Forced Long EU meetings tend to create bad decisions

Forget Nobel Peace Prize, EU launches summit warfare

By Luke Baker | Reuters – 2 hrs 58 mins ago

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  Reuters/Reuters - An European Union flag flutters outside of the European Parliament in Brussels October 12, 2012. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union may have won the Nobel Peace Prize this year, but to many EU leaders, officials, diplomats and even journalists, it can feel more like a torture chamber.

Increasingly, Europe is governed at night by leaders in an advanced state of exhaustion, disregarding scientific evidence that this can lead to bad decisions, or non-decisions.

Over the past three years, the EU has held 25 summits to try to tackle its debt crisis and related economic turmoil, with few of those meetings ending before 3 or 4 a.m. -- usually after 12 hours or more of near-fruitless negotiation.

Add to that more than 40 finance ministers' meetings -- the most recent of which ended at 5 a.m. on Wednesday, again without agreement -- and it is easy to see how a set of institutions designed to foster peace and stability in Europe can end up delivering frustration, angst and head-numbing pain.
"I'll put it this way: I woke up at 5 a.m. or 5.30 a.m. yesterday and we ended in the morning around 4 a.m.," Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico complained after the last, largely unsuccessful summit in October.
"This is how all of us operate, we adopt very serious decisions under pressure," he said, referring to the EU's increasingly weary heads of state and government.

The EU's 27 leaders gathered for another summit on Thursday and Friday, this time to try to hammer out an agreement on around 1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) of spending over the next seven years.

It promises to be a bruising clash of national interests rather than the model of reconciliation and harmony commended by the Nobel committee, although it will still be "jaw, jaw" rather than "war, war".
Gatherings to negotiate the long-term budget only happen every 6 or 7 years and are notorious for running over deadline and for being extremely hard-nosed and ill-tempered affairs.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair described his experience of it in 2005 as the most difficult negotiation he handled while in office -- tougher even than the 1998 Northern Ireland peace talks that led to the Good Friday agreement.
Already EU officials are warning that these budget talks could run into Saturday and Sunday -- making it what is known in diplomatic circles as a "four-shirt" summit.
Staff at the European Council in Brussels, where EU leaders meet, have been told to be ready to work into Saturday at least. British Prime Minister David Cameron has cleared his schedule for the entire weekend, a spokesman said. French President Francois Hollande has done the same.

Journalists -- around 1,500 of whom are accredited to cover the meeting -- took up residence in the vast glass and steel entrance hall on Thursday morning and will stay encamped there until a deal is done, or negotiations break down.

The effect on the EU's public image among its 500 million citizens is unedifying.

"It's not exactly glamorous and some would say it's downright torture," said one EU diplomat, a veteran of at least 30 EU summits. "Everyone gets extremely fed up."

Sweden has organized extra bedding for its diplomats to take a rest in their delegation room if necessary.

BAD-DECISION MAKING?
The larger issue, though, is whether the pressure-cooker atmosphere and endlessly drawn-out negotiating schedule is conducive to good decision-making.
Everyone knows that drivers should take a rest after four or five hours at the wheel to avoid accidents. Shouldn't the leaders of nation states take the same precaution lest they take a bad decision that might run their country off the road?
A study published by three academics in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States last year showed that a judge's willingness to grant parole can depend to a large extent on how tired he or she is and when they last ate.
The study examined more than 1,000 parole decisions made by experienced judges over a 10-month period. It found that the more decisions judges have to make, the more difficult it becomes to stay consistent -- they get decision fatigue.
"The theory determines that decision-making capacity is a limited resource, and when many decisions are made in sequence, the mental capacity diminishes," Professor Shai Danziger of Ben-Gurion University, one of the authors, said at the time.
That could be a lesson for EU leaders and the political advisers, diplomats and hangers-on who have to help them make the right decisions time and again for days in a row.
One experienced EU ambassador, a veteran of multiple foreign postings in high-pressure places, said a lesson could be drawn from how Israel handles Middle East talks.

When the Oslo peace accords were being negotiated with the Palestinians in the mid-1990s, Israel would change its negotiating team every six hours or so to avoid fatigue and the risk of mistakes.

"No one can negotiate at full capacity for more than six hours at a time, you just can't concentrate that long," the ambassador said. "They wanted to make sure they had a fresh team that was at its sharpest."

China has employed similar tactics in business and trade negotiations, officials say.

By contrast, EU leaders will have at least 12 straight hours of negotiation on each of the next two days and more if the meeting drags on into the weekend.

And if that isn't enough, there's another meeting of finance ministers starting on Monday evening.

(Additional reporting by Martin Santa in Bratislava and Charlie Dunmore in Brussels; Writing by Luke Baker; Editing by Paul Taylor)

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  Forget Nobel Prize, the EU is contentious
  Honored this year with the Peace Prize, the European Union is nonetheless in a tortured economic state.
  
  
  
  
  This might be something to think about regarding our own fiscal cliff. If forced meetings until 5am or longer are creating bad decisions in the European Union what makes you think that doing the same here is going to create a different result here in the U.S. ?
  
  
  It is like taking a family and telling them all they are going bankrupt and they are going to lose their house and letting them think about that for a week or a month and then forcing them into a negotiation to see what they can do to salvage something of their lives. This kind of negotiation is never productive at this level. Another example might be to be a family hit by Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy and having their house destroyed. If you didn't have flood insurance you have lost everything and unless you have a really great source of savings or your retirement IRA or a friend that will lend you the money, you really have no place to live. When negotiations get like they are in Greece or something like that there really aren't any useful decisions to be made except for individual survival. Because there are no group survival decisions left in that situation.
  
  
  You have to take this to another level entirely and likely to an individual level of survival after serious discussions of group survival break down. In fact, during such a discussion it becomes obvious to everyone that there just aren't any good decisions for the group to be made anymore.
  
  
  And this tends to be pretty horrific for everyone. Because if there are no good group decisions to be made that make any sense, you can be sure that bad decisions for everyone are on their way. This is also one of the problems with the U.S. fiscal cliff because any decision made likely will reduce the economic well being of the middle class and the poor in the U.S. So, this will not be acceptable to anyone. The other decision to be made is that less money will go to the military.
  
  
  If you combine both of these things (which any balanced approach would) no one will be happy and there could be rioting in the streets much like Greece the last couple of years even here in the U.S. , in addition to many locations in the European Union once people find out about the bad decisions being made. When there isn't enough money to make good decisions then only bad decisions are possible. This might be an economic constant for nations in the free world at this point.
  
  
  There is a saying for situations like this: "Every Man for himself!" This is an unfortunate statement but also true in some real life situations in life.
  
  
  What are the main causes of this type of problem in the free world? "There are too many people on earth to feed with the present world infrastructure in place. This causes panic in those not being fed so governments fall. Globalization has ended the free world's monopoly on education, production, and shipping of everything. Global Warming is damaging the infrastructure of whole nations with storms like Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Katrina, the long drought through about 25 states this last spring and summer, as well as various droughts and floods and hurricanes and cyclone damage throughout the world the last 20 or so years."
  
  
  So, though equality for many or all on earth has been or is being achieved, this same equality for all is damaging the bulwarks of free world stability which allow this equality to continue here on earth without creating fascist or other dictatorships to create order. But, if governments return to warlord or fascist dictatorships human rights will be lost, hopefully not permanently.
  
  
  So, on one level there is something to be happy about which is there is more equality of education and of becoming a part of the middle class on earth than ever before. So then the problem becomes: "How do we create stability here on earth with the new problems like Global Warming, Globalization and overpopulation which is destroying all other forms of life on earth except humans? Without a balanced ecosystem in place, can humans continue to survive under these circumstances? Do they want to?" These are the questions humans need to ask themselves the next few hundred years into the future in order to have enough quality of life to choose to survive.