We don’t have to tolerate programming errors in the EU political system!
Something went fundamentally wrong with how the software patents directive was handled in Brussels. I can live with the result that in the end the directive was buried and the EU Commission promised to not resurrect it again (in spite of this, software patents are again on the political agenda in Brussels), but I think that there is something at stake here which is more important than even the freedom of programming which is threatened by software patents.
In any democracy, there is a complicated system of interconnected organizations (including for example official institutions like parliaments as well as political parties, lobbying groups, the media, etc). The purpose of the whole system is to make political decisions according to the best interests and according to the desires of the citizens. In the case of the European Unions, it’s the interests and the desires of the citizens of the EU which should directly or indirectly determine the decisions which are made in Brussels. If a political system works properly, it functions as an information processing system in which the various interests and desires which citizens are expressing are analyzed, so that those demands which would benefit only a small minority at the expense of everyone else are rejected, and those proposals which are beneficial for society as a whole are accepted.
Of course, like any other information processing system, political decision-making systems do not always function according to the intended purpose. Sometimes this can be blamed on human error, but we are all human and we all make mistakes. Political decision-making systems need to be designed so that such errors will be detected and corrected before they cause significant harm. If this doesn’t happen, there’s something wrong with the political system, similar to how in computer software, “bugs” are programming errors which cause the program to function differently from how it should.
After pondering this matter for quite some time I have come to the conclusion that I don’t want to blame these malfunctions of political systems on the people who work in the various institutions and organizations which push in directions that I perceive as bad policy or even injustice. Rather, I want to take a constructive attitude and contribute towards getting these shortcomings of our political systems fixed.
Clearly the first step must be to identify those problems which should be given the highest priority. I want to focus initially on problems of the “banana republic” type, i.e. issues which do not only cause inefficiencies in political decision-making processes, but which allow foreign corporations to subvert the political decision-making system so that (unless the citizens engage in significant activism) political decisions will be made which are against the interests of the citizens but beneficial to one or more greedy foreign corporations. Of course the possibility of engaging in activism is an important part of the political system, but I view activism as an emergence measure to prevent bugs in the political system from having disastrous consequences. If in any area of public policy it becomes necessary to engage in activism, that in itself is a strong indication that the regular political decision-making systems have serious shortcomings which need to be addressed. The history of the “software patents directive” shows clearly that there are “banana republic” type problems with the political processes in Brussels.
Among this kind of problems, I want to focus initially on those which can be fixed relatively easily, without need for complicated renegotiation of EU treaties. For this reason, I believe that the EV50 issue is a good starting point. The “EV50″ awards are not well-known among the general public, but they are influential among the EU institutions in Brussels.