS "the most powerful man in the world", which is always somewhat funny, because, of course, anyone sane understands how far from truth that is. It's laughable, how little he can really do as a president, how powerless he is to change something he truly wants to change. He is more of a glorified clown, than a ruler or a politic. But I come to believe it's really important to have a role like that in the government, somebody who ignorant people believe to be responsible for everything, somebody they can hate and blame for all that is wrong around them. It is important for the silliest psychological reasons, just by human nature.
Anyway, the comment is too long as it is, so I know I won't be able to properly explain myself, but the thing is I don't imagine things like the meaningless cookie-notification, or that idiotic bottlecap thing being possible almost anywhere but Brussels, certainly not that often. It is both ironic and very characteristic of the system, that both are only some very minor footnotes in an Appendix to some enormous legal package that is "mostly obviously good", and are about the only thing from the whole package that most people notice (and obviously are very costly in the end).
I’m not so sure that equating more laws produced with “greater productivity” is necessarily the right idea.
Definitely not. The article does go on to acknowledge this:
"The result of this volume bias in the system is an onslaught of low-quality legislation. Compliance is often impossible. A BusinessEurope analysis cited by the Draghi report looked at just 13 pieces of EU legislation and found 169 cases where different laws impose requirements on the same issue. In almost a third of these overlaps, the detailed requirements were different, and in about one in ten they were outright contradictory."
Whenever I hear a politician patting himself on the back for how many pieces of legislation he got passed, I cringe at the thought of all the junk in it.
It’s amazing how similar legislation is to software engineering in that regard: It all comes down to managing complexity. A good law is achieving its effect with as little special case handling in as few lines as possible while covering most of the problem space.
Glad to see software engineers aren’t the only ones that count lines well past the point that they should be.
"Just ship it, we can patch any problems later..."
Just ship it, it will be someone else's problem
That was meant ironically. The article explains in great length that this quantitative "productivity" does not result in qualitative "productivity".
The fundamental problem, in my view, is that any significant reform of EU procedures would mean strengthening the European Parliament. In other words, EU governments must be persuaded to relinquish some of their sovereignty. Since the signing of the Lisbon Treaty in 2007, there has been no significant progress in this regard. This is also related to the fact that, unlike 20 years ago, many center-right governments are now in power in many EU countries, and strengthening the EU is not on the agenda of most of them—often quite the opposite. France is an exception, but Emmanuel Macron's initiative was met with little response.
> sovereignty
I truly hate how this buzzword is misused with regards to the EU. Voluntarily delegating authority is not the same as losing sovereignty. If you can un-delegate the authority at your own prerogative, you have not lost sovereignty. If the UK, for example, had genuinely lost its sovereignty, it would not have been able to voluntarily withdraw from its participation in the EU.
I would rather say that the term “sovereignty” is multifaceted. We have the concept of popular sovereignty, which means that political power emanates from the people and all other sovereignty is delegated.
However, there is also a use of the term “sovereignty” in the sense of self-determination over one's own state structure and the ability to ward off external interference. When a state transfers certain sovereign rights to the EU, this is more than just delegation. In German constitutional law, for example, this means that the transfer of such rights to the EU has constitutional status.
If there is a lawsuit before the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) that challanges an EU law or regulation, the court first examines whether the EU law in question regulates something that actually falls within the EU's area of responsibility or whether it is something over which Germany has reserved its sovereignty.
The most prominent example of such a ruling is the PSPP (Public Sector Purchase Programme) case from 2020, where the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that another ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) regarding the European Central Bank (ECB) program of purchasing government bonds is not binding in Germany because the CJEU exceed its judicial mandate and violated the sovereignty of the German Bundestag. The case was "solved" when the European Central Bank provided the Bundestag with additional documentation regarding the program and the Bundestag concluded that everything is in order.
For the decision of the German Federal Constitutional Court see: https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemit... (in English)
In this decision the term "sovereignty" is explicitly used to outline the case: "In particular, these [complaints] concerned the prohibition of monetary financing of Member State budgets, the monetary policy mandate of the ECB, and a potential encroachment upon the Members States’ competences and sovereignty in budget matters."
The decision later concludes:
"This standard of review [in the ruling of the CJEU] is by no means conducive to restricting the scope of the competences conferred upon the ECB, which are limited to monetary policy. Rather, it allows the ECB to gradually expand its competences on its own authority; at the very least, it largely or completely exempts such action on the part of the ECB from judicial review. Yet for safeguarding the principle of democracy und upholding the legal bases of the European Union, it is imperative that the division of competences be respected."
For good reason. The United States of Europe is a pipe dream. Why not go in the opposite direction and drastically cut down the entire thing?
Because a disunited Europe was the cause of both World Wars and multiple genocides.
The continent should be tightly linked together so that war is unthinkable, and so that the pluralistic and very factional nations of Europe can negotiate as equals with other great powers.
Compare the UK pre-Brexit and post-Brexit for some evidence.
Because cooperating is better than competing
Cutting down scope doesn't necessarily reduce cooperation.
Until 2004-07, the EU was an economic and political union for Western, Northern, and parts of Southern Europe - all of whom are largely aligned from a developmental, economic, and social perspective. It was after the rapid Eastward expansion of the EU without updated checks and balances that dysfunction arose.
The EU will remain dysfunctional as long as CEE countries that are not aligned with the core mission of the original EU remain politically relevant. The only way to reduce this dysfunction is to either decouple the policy component from the economic component, or reduce the amount of nations that should have a say in policy to those that are aligned with the EU.
The fact that the government of an EU member state like Hungary still has political privileges yet is clearly preparing for some form of economic [0][1] warfare and potentially actual [2][3] warfare highlights how tenuous the project is as it stands today.
First it's Hungary, then it's Slovakia, then ...
Clearly the EU status quo is unsustainable and needs to be reformed ASAP.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/hungary-has-financial-shield-a...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/orban-is-...
[2] - https://english.www.gov.cn/news/202405/10/content_WS663d3b83...
[3] - https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/20...
> The Commission initiates legislation, but it has no reason to be reticent. It cannot make policy by announcing new spending commitments and investments, as the budget is tiny, around one percent of GDP, and what little money it has is mostly earmarked for agriculture (one-third) and regional aid (one-third). In Brussels, policy equals legislation. Unlike national civil servants and politicians, civil servants and politicians who work in Brussels have one main path to build a career: passing legislation.
This is also relevant in debt-brake discussions. Many who want a smaller government support limits on debts, but a smaller budget leaves passing laws as the only way for politicians to assert themselves. Often, spending money is a less harmful way for a politician to get a headline then passing a law.
In the same way that we budge the quantity of dollars we can spend, we should probably budget the quantity of laws we can create, and laws that can exist at any given time.
Mandatory expiry dates or renewal cycles. You can bypass the expiry/renewal process with a large majority.
Sounds like a lobbyist dream.
Let's not create a better system that would help everybody because some people might have jobs under that system!
I think their objection is monied interests would have undue influence (they assert), not that lobbyists would be employed.
The budget is ultimately limited by the government's ability to extract value. There are no similar limits to the quantity of laws and regulations that can be in effect at the same time. Legislators can of course impose an arbitrary limit, but they can just as easily increase the limit or repeal it, if they don't like it.
The number of laws is limited by several factors, among them:
For instance, when the rule of avoidance in late imperial China created a 5x increase in rate of new regulations, the result was up to 30% decrease in tax collections and a counterintuitive increase in the power and influence of local clerks, gentry and militias, laying the groundwork supportive of the eventual mutiny against and collapse of Qing ruleLegal productivity at the expense of actual productivity!
As a Belgian, it does frustrate me that this is what we’re getting known for.
> As a Belgian, it does frustrate me that this is what we’re getting known for.
Waffles and domestic terrorism.
>Waffles and domestic terrorism.
I'll take waffles and domestic (the best kind) terrorism over "you got a license m8?" and bad food and day.
Isn't one of the Belgian governments still shut down? The Brussels government. Another thing Belgium is getting famous for.
Don't worry, you're not alone. It's what the whole EI is known for.
maybe better than being known about king leopold and what he did in Congo? where did all the wealth go
That’s true I suppose. Belgium had incredibly effective “PR” essentially turning “us” from the aggressor to the victim due to WW1 breaking out and effectively erasing Congo from the Zeitgeist.
I highly recommend the book “King Leopold’s Ghost”. (Or the fictionalized “heart of darkness” by Konrad if fiction is more your thing).
Where do you think the "all hands" meeting came from?
The key point here appears to be an innovation called the so-called "trilogues", which were introduced to accelerate the process of negotiation between the Council of Ministers (representing national governments),the EU Parliament (elected EU legislators), and the EU Commission (civil service).
It seems that this innovative process eliminates a lot of "gridlock" and is too efficient for the liking of the author, a strange complaint.
That the legislation which emerges from this is sometimes flawed, or contradicts other legislation, is not a reason to introduce less efficient processes, but to allow greater scrutiny of that legislation which does emerge from the "trilogues". The normal parliamentary mechanism for this is to have several "Readings" where the legislation is scrutinized by different groups of legislators, e.g. an Upper and Lower House.
Otherwise, perhaps Brussels has found something useful with the "trilogues", and other national parliaments should adopt a similar process?
Efficiency is not always desirable in legislature. It would be efficient if a political faction, as soon as it reached the threshold for being able to pass any of its legislature to immediately pass as much of it, as quickly as it can sign it.
You generally don't want someone with a 50.1% (or a 48%) mandate to turn everything upside down as soon as they get elected.
But yes, there's some middle ground between that and endless gridlock.
A quick glance on who Luis Garicano is tells me all I need to know about these pieces.
Economics @ University of Chicago Professor @ LSE
Various memberships at pro American institutions
Expect deregulation narratives, freemarketeering dogmas and how lobbying is actually good for democracy.
A quick glance on who Isaac Newton is tells me all I need to know about these pieces. Physics @ Trinity College @ Royal Society
Various memberships at pro Science institutions
Expect inertia narratives, gravity dogmas and... wait, do you believe economics science is pro lobbying?
A person who chooses to evaluate all ideas by way of their source tells me all I need to know about their opinion.
The biography of the author is interesting and relevant, but hardly all that matters about this or any other writing.
What a small and dreary way to look at the world
You do realize that Luis Garicano was an MEP who was the vice-chair of the RenewEurope [0] coalition and is a member of the pro-EU think tanks CEPR [1] and Bruegel [2] right?
If there is an academic you want to listen to in order to understand how to better reform the EU's institutions, it's definitely Luis.
[0] - https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/197554/LUIS_GARICANO/...
[1] - https://cepr.org/about/people/luis-garicano
[2] - https://www.bruegel.org/people/luis-garicano
I'm surprised we still don't get github for laws (or do we?) with useful automations like suggested garbage collection.
Wasn't collaboration at scale the reason Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web at CERN? :)
that was a fun project: https://github.com/steeve/france.code-civil
No we don't.
I'm going to play devil's advocate: the EU's mission was to bring peace. Maybe 80,000 employees producing garbage is a small price to pay for piece.
Agreed. The EU institutions are remarkably efficient compared to their national equivalents. 80,000 civil servants is a tiny number for a polity of 450 million people. Ireland for example has 50,000 for a population of 1/10th the size.
Admittedly however, the scope of national civil services tends to be much larger than that of the EU's.
Where are you getting your Irish numbers from?
This source [0] suggests around 300k if we count everything.
It looks like you are just counting the core "civil" servants and defence maybe?
[0] https://publicjobs.ie/en/information-hub?view=article&id=247...
Irish Times: "More than 50,000 staff now employed in Civil Service "
https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/04/15/more-than-5000...
Thanks! Interesting that the answer to the PQ doesn't map to the official data (not surprising, but interesting).
Those 50k Irish bureaucrats exist in that number because the organizations they work for are tasked with, among other things, ensuring compliance with rules written in Brussels.
It seems like laws just sprout out of Brussels.
An average of 7 acts a day. Wonderful.
And I’m sure the 32,000 EU Commission employees are being fairly and responsibly advised by the 30,000 paid lobbyists from those 15,000 lobbyist organisations registered in Brussels.
Europe and Europeans are turning themselves into museums and museum showcase. What’s new? A defeated nation waiting for its death knell in the coffin by its unelected leaders.
Europe seems to be doing better than the US, for it's citizens.
how else would they justify their abundant pay and perks
plus Brussels is a boring place, not much else to do other than LARPing as law makers
Ok, but passing laws is a bug not a feature right?
I always fondly recall certain scenes in YM/YPM.
with their hands?
I was pondering on this very thing not so long ago. I didn't discover anything new, of course, but I ended up convinced that the whole thing exists only because most people don't take a moment to think how absurd it is, and not so much time has passed since its somewhat forceful foundation (meaning, it wasn't something that "people of the Europe willingly decided to establish"). And, hence, it's only a matter of time it falls apart, and it may happen any time. Which is a pity, because I like open borders, I like EU as an idea, and I don't like wars, revolutions and other rapid changes, which I'd otherwise prefer to happen outside of my lifetime.
What I mean to say is that the whole EU political system is an epitome of citizen alienation, and it is like that by design. It is the purest faceless Kafkian bureaucratic machine. And, by the way, I think it works pretty well for what it is. I don't know how to measure it, but I suppose the overall quality of legislation is higher than what, say, Russia or USA produce. But the fact it is completely opaque by design, that no one is ever truly accountable for anything, I think, just isn't what anyone would willingly accept, and it's only a matter of time when the critical mass of people truly "notice" the fact.
You can often hear how some guy on the internet calls POTUS "the most powerful man in the world", which is always somewhat funny, because, of course, anyone sane understands how far from truth that is. It's laughable, how little he can really do as a president, how powerless he is to change something he truly wants to change. He is more of a glorified clown, than a ruler or a politic. But I come to believe it's really important to have a role like that in the government, somebody who ignorant people believe to be responsible for everything, somebody they can hate and blame for all that is wrong around them. It is important for the silliest psychological reasons, just by human nature.
Anyway, the comment is too long as it is, so I know I won't be able to properly explain myself, but the thing is I don't imagine things like the meaningless cookie-notification, or that idiotic bottlecap thing being possible almost anywhere but Brussels, certainly not that often. It is both ironic and very characteristic of the system, that both are only some very minor footnotes in an Appendix to some enormous legal package that is "mostly obviously good", and are about the only thing from the whole package that most people notice (and obviously are very costly in the end).
leave europe before it is too late.
[dead]
The more laws we have the more democracy we have! We need more! Look at all the problems around us