alt Hacker News> After decades of trying and broadly failing to regulate American tech corps, at what point does the EU...
The crux of the matter is it's a subset of the European Parliament versus a subset of EU member states.
When push comes to shove, EU member states can and already do ignore the EP for anything tangentially related to national security, and national politicans don't and won't give up sovereign power to the EU.
Additonally, the incentives of individual EU states with strong US FDI ties and not as strong domestic champions such as Poland, Ireland, Czechia, Luxembourg, and Romania means they fight tooth and nail to ensure American FDI continues. Member states like Hungary and Spain do this for China and Hungary and Austria for Russia.
There's also the added issue of perception - the EP was historically (and for larger states like France and Germany still is) used as a way to sideline unpopular domestic politicans or as a cushy retirement posting. There's a reason VdL is in Bruxelles and not the Bundeskanzleramt.
Plus, European companies have massive fixed capital investments in the US, especially after the IRA [0], so they don't want to face retaliation from American regulators, and are especially cozy with the Trump admin [1].
Also, European politicos also heavy leverage the revolving door of lobbying like their American peers. The "spend a couple years in Bundestag or Bruxelles and then take a cushy gig at Harvard [2][3]" remains strong. Heck, we'd always organize a fest where the wine would flow and European leaders would network with American and European policymakers studying and working in the US or in Europe [4].
[0] - https://flow.db.com/topics/macro-and-markets/us-german-trade...
[1] - https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/trump-bernard-arnault-lv...
[2] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/about/leo-varadkar
[3] - https://ces.fas.harvard.edu/people/ces-alumni/past-policy-fe...