BERLIN: The European Union can no longer afford to keep national vetoes when deciding on European Union foreign and security policy if it wants to maintain a leading role in global politics, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said. Moscow's war in Ukraine makes unity in Europe ever more urgent and increases pre
Unanimity simply doesn’t scale well. It might work for a small number of votes, but it risks decision paralysis. I remember Occupy Portland was trying to work by consensus. For all of their decisions, there was always at least someone who blocked it. At a certain point, they were unable to make internal decisions and fell apart. Tyranny of the majority is a thing, but so is tyranny of the minority.
There are different ways to see it. Consensus decision making might be slower, but it avoids many issues down the road.
In the case of the EU, they should just stop their monolithic thinking. Not everyone has to follow everything (see EURO) and if some member is constantly blocking decisions there should be just a clear pathway to kick them out.
If you mean it avoids parties being salty that something is going through and doesn’t want to participate and/or try to undermine it, not really. People and their opinions change, people make not well thought out decisions that sound good only on paper, people get coerced or threatened into agreeing. So you’ll get disagreements even from a uninamous system.
I really don’t think that it’s worth the significant efficiency hit that such a system brings about. A good governing organisation needs to get shit done that benefits as many people as possible, not twiddle their thumbs in deadlock. When the government is in deadlock, the people, namely the poor and vulrnable in society, almost invariably suffers while there are no consequences to the rich elite and especially the people responsible. At the end of the day, a philosophically pure system that doesn’t produce results is useless.
Example: US vs China. The US has more checks and balances that in theory is intended that a larger consensus is required to make a decision than China has (whether that actually works as intended is a whole other story). But the US also takes literally decades to pass even the most basic of laws, or sometimes not at all (see codifying Roe v Wade, they had half a century). Meanwhile, China has been on a reform rampage in recent years, and the changes have been massively beneficial to their people.
The problem is that other systems risk constantly overruling the minority opinion which IMHO if often a bigger systemic risk than adding some additional consultations.
Neither the US nor China are particularly good examples as they are not a relatively recently created loose umbrella construct like the EU.
You could also do strategies like preferential voting, issue-based weighted voting, or two thirds majority instead of one more than half, if minority opinion is still important in a case while still mitigating the deadlock issues of absolute consensus.