The Impending Collapse of the European Union

Tainter's law of diminishing returns to complexity is one of the causes of the Seneca collapse

The European Union is entering a phase of economic decline that may soon turn into a full-fledged collapse. It suffers from the typical problems that plague large-scale organizations: corruption, excess bureaucracy, inequality, cronyism, injustice, and a few more. The impending collapse of the EU illustrates how all large structures are subjected to Tainter’s law of diminishing returns on complexity.

During the 1990s and the 2000s, I visited Russia several times as part of my job of researcher. It was after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one of the worst periods for Russia during its recent history. I must admit that, at the beginning, I was a believer of the interpretation that it was a demonstration of the failure of Communism and of the superiority of the Western Liberal Democracies. It took me some time to understand that things were not so simple. Eventually, I found myself in full agreement with the thesis of Dmitry Orlov's book Reinventing Collapse (2008). (1)

According to Orlov, the same factors that led the Soviet Union to collapse would eventually lead to a collapse of the US. It has not happened, so far, although the US empire is showing ominous cracks in its internal political structure. But I think that Orlov’s analysis is most relevant nowadays if you translate his considerations to the European Union. In many ways, the EU mirrors both the USSR and the US. It is a huge bureaucratic organization ruled by an incompetent elite whose main purpose is to enrich themselves, as well as various corporate sharks, inside and outside Europe. In addition, it has specific problems of its own. The EU has little or no internal mineral resources; it mostly relies on imports. Since it has no army, the depletion problem is unsolvable by the same methods that allowed the US and the URSS to survive a little more: increasing internal production, and using military power to control or intimidate foreign producers. So, it is likely that the next large state organization to follow the USSR down the Seneca Cliff will not be the US, but the EU.

The most interesting point in these considerations is how similar these state structures are. My viewpoint is that of an EU citizen, but I lived for several years in the US, and I worked in post-Soviet Russia for extended periods. My experience is that all these places are very similar, apart from some details. Everywhere people wake up in the morning, go to work, come back home, have dinner, watch TV, chat with friends and family — no differences in these basic things. Certainly, not everything is exactly the same everywhere. In the US, people used to be somewhat richer than in the Soviet Union, almost everyone drove cars, and they rarely had parking problems, They could also buy guns in supermarkets. In Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, people were a little poorer, they also had no parking problems because they rarely used private cars. Russian citizens couldn’t easily buy guns, but vodka was very cheap. Up to recent times, the US had less censorship than Russia, but now it is probably the reverse. The EU was, and still is, richer than the old USSR, poorer than the old USA. And it has much bigger parking problems than both.

Since these organizations are so similar, it is not surprising that they all face the same problems. And they all move toward collapse, although following different paths. It is a story that Joseph Tainter examined in detail to propose his “law of diminishing returns on complexity.”

Tainter’s idea makes sense in qualitative terms; the bigger a state is, the more bureaucracy it needs. But how large is this effect, exactly? The case of the European Union gives us a chance to see an example that’s at least in part quantitative. It has to do with how the Union deals with the languages of the member states.

You know that the EU started with 6 member states, and it has now reached 27. It plans to reach 35 by 2030 (2). The result is that there are now 24 “official” languages in the EU (3). It means that every official document of the EU bureaucracy has to be translated and disseminated into 24 languages. The tower of Babel was a toy for children in comparison.

In principle, the number of translators needed increases quadratically with the number of languages, as it is typical of pairwise interactions in fully connected networks (it increases as a function of n(n-1)/2 where n is the number of nodes). For the 6-member Union, 15 translating teams were sufficient. For 24 languages, you need 276 teams. And if the number of languages were to increase to, say, 32, we would need nearly 500 translating teams. Let’s say that just for the current situation you need at least a thousand people working as translators, probably many more. I don’t know if they really have so many in Brussels, and if they plan to have many more in the future. Maybe not all translations are made directly from each language to all the others; but that’s the way things are supposed to be, at least in theory.

AI-based translations may lower costs, but you still need human translators to check what the AI is doing. And the problem is not just with languages: think of how many things are done in Brussels, just like in all government structures: documents, laws, committees, commissions, political groups, parliament sessions, speeches, all that. And everything has to be communicated using 24 different languages at the same time. You see what the problem is: complexity has a cost, it is not just a question of translators. If you want to increase the size of a structure, you have to pay the price. That’s not so difficult if the wealth of the structure depends on extracting a mineral resource such as oil. Oil production grew exponentially until the 1980s, and it is well known that an exponential function grows faster than any quadratic function.

However, no exponential function can grow forever, and with the slowdown of fossil fuels' energy availability, the increasing complexity of the structures built on that source, including the European Union, must grind to a halt. And not just a halt, as the availability of energy decreases, the complexity of the structure must decline. It is what we call the “Seneca Collapse”. My coworkers Perissi and Falsini and I described this behavior in a paper a few years ago. That’s exactly the phenomenon that Tainter had identified in the concept of “diminishing returns to complexity.”

In practice, complex structures do not just sit and watch as they start collapsing. They tend to act in order to avoid having to shrink too fast and too traumatically. The simplest strategy is to break down the structure, pushing out or eliminating one or more members. It doesn’t have to be a physical extermination, but it may be a cultural elimination (see my book, “Exterminations”).

Another, less drastic, method consists in adopting a network structure that doesn’t lead to a quadratic growth of complexity. A hierarchical structure has this property. Hypotetically, if we were to transform the European Union into an Empire ruled by a Kaiser or a Czar, there would be no need for translating anything. For all the businesses related to the state, everyone would have to speak the language of the Emperor, and that would be it. In this case, the cost of adding one more member state to the empire grows linearly, not quadratically.

It is a common strategy of empires; it is for this reason that the elites of the multilingual Russian empire at the time of the Czars spoke French with each other. Empires have just one official language, all the others are dialects. The main current Empires: Russia, the US, and China, have adopted or are adopting vertical government structures. It is the reason why Trump is planning to “drain the swamp.” It means creating an imperial structure that can get rid of the small potentates that fight each other to drain the state’s resources. That wouldn’t necessarily save the US, but it may give it sufficient time to re-organize its industrial system and its energy supply before suffering a major crash.

But Europe is not an empire, and the various attempts in recent history to turn it into one failed utterly. No one can impose on the EU members to speak, say, German or French. Maybe we could all decide to speak a language that nobody speaks as a national language: Latin, or Luxembourgeois, or the Lakota sign language, but it wouldn’t be so easy. Maybe we have sufficient genetic material from Napoleon’s corpse that we could clone him and let him try again to create a European Empire. But so far our genetic engineering capabilities seem to be limited to such things as mammoth meatballs, and not successful at that, either.

In the meantime, the EU government has been making all the possible mistakes a government could make (4), including pushing Europe into a war that nobody wanted, that Europe cannot win, and that could go nuclear. It is not surprising that the member states are courting what they call “souverainism” which means simply returning to independent nation-states. It means the disintegration of the European Union, shattered into statelets without much weight on the global stage.

Is that the destiny of Europe in the near future? I would say so, although the term “near future” is vague. Events like the collapse of a major state organization are tipping points. They appear all of a sudden after a long preparation time. The symptoms are often ignored by those who should note them, and the result is that everyone is taken by surprise. And there the Seneca Cliff appears: growth is slow, but ruin is rapid. It is one of the laws of the universe. If there were no collapses, nothing would ever change.

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(1) It was a conversation with Dmitry Orlov that led me to develop a mathematical model of the “Seneca Effect:” “Growth is slow, but ruin is rapid.” The fall of the Soviet Union was one of the best examples of this effect.

(2) The geniuses at the top of the European government seem to think that 35 member states by 2030 will be better than the current 27 ones. It is like measuring a person’s health on the basis of the idea that fatter is better.

(3) There are 27 EU member states, but only 24 official languages. It is because i) Luxembourg wisely refrained from asking for Luxembourgish to be an official EU language, ii) Cyprus uses Greek and Turkish — the latter is not supposed to be an official language, and iii) Germany and Austria both use German.

(4) They couldn’t even create a decent European flag. The one we have now looks like it was drawn by a team of nematodes to represent a cheese pizza gone blue after having been attacked by molds.