Continued Trump Administration Fallout

[hollodero]

(05-07-2021, 07:32 PM)michaelsean Wrote: I’m not sure of how the EU works.

Yeah that kinda makes two of us.
It's not very transparent to say the least.

(05-07-2021, 07:32 PM)michaelsean Wrote: Does Austria get an equal vote in any part of it?

Well, that is surprinsingly complicated to answer. There's an European parliament where Austrian delegates are elected to in proportion to the population, eg. not so many. Small countries are slightly overrepresented. What this parliament does in practice, well, that would take too long to moan about. In theory, control and legislate.
The "government" is the Commission, every country gets to send one person into that Commission. Usually local politicians we don't know what to do with. The actual overall goals are somewhat informally decided in the European Council, where every country gets a vote through their head of government. The principle of unanimity applies in most cases. You can imagine how much gets done there. Eg. Poland always says no and the thing is dispersed.
But hey we also got the Council of the European Union, where ministers (think heads of department) from every country decide things in their respective fields. Eg. foreign affairs are decided there by the foreign ministers of each country, again principle of unanimity, again there's a reason we do not really have a common foreign policy. There are topics where a "double majority" is enough, representing the double amount of people, where Austria could get overruled. I really don't know when this applies though.

Now you might ask how this all works and how the cogs match. There's just no easy way to tell and I figure you weren't really after the long uneasy way to tell. The EU basically doesn't work properly, so it's a tough comparison to the US really.