I'm all for European unity, but if a country is only half-committed to joining the EU, it probably should not be allowed to join under the assumption that EU support will continue to grow.
You could say this for pretty much every important decision in every democracy ever. It's seldom things get settled with percentage support starting with anything other than a 5.
It's a form of institutional hysteresis. If a major change can get implemented by a simple majority, it has zero noise margin. If it requires (say) two thirds, then it has a noise margin of 33 percentage points.
I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.
I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible. The question asked was:
> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.
The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
> There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.
It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.
> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).
I think the ideal solution in an ideal world would be to do ranked choice voting between the main choices that could be reasonably negotiated and remain. So voters could pick between EEA, Canada-like, remain, etc all at the same time.
Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.
If you want to split the Leave vote that way you would have also needed to split the Remain vote by asking people what Remain means: something usually presented as obvious by Remainers but it's by no means so. For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).
You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.
> For instance if the UK had remained and the EU had then announced all the opt-outs were voided, that would have been a major change but well within the remit of what was possible in a Remain scenario (without the threat of leaving what stops the EU doing whatever it wants to a member state?).
Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.
The EU institutions have done many things they weren't allowed to do under the treaties, so that argument just wouldn't have landed. An example of that was human rights law, which was originally never intended to be law and wasn't written tightly enough to be so. The UK and Poland obtained a supposedly water-tight opt out written in plain language, which the ECJ then simply voided. There are other such cases.
It was deliberately so, Dave wanted to be PM at lot and gave the Eurosceptics of the Tory party everything they wanted.
A simple question for a massively complex problem.
An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).
Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.
Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.
> I'm still stunned that anyone voted "leave". Even if you were strongly in favor of leaving the EU that particular referendum was terrible.
Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.
Voting for this once in a lifetime opportunity was smart; maybe the smartest ever. The smartest people in the UK voted for brexit. You will totally see in a few years when they made Britain great again!
I can see no reason at all to suppose that this might be the case. Quite the reverse given current events and the determination of the current administration.
> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.
In Australia, a constitutional referendum requires a double majority to pass: both a majority nationally, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states (so at least 4 out of 6).
Unlike Australia, the UK has no written constitution, and is a unitary state with devolution instead of a federation. Still, Brexit was undeniably a constitutional-level issue, and taking the constituent countries as the analog to states, they could have adopted the same "double majority" rule in the UK for the Brexit referendum. And if they had, the referendum would have failed: it got a majority nationwide, but in only two out of four constituent countries (England and Wales but not Scotland and Northern Ireland).
A big problem the UK has – which Brexit has arguably only worsened – is its extreme lopsidedness – one of the constituent countries (England) is over 80% of the population, so a big enough English majority on any issue can override the will of the other three constituent countries. And yet there are essentially no constitutional provisions to protect against this. Adopting a "double majority" for the Brexit referendum would have been a small step in the direction of doing so, at least by establishing a precedent.
[0] The fact that it was legally non-binding is not an issue: the legislation could have simply specified the conditions under which the referendum would be "deemed to pass", and require some appropriate government official to make a formal declaration as to whether those conditions had been met or not.
In 1973, the UK was much closer to a pure unitary state – there was no Scottish Parliament, no Welsh Parliament; the existing devolution in Northern Ireland (the Parliament of Northern Ireland) had just been abolished the previous year and the attempts to reinstate it in 1974 and 1982 proved to be short-lived failures. By 2016 there was a devolved Scottish Parliament, a devolved Welsh Assembly (designated a Parliament in 2020), and a devolved Northern Ireland assembly.
I think the evolution of devolution (pardon the pun) is a recognition that the UK needed stronger protections for Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish rights against the English supermajority, and a "double majority" for constitutional-level national referendums would be a step further in that direction.
Wow I never thought about the "joining" stage of this whole brexit topic. If that's the case then that adds a whole new level of dysfunction to "democracy" as a concept.
It seems like democracy really is an experiment representative of our hope of human cooperation, and yet I'm constantly reminded that the way we actually implement and enact is very far from that ideal.
In fairness entering was done without a referendum, and could not have won one. (The government can and should make policy decisions without punting them to a referendum, of course).
Yes, there really needs to be some margin for really big and costly changes. One of the main reasons for Brexit being such a clusterfuck was that, once the going got tough, majority support evaporated and the exit was pushed through by what was effectively a minority government at that point, with parliament trying to make their lives as difficult as possible. It could have been less painful overall if there had been more robust agreement to go ahead with it, and therefore some degree of cooperation. Maybe 2/3 majority is overkill, but a 60-40 split should be a requirement for serious changes to the future of a country.
> once the going got tough, majority support evaporated
It's likely that majority support would have evaporated as soon as any leave deal was reached. No deal would have satisfied all the different reasons people voted leave.
Indeed; no deal (including the "no deal" option of leaving with no deal, and also the option of having another referendum) was acceptable to Westminster, which was why May was forced to leave office.
Only Johnson was able to cut that Gordion Knot, albeit by lying to people to their face.
To be fair, Parliament forced a delay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020, to ensure that there was some sort of agreement in place. And then it passed because there was a one-year transitionary period until Jan 2021 during which the UK stayed in the single market.
And now we've voted in a PM who promises building closer ties with the EU. And eventually the generation that rabidly voted to leave will disappear. Progress marches on slowly.
I live in hope that I will see the UK, or its constituent countries, return to the EU; but events may overtake such dreams, and it would be sensible for the EU to require a supermajority of the candidate nations to be in favour of joining, just to reduce the chances of things like Brexit from happening in the future.
Yeah. I'm astonished that people aren't looking at the EU and AV referendums and thinking that we need to drastically overhaul how we conduct them in future. Guidelines have been published with some pretty obvious improvements, like the sitting government not campaigning for one side.
> I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.
The problem with not proceeding following a "50% + epsilon" is you're then suddenly ignoring the majority of the electorate which has its own political backlash.
The trick is to not have a referendum unless the outcome likely to be definitive. This is actually codified in the Good Friday agreement as a condition for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to call an Irish unification referendum.
This is a great explanation. I wasn't previously familiar with these concepts and this is exactly the point I wanted to make. If only a 50.1% consensus is needed at one point in time (either by political will or referendum) to join the EU, the EU could end up with a group of members half-committed to membership. It is then much harder for such a body to make difficult or controversial decisions if members are constantly on the cusp of leaving, and easier for members with lower EU approval rates (such as Hungary) to extract concessions far in excess of their relative power.
That is an artificial problem created by the EU's structure and ideology though. There's no reason collaboration between nations must be funneled through an organization that sees itself as an alternate government, and which likes to present everything as all-or-nothing. There could easily be independent agreements on independent topics which would avoid such issues, but this would not meet the ideological goals of the EU to replace the existing nation states and governments, so they don't do it.
Maybe surprising, but based on the latest Eurobarometer, the citizens of the following countries trust the EU less than Hungarians (even if Hungary is just below EU average): Germany, Czechia, Greece, Cyprus, Slovenia, France (in this order ...)
While the stance of Hungary, Slovenia, Cyprus and Greece is not much relevant in relation to the future of the EU, regarding Germany and France, that's a bit more alarming...
Nevertheless, the loud HU government propaganda unfortunately has its clear effect on the Hungarian public opinion - Hungarian people trust the EU less every year, and also, everything else, including democracy in general.
https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/3215
The whole thing was a bit of a mess. A good analogy I heard was you have a bunch of people in a room with one TV and have a vote whether to change the channel and 50% vote yes because they are fed up with the current one. But no one has specified which channel to change it to. After the vote they check out all the channels and find they are even worse than the first but can't change back because that would be "betraying the will of the people" or whatever nonsense.
The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?
The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states, which is a problem if you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland).
> The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states
We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.
The Qualified Majority Vote has been being used in increasing scope of policy areas for many years.
QMV was part of stuff from the 1986 SEA, and got a major boost in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, since it was recognised as practically being necessary to make any progress towards (and within) the Single Market.
Yes, not much progress since - apart from Russia, China and the USA increasing pressure... I suppose they support our federalist project and try to motivate us !
The requirement for unanimous voting has not existed for more than a decade. It was removed in response to the tactical shenanigans of Visegrad countries.
In practice most decisions are still technically unanimous, because it looks better politically and it doesn't cost anything more (since a majority can simply pass whatever they want, they are not forced to concede anything to the obstructionists; with the newer rules, it's smarter for any isolated bloc to immediately trade any publicly-stated opposition for any minor favour they can get).
This is the reason why Orban, despite all his bombast, has no influence whatsoever on the actual decisions; but also why German resistance against overdue fiscal reforms has basically melted.
>you have a country with wildly different ideas than others (now Hungary, a few years ago Poland)
Why single out Hungary and Poland specifically? Is it worse than when Austria, Netherlands, France, etc. have a different opinion to the rest of the union and torpedo progress just to pander to the right wingers in their country?
Leaving aside personal preferences regarding the previous Polish and current Hungarian governments, the electoral processes are generally viewed as fair regarding the absence of major direct fraud related to vote counting. However, the fact is, that the state resources were used by the ruling parties to promote themselves.
The removal of the former Polish government was largely driven by public disapproval of state fund mismanagement. In Hungary, a key element of the current government's platform appears to be the promotion of national identity, including ties with diaspora communities formed after WWI (The Treaty of Trianon), potentially with implications for future "geopolitical alignments" (the likelihood of which is debatable).
These results, while influenced by the d'Hondt system, reflect the sentiment of the voting population, which is a democratic process, in principle. The ruling methods are not 100% democratic though (rule of majority with respect for minority rights)
However, the opinions of my "more Western friends" on those topics "diverge from on-the-ground realities".
Still, Hungary and Poland are consistently brought in as the bad apples for opposing mass migration quotas, and recently Hungary for the milder tone towards Russia, but it's ignored that everyday plenty of countries oppose many other resolutions.
That's hilarious (not), given that so much discourse is about just how much democracy should be shaved off to get the desirable Democratic(tm) results (Supermajority for Brexit! Ban AFD! et al.).
How are they authoritans? Do you just look at the optics, or do you look at the damage done to the EU in monetary terms? Because those are two different things?
60% is a very huge number, not understanding the "only" wording.
Also, as an European I know virtually no people opposing EU membership, when there are, it's generally less educated people thinking that the economy or whatever would be better.
As an European, I know many who oppose EU membership, but most educated people would not express it publicly because they are harrassed if they express their opinion -- supposedly only "less educated people" -- i.e. idiots -- support it.
It appears that opposing EU membership is kind of a taboo, and many educated people are afraid to express their opinion on the subject. Which tells you all you need to know about the legitimacy of EU.
Why do you ask? One often encounters an argument that if I cannot make up a rationale that you consider as reasonable, then it means I am wrong. The problem is that the polarization means that neither side can rationally understand the argument of the opposing side. The fact that you don't consider the argument of these people as reasonable does not prove anything.
They don't want to become like USA, that is the easiest argument. We see how USA went the slippery slope of removing states rights and expanding federal power, people in the EU don't want that.
To prevent that from happening there needs to be a resistance to EU expanding its power, and the most effective way countries can do that is to threaten to leave.
The US seems like a success model if anything. Wonder how much better would be the lives of Californians or Louisianans if they were their own country.
The UK complained at length about the EU for decades including educated people so much so that they decided to leave and are now out.
Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.
I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.
But polls do tell that it's generally less educated people having worst feelings about the EU.
It also happened with the Brexit, where it was mostly less educated workers and farmers supporting Brexit, exactly the demographic that got hurt the most by it.
Farmers by and large supported Brexit in line with the rest of the country, especially once you factor in age.
The single clearest indicator was age. Old people - million who have died since 2016 - voted out, young people who have to live with the devious voted remain.
Not true, poorer, lower educated and rural population predominantly voted for Brexit.
> University graduates and those with higher qualifications predominantly voted to remain. Blue-collar workers, particularly in traditional industrial areas and manual labor jobs, overwhelmingly supported Brexit.
Reasons included economic discontent, perceived competition from EU migrants, and a desire for national sovereignty.
As usual, it's only people that have very low capacity to understand a complex world, those that are easier to sell dreams about "sovereignity" that end up screwing their own lives.
Somehow the same happens in the US where conservatives can win even while openly promoting policies against workers (but it's always easy to promise more manufacturing jobs and america first).
Could such causation be proven, if it existed? I don't think so.
In addition to contemptuous elitism and Trump, there is also agreement that the US is very divided.
Also, as the posts above suggest, people who oppose people who oppose the EU, do not meet these people with the same proportion they appear to exist according to polls. Which matches my experience that educated people are afraid to express their opposition to the EU.
Still does not prove causality, because causality on such an issue cannot be proven.
You need to look into second-order effects in order to get a clue what is happening. First second-order clue is that people are afraid to express their opinion. The second one is that opinion is very polarized and people are divided on the issue into "us" and "them", i.e. divided.
No, Trumpism is caused by manipulation of public opinion by populist and authoritarian politicans and media.
One of their manipulations is to promote the dismissal of expert opinion as "elitism" and that the "elites" are contemptuous of "the ordinary American".
It's bullshit and always has been factually incorrect.
So what is the approval of staying in USA for the states? Approval for a specific politician will of course usually be lower than approval for the union as a whole.
Most EU countries banned certain categories of weapons like cluster munitions and antipersonnel mines, and as a result were unable to provide them to Ukraine.
russia had no such qualms. Fortunately non-EU countries were able to supply Ukraine with these useful weapons: the EU was dependent on non-EU countries for its security.
Had russia attacked a NATO country of the EU directly, said country would have been at a disadvantage.
There have been reports of experiments with autonomous drones in the russia-Ukraine war.
If the EU bans AI for military uses and our adversaries do not, I am afraid someday we will regret our mistake. But it will be too late.
> Most EU countries banned certain categories of weapons like cluster munitions and antipersonnel mines, and as a result were unable to provide them to Ukraine
The hypothetical war in Europe would not be fought the same way it is fought in Eastern Ukraine, where anywhere between 30-60% of inhabitants are ethnically Russian, depending on locale, and Russia goes out of its way to not just methodically flatten things the way Israel flattened Palestine, which, by the way, is something they can do given their near endless supply of guided bombs. That's why you only have ~23K civilian casualties there after 3 years of war, about half of them attributable to Ukrainian strikes. Absolutely nobody in Moscow would care about collateral damage in e.g. Warsaw or Berlin. Nor for that matter anyone in Warsaw or Berlin would care about collateral damage in Moscow. So if this war were to actually break out, it'd spin out of control within weeks, and end with a full nuclear exchange, decimating Russia, and completely destroying Europe, which is much more densely populated.
Have you seen what Mariupol looked like right after it was taken? Or what Bakhmut looks like today?
The reason why Russia doesn't do this to Ukraine as a whole is because it is fighting this war with the ultimate goal of occupying and annexing Ukraine, so why would it destroy valuable resources like infrastructure and people needed to maintain it unless it serves some other goal? OTOH when it does serve some other goal (e.g. actually advancing the frontline), they have zero qualms about doing the same exact thing Israel does. I mean, Russia doesn't care all that much about lives of its own soldiers, given the kinds of tactics routinely used.
How Europe would be treated would similarly depend on what the goals of the war from Russian perspective would be.
You don't understand - that was the _minimal_ amount of damage typically inflicted in urban warfare of this intensity. Mariupol itself wasn't even carpet bombed because there were a lot of locals hiding in the basements. Nor was Bakhmut, for largely the same reason. Look at what we did in Mosul or Raqqa to see how we'd approach this. Flatten first, then move in. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/war-torn-...
The point is that Russia was entirely willing to engage in urban warfare of this intensity regardless of what it does to civilians. And just so that we're clear about what intensity that is, Mariupol has seen a larger percentage of buildings destroyed than Stalingrad did back in WW2.
Carpet bombing is tricky when your planes get blown out of the sky on a regular basis and your industry can't replace them as easily as it can replace artillery shells. That's the main reason why they're using glide bombs and missiles instead.
Oh, and you don't need to look at Mosul or Raqqa to see other examples, either. Grozny, in either the first or the second Chechen war, is a nice illustration of how Russia fight wars.
This is an outrageously blatant lie. Of course, Russia is trying its best to damage as much civil infrastructure as it can.
A quote: "The latest available assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government found that direct war damage in Ukraine had reached $152 billion as of December, 2023, with housing, transport, commerce and industry, energy and agriculture the worst-affected sectors." [1] By now, it should be over 200 billion.
The reasons why Russia failed to cause more damage have nothing to do with demoraphics, good will, or anything like that. After all, Russia sent to death hundreds of thousands of ITS OWN citizens. Had it cared about russian lives as much as you are trying to whitewash here, it would not have been fighting this war to begin with.
The real reasons why Russia has not caused more damage or killed more civilians, are, first, it has failed to achieve air superiority. Second, Ukraine, with the help of its allies, was able to set up more less effective air defense against missiles and drones.
"Nearly 12,000 missiles have been launched against Ukraine by Russia since this full-scale conflict started.
Some 80% of those have been intercepted by Ukraine." [2]
The number of drones must be comparable or higher.
The limited number of civilian casualties is easily explained by the number of refugees from Ukraine which is in the millions. Its definity not because Russia did not try too hard.
This is an unprecedentely low civilian casualty count for a conflict of this intensity and duration. Such high ratio of military to civilian casualties has not been observed since WW1.
I hope to see even more "stupid AI regulation" in the future, fingers crossed.
Recently I benefited from a "stupid regulation" mandating minimum Internet speeds carriers need to provide. How dare the policy makers interfere with the extortionate prices every single ISP in the market colluded to impose on the population. Muh liberty!
Plus the undemocratic law making process and the unelected EU commission that is an authoritarian institution without anyone keeping it in check. The DSA is a censorship law with an added backdoor (look up "emergency response" and its implications). And tethered caps are just annoying ;)
The European Parliament is elected every few years by citizens in all member states.
The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.
The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
It may be a little complicated, but it's all rooted in democratic processes. Please stick to the facts and keep the populistic anti-EU nationalistic propaganda to yourself.
(Every kid in the EU has been learning those basic facts in school for decades, making it surprising that this populist nonsense still catches on with so many people. I have an easier time forgivin non-EU folks, but even those should check the facts before claiming things.)
> The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.
> The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
I disagree. Successful elected government officials from member states aren't governing the EU Commission and Council. They're governing their own member states, where they are elected by the public.
Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.
Just look at the uninspiring Commissioners we've suffered over the last few years.
It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
> Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.
Von der Leyen was not appointed by bureaucrats.
> It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
That's nothing special in European voting systems. Various governments (regional or country wide) in Germany have small, but relatively stable majorities provided by coalitions. That's very different to the mostly two-party systems in the US or the UK.
The CDU is a large party, not a particular large "organization" in terms of full-time CDU employees. The bureaucracy of the CDU is in no way responsible for nominating/selecting the EU President of the Commission.
Ursula on der Leyen was 2019 supported by Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) as the future president of the EU commission. That's no secret. Macron also supported her. The European Council then nominated Ursula on der Leyen and she was accepted by the European Parliament. The Parliament is directly elected the citizens of the European Union.
The election of her was kind of unfortunate, since it was signalled by parties that the election to the parliament will also find the proposed EU commission president. But that was not the case. Since a candidate was not found (various parties and governments were not happy with the proposed candidates), the European Council finally proposed Ursula von der Leyen, which then also got a majority in the parliament.
51.4% is a majority. You are free to disagree again, but that won't change the facts. You can just as easily disagree about gravity, evolution or climate change. Still won't change them.
Look, I don't like lots of things about the EU either. But the first step to being able to change sth is to acknowledge the facts. Claiming that von der Leyen wasn't democratically appointed is similar to Trump claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Not a great start.
That was always one of the issues with EU, and EEC before it, membership in the UK. There was no education as to the change in constitutional status, nor explanation of how the EEC (then EU) actually worked.
Most folks still had the view that UK Parliament was in charge, not really appreciating the change. That also applied to our MPs, hence the Factomane cases.
Now if there had bee proper education in the UK as to the impact of EEC and EU membership, possibly Brexit would not have happened.
From Chapter 6: 'The Inherently Undemocratic EU Democracy'
'A number of prominent public intellectuals put pen to paper to warn not only of a crisis of European democracy, but of a crisis of the very ‘political institution’ of democracy, and particularly its representative and liberal variants. Contemporary manifestations of the ‘hollowing out’ of democracy following the Eurocrisis have taken many forms and several contributions in this volume have dealt with various aspects of the phenomenon.'
' .... a crisis of the EU’s own democratic credentials. Even as they insisted on its purely economic character, commentators were quick to criticise the undemocratic form that the emergency EMU-related responses to the Eurocrisis came to assume, particularly at the European level, where not only parliamentary processes, but also the Treaties’ legal prescriptions, were systematically circumvented'.
The EU has certainly its issues, no doubt about it. They need to be pointed out and addressed for sure. We are not in disagreement there.
But the flat out denial that EU is in principle a democratic system is just a too simplistic view. It tends to be mostly touted by those populists who ultimately would like to see an authocratic state with themselves in charge.
I think it makes a lot more sense that there's a lot of (especially rich people and US folks) that desperately want EU to fail - either because they're deeply nationalist, see a profit motive or just hate foreigners.
Those will craft narratives that are patently untrue to drive their agenda.
The council, composed of representatives of governments elected in their own state, nominates the commission and proposes laws which are then voted by the parliament where deputies who have been directly elected by European sit. The parliament also confirms the commission.
The commissioners are appointed by their party - often the decisions are made by people who are not even directly elected themselves - and as such have no real accountability to the public. MEPs are slightly better but the overwhelming majority of them are "elected" via a party list system, which means that any individual can much more easily get elected by being popular with party bureaucrats than by being popular with the public that they supposedly represent. (But since the MEPs can't write laws, only vote on laws written by the commision, they're pretty irrelevant anyway).
Even an extremely unpopular commissioner is at no risk of being voted out. For many years the UK's representative was disgraced former disgraced former MP Peter *Mandelson, one of the most hated people in the country, who could never have won any remotely democratic contest.
Peter Mandelson*. Recently back in the headlines as he was just appointed as US ambassador.
I think it’s a stretch to call Mandelson “one of the most hated people in the country”. What did he do exactly? By this point I’m sure the average person has mostly forgotten that he exists.
You are right, however, about the lack of real democratic accountability in the EU. The EU commission is the place to “fail up” - it’s where politicians go after their democratic viability has run out at home and the voters boot them out.
> I think it’s a stretch to call Mandelson “one of the most hated people in the country”. What did he do exactly?
He had at least the image of a slimeball "spin doctor", seen as having control over the media and using it to control the narrative and cover up government wrongdoing. He was definitely publicly hated even before it emerged that he'd taken a bribe^Wundeclared interest-free loan from a person he was responsible for investigating. You're right that he's mostly forgotten nowadays.
Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).
I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.
Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country. Which generally means they're selected by the ruling party in that country.
> I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.
Huh? Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to) redouble the problem - you lose democratic accountability even at that lower level.
> Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country.
Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.
> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)
Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.
> It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists.
This is one of those "the law in its majestic equality" things. It's not practically possible to compete with the full-time political parties without being a full-time political party. And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.
> The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country
I get involved, more at a local level, but at a national level I vote, and occasionally I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable. Piss off your constituents enough and it doesn't matter how much the party likes you. Which is a system I'm very happy with, and something that's deeply missing from the EU.
> And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.
So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.
> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable
It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.
Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.
Not OP, but for starters, the referendum in my country about joining EU did not ask whether we should give our independence away to the EU. If people would have been told the actual goal, the referendum would have probably never passed. The EU is not a legitimate democracy.
