Sweden became NATO’s newest member on Thursday (7 March 2024), upon depositing its instrument of accession to the North Atlantic Treaty with the Government of the United States in Washington DC. With Sweden’s accession, NATO now counts 32 countries among its members.
I blame the fact they built all these institutions with no clause to expel members, or which require total unanimity to do so. They really bought in to the whole “end of history” thing, I guess.
Yeah, this is an interesting element. Historically, allowing all members a veto, while also having no way to expel a member, means that any such institution is liable to outside meddling. The classic example is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberum_veto – in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, any noble could veto anything. So all it took was buying a few nobles and it shattered.
Apparently, based on that Wikipedia article, they ended up making a new version with less strict veto rules, called the confederated sejm, which is also where I expect all these Western institutions to go eventually. TIL.