Romania and Bulgaria are now suing the Austrian government for blocking our entrance into Schengen despite fulfilling every single point asked of us, and they still turn around and go “Lol no, you’re not western EU, you don’t deserve to be in this club”.
Isn’t that just a function of small numbers of dissenting countries being able to gum up the entire EU more than favoritism from the organization itself, though? I feel like I hear similar scenarios from the EU all the time.
Partially true, but you almost never hear about Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, etc vetoing shit because the retaliation would be harsh. It’s almost always rich countries doing the vetoing (notable exception of Poland and Hungary’s former mutual defence pact to prevent sanctions on each other, and that did cause retaliation).
I do agree that the veto system needs to go though.
Lifting the veto is more problematic than it might appear. Each country having a veto lends a lot of legitimacy to EU, without it you’ll see a lot of discussion about loss of sovereignty which is bound to be explosive. If countries don’t have veto and still are strictly against some measure, how does the EU actually enforce it? Will “EU police” enter Hungarian parliament?
