The data had been collected after Germany put pressure on the EU’s External Action Service to try to nail down reliable data on each member state’s contributions.
Some say it was out of a sense of frustration in Germany, which has so far contributed €17bn (£14bn) with another €7.4bn committed for 2024, that other member states, particularly the large economies of France, Italy and Spain, were not doing enough.
Hmm.
thinks
Not really an immediate issue, but that’s actually a role for the EU institutions to have that might be able to bear some interesting fruit. The EU is a confederation of sovereign states, and there are things, like foreign policy or intelligence, on which there is very limited integration.
And not every member might want to share full information with other countries.
But if you can’t share some information, then you can’t make some decisions that might depend on the output of that information, like what the average contribution is.
However, it might be possible for all countries to share information with a trusted entity – like some designated person at the EU – who would then report aggregate information or information in a way processed so as to make specific decisions possible.
If even that isn’t possible, there are even some ways in which calculations on secret data can be performed without the information being input being disclosed to any party at all.
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