The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The European Union: Will It Adapt or Die? || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

The fate of the European Union will likely be decided in the coming week; if that doesn't pique your interest, I'm not sure what will.Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-european-union-will-it-adapt-or-die

Hey, everybody, Peter Zine here, coming to you from Cape Cod, where we have to talk about the EU, European Union. EU is a group of states, 27 of them right now, who have kind of thrown their lot together to form an economic grouping so they can economically be a bigger power on the world stage. And they're starting to discover that economics without military power is a bit of a problem. So they're looking to their east, and they see a whole lot of states that are either directly threatened by the Russians or at war with them, like say Ukraine. and they're coming to the conclusion very quickly that if they don't let these countries into the EU, it's going to actually cost them more the long run. So on the 5th of October, they are meeting with all of these governments to see what they can do.

And then on the following day, all the Europeans are meeting without the potential new members to figure out what they need to change about the EU in order to let these countries in. The issue is the identity of the European Union has always been a peace project. In the aftermath of World War II, they tried to create a Europe that was united, free and at peace and it broadly worked, but that environment is now gone and things need to change. So the biggest problems they have, well, there's two big ones. Number one, a lot of these states have weak rule of law and are fairly corrupt. And number two, a lot of them are heavily agrarian and courtesy of some of the evolutions of the EU early in its development. Until very recently,

over half of all EU funds were given as agricultural subsidies. That's down to about a third now, but still a huge chunk of the budget. And all, of these countries would basically absorb every scrap of cash that the EU would have. In addition, EU decision-making is founded on national vetoes for any sort of big issue like enlargement or taxes. So tiny little Greece can veto, for example, Greek bailout terms that they don't like, which has led to the organization kind of being an institutional pig meat when anything real is involved.

And they tend to squabble about the most irrelevant things such as, say, cheese policy. So if this is going to work, if the EU is going to matter, if the EU is going to survive, a lot of this needs to change, and is not necessarily the countries that they're looking to admit that need to do most of the changes. They need to get rid of the single member vetoes, which means countries like France can't shape the union to their liking anymore. They probably need a little bit softer on things like rule of long corruption, which is going to be of a problem because there are already countries in the EU that are, um, that are, um, that. backsliding quite a bit with Pullman and Hungary being at the top of that list. And they have to change the financial system so that it's not just all going to relatively nonproductive farmers or to big conglomerate farmers in places like Ukraine. So this is one of those situations where the world that the EU was built for doesn't exist any longer.

And they've got to decide if the EU can change in order to adapt to that world and shape it on the other side. And we're probably going to have a really good idea about that in less than a week. All right, that's it for me. See you guys next time.