alt Hacker News> Would you let one or two cities have veto power over the policy of an entire country?
And this is why analogies are bad.
A few important details:
1) The EU is not a country.
2) The one-country veto already has limited applications within the context of the EU. Foreign policy is one of the most important, but most EU laws start from the Commission and go through Parliament instead where they pass by a simple majority.
3) What von der Leyen is in effect asking for is for EU member nations, who are sovereign and with each having their own foreign policy, to subordinate their foreign policy to the EU’s foreign policy. That is a massive power shift from the members to the EU Commission.
Political structures exist to influence the world around them.
A thousand or even a few hundred years ago most people travelled very little and often were born, lived and died in the same village. At that time the village was the natural unit of organisation. As communications improved, with horses, trains, planes, internet the unit of political organisation had to scale up to cities, regions, nations and now supra national organisations like the EU
The nation state is an outdated concept that has lived its time. In a world where those we need to talk to are the US, China, Russia even big EU countries like France and Germany are too small so we need to scale up.