15 ms·

I absolutely see the advantages of having common standards, tariff agreements etc. to make trade across borders easier (i.e. something akin to the European Econ

by folli 10y ago

I absolutely see the advantages of having common standards, tariff agreements etc. to make trade across borders easier (i.e. something akin to the European Economic Area). I'm however also a proponent of federalism, because I believe that for a democracy to truly work it is necessary that the people still feel responsible for their votes and their decisions. This is something which I'm missing in centralised and unitary states after they reach a certain size and heterogenity. I'm aware that the European Union is not (yet) a unitary state, but it is certainly shifting away democratic power from a more regional democratic system to a centralised government. I agree that the UK's decision to leave the EU is not an optimal one (and potentially costly), but I believe it's long term the right one, given the current state. An alternative would be to change the EU within, to force it to focus on its core competencies (which I mainly see as a trade union, and leave most of the political decisions to its nation states); however I'm not sure that this would happen without any big bang, such as the Brexit might have been.

Svip 10y ago
But the EU does have a directly elected parliament? So where's the lack of democracy in the EU?
- folli 10y ago
  My point is that the more people feel detached from the political process, the less responsible they feel to take an active part in the process. This is why I believe that a regional government is to be preferred over a centralistic government. I'm aware that not all problems can be solved on a regional level, but those that can, should. This is especially true on a cultural more diverse landscape such as Europe compared to e.g. the US. Regarding your second question, lack of democracy: one thing that comes to mind is the lack of binding referendums and initiatives, as it happens e.g. in Switzerland on a regular basis.
  - zelos 10y ago
    Subsidiarity is one of the founding tenets of the EU: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html Whether that's true in practice is a matter of opinion.
  - sangnoir 10y ago
    Is there any that evidence the optimal administrative size for people not to feel "detached from the political process" is at state level? Why not further devolve sovereignty further to the british isles, regions, cities or counties? The absurdity of it all is that the Tories say "It's good to leave the union" when the subject is Brexit, while also saying "It's not good to leave the union" when the subject is Indyref 2
    - mstade 10y ago
      Not to mention the hypocrisy of voting to remain and then championing the effort to leave. UK politics is so broken right now.
      - nfbush 10y ago
        The poll was legally binding, they had to leave. Not that politics isn't broken ofc. EDIT I was wrong
        eyko 10y ago
        The referendum was not legally binding.
        djmobley 10y ago
        It would have been untenable, however, for a government to defy the will of the people as expressed in the referendum.
        afandian 10y ago
        I have no desire to re-hash this particular argument, but the margin, 48/52 was very small. Very close to 50/50. And the turnout wasn't perfect. I've heard that only something like 30% of the eligible voters voted to leave. There was no "will of the people". The people were undecided.
- pluma 10y ago
  The often cited claim that the EU is undemocratic stems from a difference of opinion what "democratic" actually means. First of all: there is barely any nation that is truly democratic in the historic sense of the word. Most democracies are actually representational systems: citizens don't vote on every single issue, they elect someone to represent them and vote in their name. Who each representative actually represents and how their votes are weighed varies but this is what almost all so-called democracies in existence have in common. Additionally representatives may sometimes again elect other representatives who vote in their name in another group, or they may elect solitary rulers who act in their name. Keep in mind, this is a gross (and incorrect) simplification, but these are all things that happen in systems most people would call democratic. Specifically: The European Parliament is elected in a way most people would agree can be described as democratic: every EU citizen gets a vote. The MEPs are directly elected. This is pretty straightforward and not unlike how national governments are generally elected. The MEPs elect the President of the European Parliament. Depending on what your national government's elections look like this may also be perfectly normal and expected. There's also the European Commission. This is where things get slightly weirder: the Commission consists of one person per member nation but they are bound by oath to the EU rather than their own nation. One of them is the President of the European Commission who is proposed by the European Council and then confirmed by the European Parliament. The Council then nominates the other commissioners which are approved by the President of the European Commission. The European Council in turn consists of all heads of state of the member nations plus the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission (but they don't get to vote). The President of the European Council in turn is elected by the European Council. So in other words there are basically two groups of people both ultimately elected by EU citizens: As a EU citizens you get a direct vote for the European Parliament, which elects the President of the European Parliament. Additionally you (presumably) get a direct vote in your own national elections and your elected national governments gets to send its head of state (or a representative, plus maybe some non-voting attendees) to the European Council, which elects the President of the European Council. Finally both the European Council and European Parliament (i.e. the representatives of the citizens and the representatives of the member nation governments) together elect the European Commission. Yes, it's complicated (but in honesty all governments are if you try to understand them in detail) but I can't for the life of me see why you would call them undemocratic in comparison to any other "democratic" system. I think "undemocratic" is just a shorthand for "subject to the will of other people than my own nation's citizens", which is the entire point of the EU and the only way you can have international organisations. The complaint makes much more sense if you consider that the perspective of the EU critics that usually make this complaint isn't "we're part of the EU" but "the EU tries to tell us what to do". It's not so different from Americans who complain about "the government" because they see their ultimate authority at the state level than the federal level.
- dnautics 10y ago
  The eu's Parliament has de facto no power and all of the authority rests with the European commission, which is an unelected entity.
  - bengale 10y ago
    All of the authority? You've been misinformed.
    - dnautics 10y ago
      I apologize, I should not have been hyperbolic.
  - ricw 10y ago
    This is entirely false. Every legislation coming from the EU commission has to be approved by the parliament.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    You're right it's unelected but there's much more complexion to it than that: >Selecting the team >The president-elect selects potential Vice-Presidents and Commissioners based on suggestions from EU countries. The list of nominees has to be approved by all EU heads of state or government, meeting in the European Council. >Each nominee must appear before the parliamentary committee with responsibility for his or her proposed portfolio. Committee members then vote on the nominee’s suitability for the position. Once the 27 nominees have been endorsed, Parliament as a whole votes whether or not to approve the entire team. Following Parliament's vote, the Commissioners are appointed by the European Council. Accountability >The European Commission is held democratically accountable by the European Parliament, which has the right to approve and dismiss the entire political leadership of the Commission. >The European Commission is also accountable for putting the EU budget into practice. Every year, the Parliament chooses to give (or not) its blessing to the European Commission on the way it has managed the EU budget. This process is called the discharge. The Parliament bases its decision on several reports from the European Court of Auditors and from the European Commission, including the annual management and performance report for the EU budget. https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-union/organisational-structure/political-leadership_en#how-the-commission-is-appointed https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-union/organisationa...
- Chaebixi 10y ago
  > But the EU does have a directly elected parliament? So where's the lack of democracy in the EU? I'm not a European, but could it be that the bloc has gotten so large that an individual's vote is so diluted that it feels like it's not a democracy? Especially considering the number of different nationalities and language-groups of various sizes that are supposed to be represented by that one body. I think federalism is a good idea because, at the end of the day, I want to be ruled by a government that represents my community, not some abstract mass of people.
  - djmobley 10y ago
    Also note that EU bureaucracy is utterly bewildering to anyone who does not spend their whole life following it. The average British person has no idea how the EU works. They don't know what the different bodies are. They don't know who their representative(s) are. They don't know how to make their voices heard. Maybe a third of people vote in the elections, and they don't really know what they're voting for. What kind of democracy is that?
    - ben_w 10y ago
      Sounds a bit like the British democracy to me. How many Brits know that bishops sit in the house of Lords? Some know, sure, but many? How many of us know what the Privy Council is and who the members are? What powers are purely ceremonial and which have teeth? Why can't MPs resign like normal people? How and why there is judicial independence from parliament seems to be news to the Secretary of State for Justice, if she doesn't know how it works what hope do the general population have? Even how laws are passed seems to surprise people — "The Lords might disagree with us? Abolish them!" — to say nothing of the difference between primary and secondary legislation. The UK has a constitution, but it's not written down in one place for convenience and understanding, it's spread over time-worn ritual, over the Queen's Speech and slamming doors in the face of Black Rod.
      - mjevans 10y ago
        Maybe it's time for that last one to change. Refactoring a system in a well-intentioned way can optimize a lot of inefficient and ineffective approaches and gives an opportunity to bring things that may be scattered about in to locality for increased comprehension and decreased error in modification.
- paulajohnson 10y ago
  Much of the work of the EU is done by the European Commission, which consists of one senior appointee from each member state. On one hand this is clearly not particularly democratic, but on the other hand it gives the member governments an avenue to make policy that doesn't go via their population, which is why none of the member governments wants to change it.
- nicky0 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Euro...
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
rayiner 10y ago
What's at stake here is more fundamental than federalism: it's self determination. Throughout history, discrete groups have waged wars of independence to ensure that they can have a government that reflects their shared history, culture, and values. My family is from Bangladesh, which fought a war to separate from Pakistan over cultural/linguistic differences. In another example, Israel is engaged in an existential battle to ensure the existence of a sovereign nation for its people. In Europe, exactly the opposite is happening. People are being prodded to give up their sovereignty to a supra-national bureaucracy, and to be assimilated into a hetrogenous body politic with hundreds of millions of other people with which they share little other than said bureaucracy. People in the U.K. were very rightfully afraid of what that could lead to and decided they wanted to get off that train.
- selimthegrim 10y ago
  That's not what Dominic Cummings gave as his reasoning. If you read his manifesto, he cites falling educational standards and scientific and technical competitiveness and cherry-picks a few mathematicians and scientists to say so, which is ridiculous given the situation of JET, Euratom, and the expressed wishes of the vast majority of practicing scientists.
- zekkius 10y ago
  Yes, humans are inclined to form tribes and to fear the other, just like our primitive ancestors. It's little reason to justify such division today, and especially not to participate in mass murder to achieve it.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    > It's little reason to justify such division today, and especially not to participate in mass murder to achieve it. Not at all! To use my Bangladesh example. Bangladesh was founded in 1971 as a secular republic. Pakistan thereafter veered towards theocracy, e.g. adopting Sharia law for criminal proceedings in 1976. Subsequent events have slowly chipped away at Bangladeshi secularism over the years, but had they remained with Pakistan it would have been a lost hope. And as for tribalism being obsolete, I don't agree. There are hundreds of millions of people who think I should be executed for leaving the religion I was born into: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/01/64-percent-of-muslims-in-egypt-and-pakistan-support-the-death-penalty-for-leaving-islam/?utm_term=.20140ab55af2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/01.... Do you want those folks voting on the laws that govern you? If not, you're not arguing against "tribalism," you're just arguing about where the tribal lines should be drawn.
davedx 10y ago
> it is certainly shifting away democratic power from a more regional democratic system to a centralised government. The Treaty of Lisbon indicates otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon How is the EU centralising further?
simonh 10y ago
A primarily trade union with most political decisions made by nation states is exactly what the EU is. The failure of the Euro has also pretty much guaranteed it will stay that way too.
- rayiner 10y ago
  The crucial difference is that the E.U. can impose regulations on citizens of member states that have the force of law, and those laws override national law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union). The U.S. has a similar principal (the Supremacy Clause), and in the long term that resulted in the gutting of states as sovereign entities.
  - simonh 10y ago
    It can't do that without the agreement of the states though. Directives are created at the direction of the European Council, made up of the heads of state of every EU member state. US states don't have veto powers over federal legislation, but EU states do. Hence Britain never joined the Schengen Agreement and kept its own currency. We had the best of both worlds and threw it away.
barrkel 10y ago
The EU isn't about trade; it was never about trade. It was about peace.

by folli 10y ago

Svip 10y ago

But the EU does have a directly elected parliament? So where's the lack of democracy in the EU?

folli 10y ago
My point is that the more people feel detached from the political process, the less responsible they feel to take an active part in the process. This is why I believe that a regional government is to be preferred over a centralistic government. I'm aware that not all problems can be solved on a regional level, but those that can, should. This is especially true on a cultural more diverse landscape such as Europe compared to e.g. the US. Regarding your second question, lack of democracy: one thing that comes to mind is the lack of binding referendums and initiatives, as it happens e.g. in Switzerland on a regular basis.
- zelos 10y ago
  Subsidiarity is one of the founding tenets of the EU: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/subsidiarity.html Whether that's true in practice is a matter of opinion.
- sangnoir 10y ago
  Is there any that evidence the optimal administrative size for people not to feel "detached from the political process" is at state level? Why not further devolve sovereignty further to the british isles, regions, cities or counties? The absurdity of it all is that the Tories say "It's good to leave the union" when the subject is Brexit, while also saying "It's not good to leave the union" when the subject is Indyref 2
  - mstade 10y ago
    Not to mention the hypocrisy of voting to remain and then championing the effort to leave. UK politics is so broken right now.
    - nfbush 10y ago
      The poll was legally binding, they had to leave. Not that politics isn't broken ofc. EDIT I was wrong
      - eyko 10y ago
        The referendum was not legally binding.
        djmobley 10y ago
        It would have been untenable, however, for a government to defy the will of the people as expressed in the referendum.
        afandian 10y ago
        I have no desire to re-hash this particular argument, but the margin, 48/52 was very small. Very close to 50/50. And the turnout wasn't perfect. I've heard that only something like 30% of the eligible voters voted to leave. There was no "will of the people". The people were undecided.
pluma 10y ago
The often cited claim that the EU is undemocratic stems from a difference of opinion what "democratic" actually means. First of all: there is barely any nation that is truly democratic in the historic sense of the word. Most democracies are actually representational systems: citizens don't vote on every single issue, they elect someone to represent them and vote in their name. Who each representative actually represents and how their votes are weighed varies but this is what almost all so-called democracies in existence have in common. Additionally representatives may sometimes again elect other representatives who vote in their name in another group, or they may elect solitary rulers who act in their name. Keep in mind, this is a gross (and incorrect) simplification, but these are all things that happen in systems most people would call democratic. Specifically: The European Parliament is elected in a way most people would agree can be described as democratic: every EU citizen gets a vote. The MEPs are directly elected. This is pretty straightforward and not unlike how national governments are generally elected. The MEPs elect the President of the European Parliament. Depending on what your national government's elections look like this may also be perfectly normal and expected. There's also the European Commission. This is where things get slightly weirder: the Commission consists of one person per member nation but they are bound by oath to the EU rather than their own nation. One of them is the President of the European Commission who is proposed by the European Council and then confirmed by the European Parliament. The Council then nominates the other commissioners which are approved by the President of the European Commission. The European Council in turn consists of all heads of state of the member nations plus the President of the European Council and the President of the European Commission (but they don't get to vote). The President of the European Council in turn is elected by the European Council. So in other words there are basically two groups of people both ultimately elected by EU citizens: As a EU citizens you get a direct vote for the European Parliament, which elects the President of the European Parliament. Additionally you (presumably) get a direct vote in your own national elections and your elected national governments gets to send its head of state (or a representative, plus maybe some non-voting attendees) to the European Council, which elects the President of the European Council. Finally both the European Council and European Parliament (i.e. the representatives of the citizens and the representatives of the member nation governments) together elect the European Commission. Yes, it's complicated (but in honesty all governments are if you try to understand them in detail) but I can't for the life of me see why you would call them undemocratic in comparison to any other "democratic" system. I think "undemocratic" is just a shorthand for "subject to the will of other people than my own nation's citizens", which is the entire point of the EU and the only way you can have international organisations. The complaint makes much more sense if you consider that the perspective of the EU critics that usually make this complaint isn't "we're part of the EU" but "the EU tries to tell us what to do". It's not so different from Americans who complain about "the government" because they see their ultimate authority at the state level than the federal level.
dnautics 10y ago
The eu's Parliament has de facto no power and all of the authority rests with the European commission, which is an unelected entity.
- bengale 10y ago
  All of the authority? You've been misinformed.
  - dnautics 10y ago
    I apologize, I should not have been hyperbolic.
- ricw 10y ago
  This is entirely false. Every legislation coming from the EU commission has to be approved by the parliament.
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  You're right it's unelected but there's much more complexion to it than that: >Selecting the team >The president-elect selects potential Vice-Presidents and Commissioners based on suggestions from EU countries. The list of nominees has to be approved by all EU heads of state or government, meeting in the European Council. >Each nominee must appear before the parliamentary committee with responsibility for his or her proposed portfolio. Committee members then vote on the nominee’s suitability for the position. Once the 27 nominees have been endorsed, Parliament as a whole votes whether or not to approve the entire team. Following Parliament's vote, the Commissioners are appointed by the European Council. Accountability >The European Commission is held democratically accountable by the European Parliament, which has the right to approve and dismiss the entire political leadership of the Commission. >The European Commission is also accountable for putting the EU budget into practice. Every year, the Parliament chooses to give (or not) its blessing to the European Commission on the way it has managed the EU budget. This process is called the discharge. The Parliament bases its decision on several reports from the European Court of Auditors and from the European Commission, including the annual management and performance report for the EU budget. https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-union/organisational-structure/political-leadership_en#how-the-commission-is-appointed https://ec.europa.eu/info/about-european-union/organisationa...
Chaebixi 10y ago
> But the EU does have a directly elected parliament? So where's the lack of democracy in the EU? I'm not a European, but could it be that the bloc has gotten so large that an individual's vote is so diluted that it feels like it's not a democracy? Especially considering the number of different nationalities and language-groups of various sizes that are supposed to be represented by that one body. I think federalism is a good idea because, at the end of the day, I want to be ruled by a government that represents my community, not some abstract mass of people.
- djmobley 10y ago
  Also note that EU bureaucracy is utterly bewildering to anyone who does not spend their whole life following it. The average British person has no idea how the EU works. They don't know what the different bodies are. They don't know who their representative(s) are. They don't know how to make their voices heard. Maybe a third of people vote in the elections, and they don't really know what they're voting for. What kind of democracy is that?
  - ben_w 10y ago
    Sounds a bit like the British democracy to me. How many Brits know that bishops sit in the house of Lords? Some know, sure, but many? How many of us know what the Privy Council is and who the members are? What powers are purely ceremonial and which have teeth? Why can't MPs resign like normal people? How and why there is judicial independence from parliament seems to be news to the Secretary of State for Justice, if she doesn't know how it works what hope do the general population have? Even how laws are passed seems to surprise people — "The Lords might disagree with us? Abolish them!" — to say nothing of the difference between primary and secondary legislation. The UK has a constitution, but it's not written down in one place for convenience and understanding, it's spread over time-worn ritual, over the Queen's Speech and slamming doors in the face of Black Rod.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      Maybe it's time for that last one to change. Refactoring a system in a well-intentioned way can optimize a lot of inefficient and ineffective approaches and gives an opportunity to bring things that may be scattered about in to locality for increased comprehension and decreased error in modification.
paulajohnson 10y ago
Much of the work of the EU is done by the European Commission, which consists of one senior appointee from each member state. On one hand this is clearly not particularly democratic, but on the other hand it gives the member governments an avenue to make policy that doesn't go via their population, which is why none of the member governments wants to change it.
nicky0 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_European_Union https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_deficit_in_the_Euro...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

rayiner 10y ago

What's at stake here is more fundamental than federalism: it's self determination. Throughout history, discrete groups have waged wars of independence to ensure that they can have a government that reflects their shared history, culture, and values. My family is from Bangladesh, which fought a war to separate from Pakistan over cultural/linguistic differences. In another example, Israel is engaged in an existential battle to ensure the existence of a sovereign nation for its people. In Europe, exactly the opposite is happening. People are being prodded to give up their sovereignty to a supra-national bureaucracy, and to be assimilated into a hetrogenous body politic with hundreds of millions of other people with which they share little other than said bureaucracy. People in the U.K. were very rightfully afraid of what that could lead to and decided they wanted to get off that train.

selimthegrim 10y ago
That's not what Dominic Cummings gave as his reasoning. If you read his manifesto, he cites falling educational standards and scientific and technical competitiveness and cherry-picks a few mathematicians and scientists to say so, which is ridiculous given the situation of JET, Euratom, and the expressed wishes of the vast majority of practicing scientists.
zekkius 10y ago
Yes, humans are inclined to form tribes and to fear the other, just like our primitive ancestors. It's little reason to justify such division today, and especially not to participate in mass murder to achieve it.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > It's little reason to justify such division today, and especially not to participate in mass murder to achieve it. Not at all! To use my Bangladesh example. Bangladesh was founded in 1971 as a secular republic. Pakistan thereafter veered towards theocracy, e.g. adopting Sharia law for criminal proceedings in 1976. Subsequent events have slowly chipped away at Bangladeshi secularism over the years, but had they remained with Pakistan it would have been a lost hope. And as for tribalism being obsolete, I don't agree. There are hundreds of millions of people who think I should be executed for leaving the religion I was born into: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/01/64-percent-of-muslims-in-egypt-and-pakistan-support-the-death-penalty-for-leaving-islam/?utm_term=.20140ab55af2 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/01.... Do you want those folks voting on the laws that govern you? If not, you're not arguing against "tribalism," you're just arguing about where the tribal lines should be drawn.

davedx 10y ago

> it is certainly shifting away democratic power from a more regional democratic system to a centralised government. The Treaty of Lisbon indicates otherwise: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon How is the EU centralising further?

simonh 10y ago

A primarily trade union with most political decisions made by nation states is exactly what the EU is. The failure of the Euro has also pretty much guaranteed it will stay that way too.

rayiner 10y ago
The crucial difference is that the E.U. can impose regulations on citizens of member states that have the force of law, and those laws override national law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_(European_Union). The U.S. has a similar principal (the Supremacy Clause), and in the long term that resulted in the gutting of states as sovereign entities.
- simonh 10y ago
  It can't do that without the agreement of the states though. Directives are created at the direction of the European Council, made up of the heads of state of every EU member state. US states don't have veto powers over federal legislation, but EU states do. Hence Britain never joined the Schengen Agreement and kept its own currency. We had the best of both worlds and threw it away.

barrkel 10y ago

The EU isn't about trade; it was never about trade. It was about peace.