The Eurovision song contest includes Australia in its member nations. Mindblowing I know, but it's possible for a thing to transcend its name.

Mostly a semantic concern in the name given the shared interests and concerns both have in a number of things including the Arctic. It's more a "North Atlantic" group of nations view both sides seem to be taking, but you know, without the US.

One could argue that it is European by founding and history though.

Founded by Europeans, still mostly populated by people of European ancestry, with laws written by Europeans and based on European ideas.

European isn't just a geographic descriptor :-)

Who knows, maybe after all the doom and gloom the EU might just win by default because the other world powers have become so unattractive the rest of the world rallies around them?

If I’d said to you last year “Hey! I bet Canada is going to join the EU! No, of course not as charter-violating full member, as a newly invented ‘associate member’!” You’d probably have said “That’s both crazy and oddly specific, the chances of that have to be approaching zero”.

That’s why.

I think the world would be jumping into alignments like this if the US hadn't spent the last 80 years building a "nuclear umbrella" for the "western alliance" with itself in the centre.

I bet many countries would prefer to disassociate with US foreign policy right now if they weren't security dependent.

I expect after this destructive episode in history has played out, if we're all still alive and free in another decade then there will be alternative umbrellas.

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> (as usual, the key blocking point that will need lots of work will be food, eve more than it is with the US, I wish we could scrap that entire part to get a v1 going quickly but alas it's not how trade deal work)

I mean food/dairy/autos (which is also a major EU issue) have been 90% of the issues with Canada/USA trade for decades too so I have my doubts of them figuring it out any better.

I guess Canada is way more motivated then ever before as rapid souring of the relationship with the USA from this point would be a near economic collapse for them.

From what I read about what they wanted Canada to sign (the "new deal" Canada walked out of), they want to give them strict conditions and no abilities to make new deals with someone else to make them fully dependant. So the goal was not really military conquest but economic stranglehold. All the while apparently asking to tone down their minorities including the french one.

There is an alternate timeline where Canada signed that, and it looks much bleaker for them down the road.

> Tough words, that's the worse we may expect from the US gov realistically.

Trade wars and sanctions can get very nasty too. I don't know about Canada, but most of the EU runs on US Big Tech to name just one sensitive sector.

This is not really true. It's an extreme fringe minority in Canada that is massively misrepresented in US media, and largely propagated by AI bots.

The context in the podcast was that EU was too picky in their reform criteria for inclusion for current candidates on the European continent, but that Canada as a modern country would sail past and pass the exam. The ease with which these experts concluded it would make sense for Canada to join struck me, because impact on geopolitical relationship with US was imho too easily overlooked. It is a sentiment I hear more often now, in the news.

This seems to be what Canada and Europe want from each other. Both have interests in repelling other powers that deserve to have their economic and military capabilities weakened, and both seem to be able to help each other on expanding economic base, energy security, food supply, and resource availability/manufacturing capability with existing intellectual and trade property that will distance them from the US MIC.

The way you paint it sounds like the EU is a hardline communist state where dissent and even insult must be punished.

Why does Canada get a free pass to pleasantries just because the Canadians haven’t had a chance to insult the EU and its federalist technocrats yet?

Well the issue there then is that Farage’s Reform party seem likely to win that election. The current ostensibly-left-wing Labour government also have absolutely no appetite for rejoining either. Even the coalition of anti-growth eco-warriors and islamists which is the contemporary Green Party don’t say much which is a real surprise because it seems like such an easy vote-winner for them. Finally, it seems strange that the EU should pretty-well require the governments of its potential members to be left-wing or centrist, especially as this demand is now causing constituents of the EU to start to swing to the hard right too.

Do you have a citation for that? What was the exact quote?

Go ahead, make my day.

> If it did they'd lose a third of the members doing it.

As a federalist, that would be fine for me. Make a two speed europe. EU stays primarily a trade block that the "federal EU" is in.

“A single country” is pretty vague. For some definitions the EU already is one, for other definitions the EU can never be one.

What we do need is doing more things on the EU level. E.g. there’s no point in all member states building a nuclear umbrella or a space program. Some taxes also work better on an EU level because capital flows freely in the union and makes taxation hard for individual members.

Nevertheless that exact plan is in the minds of every higher-up running the EU. Individual counties are an anachronism that will eventually be got rid of if the EU is to continue.

Not necessarily. One can eg want more power to the actually elected part of the EU structure and less power to the commission. Imo electing or not a president does not necessarily help with democracy, as the US example shows. And in europe most countries do not have a strong presidential system, except France and 2-3 others. So I doubt having "strong elected president" is what people actually have in mind for the EU.

People bring this up they may consider EU to be historically a centralized power structure. Whether it can practically be actually democratized or not is a matter of debate. One can bring up the democratic deficit of EU without harbouring actual thoughts or hopes that it can be fixed.

That would be the next step but they seem to be getting on fine with an unelected president.

EU already has a constitution (?)

In actual democracy, like ancient Athens, most offices are filled by sortition rather than election.

Election is characteristic of oligarchy, where a few people make decisions for the many. Usually the few are supposed to be more qualified for or deserving of office, and election is a way of deciding which volunteer is most worthy.

In democracies, everyone is assumed to be equally qualified, as governing requires no special knowledge beyond some basic morality. So, lists of volunteers for office are compiled and names drawn from those lists at random, and for every office something like nine names are drawn, so volunteers can split their time between public service and their private affairs. This random selection also prevents the creation of political parties: you can’t get randomly selected by spending more on a campaign.

So, election of officers is oligarchic, rather than democratic. Democracies have votes instead on legislation, declarations of war snd peace, and jury trials.

Well funnily enough, virtually all the constituent countries of the EU do put the election of their president to a democratic vote.

This is incorrect. The European Parliament elects the Commission President, not the European Council. In fact, von der Leyen narrowly squeaked through in 2019, getting 383 votes with 374 votes required (with her making it being attributed to her hawkish stance on Russia to an extent, which supposedly earned her additional Eastern European votes).

The European Council does nominate the candidate and infamously in 2019 overrode the informally agreed on spitzenkandidaten process, by which the nominee of the political group (EU Parliament equivalent of parties) with the most seats should have gotten the nomination.

That said, the EU Parliament is not bound by the nomination. It can very obviously reject any candidate it doesn't like, though of course the dynamics of candidate selection are heavily influenced by the European Council's nomination power.

But yes, there's nothing per se undemocratic about it and I'm a bit bewildered by people asking for direct election of the President rather than cleaning up the existing process, given that most EU member states elect their heads of government indirectly.

The appointment of the commission president is quite different from how the German chancellor is determined:

1. The majority of representatives in Bundestag represents (up to rounding issues) the majority of voters.

2. Parties advertise their chancellor candidate before the election, and voters take that into account when choosing which party to vote for.

Being chosen democratically isn't a black and white thing. It becomes gradually less democratic as you separate voter intent and outcome further. This isn't just a function of how the election process itself works, but also voters being informed.

Practically no voter would have predicted von der Leyen becoming commission president when they cast their vote, making her appointment not very democratic.

Her doublethink and doublespeak needs repeated illumination.

She has never been part of any democratic process to put her in that role. In a parliamentary democracy the prime minister is an elected minister who leads his or her party. Von der leyen is a technocrat. “Demos” means “the people” en masse.

Or the President of the US, which is also appointed by the democratically elected Electoral College...

> You keep spreading this, but the eurocommssion president gets appointed by the European Council, which consists of democratically elected heads of state.

It does not matter who elects the EU commission, there needs to be a popular vote across the EU for every commissioner job and the EU Commission head. What we have today in EU is pure BS: every country gets a commissioner based on that country's influence within the bloc and every time a new country joins the EU, a new commissioner role just happens to be created.

I want to be able to choose from a number of candidates who should run the EU, not the prime minister or the president of a member country.

Everybody who holds even a little power in the EU construct needs to be voted by EU citizens, not appointed by who knows who.

This second- or third-hand "democracy" is not a democracy at all.

To be frank, it is a quite eccentric way to appoint an executive leader: imagine POTUS being chosen by state governors.

> She is no less democratically elected than the prime minister of a parliamentary republic

Well I would say this is arguable. Sure, her power is ultimately resulting from a popular mandate. But, if your country elects the head of state directly (say, France) then there are two "hops" between a popular mandate and the head of the EC. Whereas, if you are in a parliamentary system, it's three "hops" (MPs -> head of State -> EC president).