Sweden became NATO’s newest member on Thursday (7 March 2024), upon depositing its instrument of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty with the Government of the United States in Washington DC. With Sweden’s accession, NATO now counts 32 countries among its members.
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I blame the fact they built all these institutions with no clause to expel members, or which require total unanimity to do so. They really bought in to the whole “end of history” thing, I guess.
Yeah, this is an interesting element. Historically, allowing all members a veto, while also having no way to expel a member, means that any such institution is liable to outside meddling. The classic example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto – in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, any noble could veto anything. So all it took was buying a few nobles and it shattered.
Apparently, based on that Wikipedia article, they ended up making a new version with less strict veto rules, called the confederated sejm, which is also where I expect all these Western institutions to go eventually. TIL.
Term limits are inherently undemocratic, and insistence by Westerners that everyone has to have them is pure American exceptionalism.
That is an L take. Having a term limit helps increase the difficulty of making political dynasties. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it sure is gonna make it harder for a certain person or group to solidify their power base.
Not really, the difference between two people of the same ideology to fulfill your democratic needs whom one can find in a population of a few million can be very small.
Doesn’t change the fact that banning people from running for election is inherently undemocratic. In practice they’re mostly used by the West to prevent political change domestically, and to justify overthrowing democratically elected leaders overseas
Something being democratic is not the only criterion, because you wouldn’t want your neighbors to vote in favor of collectively owning you as a slave, even if your vote against gets counted.
It’s just one safety measure - if a politician still would win an election after 8 years (life changes entirely in only 1 year), for example, that’s likely for wrong reasons. Like using administrative resource, pro-government mass media, crooked elites etc.