Definitely center-right. They hate welfare but provide it reluctantly. They keep trying to privatize public transit. They'd never dismantle a company doing stuff they didn't like, as long as it was profitable. Stuff like that.
Is this a joke? The EU is the product of large industrialists institutionalising their liberalist, capitalist values as an international bureaucracy.
It hardly cares about unions beyond what the ECHR and ILO treaties demands, i.e. it's obviously not left wing. If it was inherently left wing it wouldn't have the kind of parliament it has, but rather something like Yugoslavia or the DDR did.
It's also not conservative, hence why that movement has had to bolt on militarisation and stuff like Frontex.
The Soviet Union had large industrialists and so does China. Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of both socialism and capitalism.
Soviet Union certainly had industries, but the only large industrialists I can think of were some pre-WW2 experiments with foreign companies invited to set up shop there where it was deemed the fastest way to get access to some piece of tech and the associated know-how.
Other than that, can you give any examples of Soviet industrialists, large or otherwise?
The Soviet Union had some giant corporations with powerful leaders. The best known of these are the leaders of military industry, such as Pavel Sukhoi or Mikhail Kalashnikov, or Tupolev. Were they not industrialists? They performed the same functions as leaders of Western industry. Soviet military corporations even competed against each other for government contracts. The industrialist could also be a party functionary or minister, but for sure they had industrialists.
They were not industrialists in this sense because those people did not own the industries they managed. The state owned it, and they were hired managers who could be ousted from their position at any moment, and if that happened they immediately lost all their power and control.
Large companies and large industry is the defining aspect of an industrialized society with quick travel and near-instantaneous communication across large distances.
As soon as it's possible to run efficiently a large enterprise (Thanks to the telegraph, and an extensive rail/road + automotive network), economies of scale will favor consolidation.
The Soviet Union and China are/were not and have virtually never been socialist countries - they are/were state capitalist economies.
Socialism means "corporations are owned by the people working in them", as in co-ops. State-owned corporations under brutal dictatorships are in no conceivable way "worker-owned". They all called themselves socialist just as they called themselves democratic - as in, basic propaganda.
This is very relevant in a discussion of left-wing VS right-wing economies. The Soviet Union and China are firmly in the right wing in reality, just as much as Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy were. They just had different propaganda.
A small note: state owned companies under actual Democratic societies is a more complex topic on the left-wing VS right-wing debate, that I won't go into here.
Clarification: an exact specification of socialism does not exist, but one of the consistent themes is that everything is democratized - in the sense that power rests with the people, actual power not just nominal - not necessarily by voting on everything.
The Soviet Union had big guys at the top who controlled everything from a distance, it was literally just a dictatorship (at least by the end).
It's funny, as the EU is normally bashed by left people for being too right, and right people for being too left.
Like, lots of the Treaties are pretty neo-liberal (private services, competition is always good, privatise stuff) but lots more are more left wring (the anti-monoploy stuff, the social charter etc).
Really though the EU is 27 governments in a trenchcoat, so it tends to reflect those governments (which change over time).
Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.
Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
> Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?
Yeah, look it could go either way.
> Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion.
I don't really agree with this. For an example of why not, the AI act is a good one. This was a great Act that got a lot of LLM nonsense pumped into it following ChatGPT. While I get why that happened, I would have preferred that they wait, as the original stuff made lots of sense, and the less well thought through AI/LLM stuff significantly weakens the act.
> It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
Can you give me some examples of people (national governments particularly) pushing for this? I think that lots of governments are pretty happy with inter-governmentalism even though it has lots of problems.
It is quite unfortunate what happened when ethnic nationalism won out over brotherhood and unity, but to be clear, I don't think that has anything to do with the economic model
Marxists usually apply a discourse regarding political economy because they perceive economy and ideology to be inseparable, and I'd expect Tito to also have done so. Yugoslavia as an entity was tightly coupled with the person of Tito and lacked mechanisms for keeping local governments in cooperation in his absence.
I'm sympathetic to the yugoslavian project and consider it an important source of inspiration and knowledge, but I don't believe fortune had anything to do with what happened afterwards.
I also don't believe fortune did. I believe western capital, threatened by the success of the Yugoslav project, bankrolled nationalist extremists in a successful ploy to destabilize systemic competition.
I don't think you know what you are actually talking about, you are confusing the EU with Europe, if talking about Europe you are giving a blanket statement over 40+ countries with quite different cultures, societies, etc. If talking about the EU then you have no clue what the EU actually is.
I recommend using more precise language about what you are talking, at the moment you just sound very confused.
Yes, the EU as an institution is centre-right, its main purpose is to regulate a common market, it's a economic liberal institution, and liberal in this sense is a right-wing political philosophy, not the bastardised "liberal" usage in American politics meaning "progressive".
Center right is spot on if you know anything about the EU's member states. Here left means some flavour of socialism. Running state monopolies to the ground and adding markets for essential services like electricity is not exactly that.
