I'm strongly in favor of giving the parliament the ability to propose laws (directives). Currently only the comission can do that.
Each member state has a seat at the Council, and for almost all issues a veto. Each member state is democratic, therefore the EU itself is entirely democratic. That doesn't of course mean the right decisions are always made!
The US have that. The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.
The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards
And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down
It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform
A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)
Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them
In theory, if parliament had the power to propose legislation, the council would still be able to shoot those bills down, assuming no other changes to the EU structure.
The EU system is also not without its flaws but it's not the worst. Enacting broad, sweeping legislation is cumbersome and difficult which is a feature, not a bug. If we had a more streamlined system we'd probably already have chat control by now.
A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
I'll also note that nothing here is per se undemocratic. Both the Parliament and the Council are made up of elected members. The members of the Council (as members of the national governments) are indirectly elected, but elected all the same. Direct election is not a requirement for a democracy (see election of the US president or the US Senate prior to the 17th amendment or the Senate of Canada right now).
That does not mean that there isn't plenty of valid criticism of the EU's current structure, but claiming that it is not "actually democratic" falls far short of a meaningful critique.
The Treaties haven't changed since 2011 or so, and I don't expect any changes in the next decade at the very least.
And it has a major problem: There is no European public. Cultural differences ad language barrier make it hard to follow debates and issues. It is a lot simpler to follow my elected governments behavior.
Also the parliament would lose its style of working. Currently there is cooperation accross parties and a less strict "government vs opposition" than in most other parliaments, which means that MEPs actually got a vote (in the areas where the parliament matters) instead dof being whipped by party leaders.
And then: Most decision power is with the council, which is made of democratically elected governments (if we ignore the Hungary problem ...)
Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.
This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.
This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.
In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.
[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...
the "obvious" solution seems to be to make these meetings open, sure industry wants to push their thing, put it on the calendar, and let civil society delegate someone, and industry pays for that too.
That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power and they often overstep their role... We're seeing clearly on issues like Ukraine and, lately Israel.
Anything else is green washing.
Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.
Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.
Over the past decade I went from a big fan to someone very troubled about the political goals of the elites.
And, having lived in Brussels, you can sorta see why they're disconnected from the “will of the people”…
education seems similarly harmonized in both unions (the Bologna system works pretty well)
but just as in the US border issues are always affecting members differently (migration flows North, right? so southern borders are affected more; at the same time migrants went to NYC and Berlin because they are rich cities with opportunities and very migration-friendly policies)
and of course federalism in the US is also suffering from vetocracy (aka. tragedy of the anticommons), see housing, which very directly leads to "blue states" losing seats in the House (and similarly housing issues are catalyzing radicalization in the EU too)
(and the solution to the housing challenges are not obvious, and even if there are success stories - like Vienna - city-state politics is stuck in the usual local minimas)
Notably ChatControl is not one of them.
What specific example are you thinking of where additional power was handed to Brussels through an amendment of the treaties?
> That's in addition to the constant Commission push for more power...
If you are worried about the executive trying to expand its power (and something that should be kept in check), may I suggest that the US is not actually a great example right now for how to avoid that?
And every time I push a bit the answer seems to be "EU didn't follow my preferred decision". :P
You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.
With it's 24 languages the EU debates have interesting interpretation challenges, as they don't have interpreters for going from any language to any language, but often the translate first into one language (say from Latvian into German) and then some other language (German to Portuguese), which loses a lot of nuance and color from the language.
Also media can cover it better, with few languages and politicians can provide their press statements in those few languages.
And then culture is a lot more similar, which helps to identify the "relevant" topics and way to talk about it.
Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.
The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.
The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.
* the Council of composed of ministers and heads of government. Ministerial posts are distributed among the winning party members in pretty much every country, and only presidential systems have a direct election for their head of government. In constitutional monarchies, the head of government is commonly assigned to the largest party leader, but it's not a directly electable position.
The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.
- candidate needs to be proposed in country
- EU wide elections are held, candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country.
- Votes are weighted by amount of seats in EU parliament.
What we have right now does not work at all, EC has 0 responsibility(towards EU citizens) for their own actions and is basically a magical black box.
Ironically, we managed to re-create a Forbidden City full of mandarins and eunuchs, or a new Versailles, only now they wear modern suits.
Scaling power institutions is always tricky, and this is the main risk.
A Californian did not vote for the Senator from North Carolina.
A Londoner did not vote for the MP from Edinburgh.
A Berliner did not vote for the Bavarian Bundesrat member.
Plenty of Europeans, including me, disagree with you on the very existence of a "European cause".
"There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states."
I don't want federal EU, many others don't either. At least hold a referendum before running your fix. I suspect that most member countries would vote against being reduced to provinces of a centralized state.
We don't have the luxury of waiting for endless referenda. The enemy's at the gates.
Let us say that I don't consider your prophecy very accurate. Czechia, in some form, exists for about 1100 years. The EU probably won't match that record.
As for the Russians, molon labe, and I wouldn't count on Brussels to help us efficiently in such situations, if they cannot even enforce law in local Arab neighbourhoods.
Even today, the southwestern part of Europe is mostly obsessed with Gaza and I have to remind my Spanish and Italian colleagues that there is an actual shooting war on this very continent.
That said, we gained sovereignty and precisely because we still remember being treated as subordinates, we don't want to lose it again to another hodgepodge.
There won't be a federal EU, live with it. The optimal time for federalists has passed, and people are more distrustful of centralization than ever before. Not just because of naked power grab attempts like Chat Control, which would perfectly fit into China, but not to a continent where multiple constitutions forbid this sort of mass surveillance.
You may find it funny, but people actually fought and died for freedom of their nations, and their legacy won't be disposed of just because the Brussels bosses would find it practical in their quest for more power and money.
The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.
It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.
Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.
Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.
The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.
It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.
For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.
But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.
What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.
America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.
The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.
In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.
A problem for the US is that /both/ chambers of parliament are skewed that way.
The Londoner is completely out of luck if their seat is a safe seat but not their party.
Not that German politics isn't pretty hosed too.
Look at what EU wants to do. I would be glad if nothing got done but unfortunately a lot of their horrible regulations do and Europeans suffer for it.
> The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU.
No.
I'm not necessarily picky with every word we use informaly. As you noticed with green washing, which here was colloquially used as "bullshit to pretend to be virtuous because manipulating public opinion open some hope to control its behavior".
But when it comes to the official fundamental statement of what the government ruling people is pretending to be, I do expect something more aligned with the first degree interpretation of the words.
Republic means there is no State secret.
Democracy means that citizen rules and decides the laws.
I have the firm conviction that asking better than newspeak level nomenclature is not asking for perfection. That just mere basic honesty.
Consenting that utter lies to serve as base political denomination with the excuse that nothing is perfect is just lazily opening doors to broader harsher lies for those willing to gain carte blanche on exercising political power with a flow of void sentences.
Note they wrote "Start by removing...", not "Finish with". You could remove Council of the EU and then create another "upper house". But its personnel would have to be nominated differently. Perhaps directly elected? But that would be tough.
Re the direct vs indirect election, note that in some countries governments do not have to consist of MPs. Like currently in France, you have a directly elected president who then nominates whoever to be his head of government and ignore the parliament for a while. And that government has a say in the Council. And at that point it's good to answer the question, at which level of indirection can we say there is a deficit of democracy?
Also note that it's quite unusual for a democracy that the 'lower house' (EP) does not have legislative initiative, can't propose laws. Is that a deficit of democracy yet?
Of course I understand it's all because national governments do not want create another centre of power, but the issues are very real.
You can pretty directly tie this as a natural consequence of most of Europe's colonial empires falling; without the extra resources the colonies brought in, Europe would've risked being run under by both the US, Russia and nowadays China. The goal of the EU is to essentially find agreement between 27 member states to do things that all those states agree are things they want to do.
Actually federalizing the EU wouldn't work simply because Europeans are too different from one another; it's a cooperation between countries that spend most of their history being in varying degrees of "dislike" to "waging war" on each other, and while most people agree war is bad these days, those cultural differences have never gone away[0]. Trying to create a mono-EU "national identity" wouldn't work, the same way that most Americans find a shared national identity in well, "being American".
Probably the most topical example for HN would be tech antitrust legislation. If any one European country tried to pass tech antitrust laws with teeth, it'd be trivial for those companies to just... stop providing services to that country. Most European countries are too small to make a meaningful dent, and a few actions "to prove a point", will lead to a chilling effect. It'd lead to a copy of the US's current tech dystopia where you don't even own what's done with your private data. Passing it through the EU changes this; now it has the full backing of all 27 EU countries, and collectively, this makes the EU the second largest customer market in the world. Now the EU is impossible to ignore as an economic bloc.
This is why the EU democratic process is so fractured and can at times feel undemocratic/disconnected. It's not a regular country making laws; it's more international geopolitics playing their course in real time. EU laws aren't really laws either, they have more in common with diplomatic agreements than anything else, which is why the Commission works the way it does[1]. (EU regulations and directives are turned into local country laws that are legally required to do the same thing that those regulations mandate.) The EU parliament (which is a more typical elected body) primarily exists as a check on the Commission to prevent it from rubber-stamping things[2] that people don't want.
[0]: Watch any online discourse around Eurovision, and you'll quickly realize that Europe still has some pretty harsh population divides.
[1]: The Commission is made up of representatives from the member states, which are in turn locally picked by the member states through their governments. If you think this means the Commissions representatives are equal and work as one body; they don't. All the petty inter-country geopolitics you see on a global scale very much apply to the Commission. (There's a Yes Minister skit about this part: https://youtu.be/ZVYqB0uTKlE , which is oddly funny given Brexit happened.)
[2]: Which it generally tends to do - the parliament is much more subject to activist calls to action to avoid passing bad legislation than people usually expect.
Elected officials, elected judges and binding referenda would make it democratic.
For goodness sake, you are sending people on goose chases instead of the real problem.
What happened here falls under the exact definition of representative democracy. There are some politicians from certain nation states pushing for the policy. They request the commission (the civil service type group) to work on the proposals, and then elected MEPs vote on it.
Again and again I have to keep repeating the same message:
This is NOT some random bureaucrats in some EU group deciding they want to push a policy. This is our elected politicians being influenced some some other agency to push chat control. They're pushing it through the EU commission, because that is how it works.
Please people, inform yourselves, or you're going to get this all wrong and fight the wrong fight.
The answer is simple. The EU institutions cannot be both directly elected and have executive authority over member states.
The reason is that by doing so one would create a conflict between the "democratic legitimacy" of the EU executive and the "democratic legitimacy" of national parliaments.
In the current model, the member states retain ultimate authority and democratic legitimacy through their delegates to the Council of Ministers.
https://www.cbsnews.com/miami/news/ron-desantis-florida-elim...
And, despite certain bills having to originate in the House, the Senate is more powerful since all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert or the Senate alone (except for electing the President when there is an electoral tie, which the House does but with a voting rule of one-vote-per-state-delegation which gives it the same undemocratic weighting as the Senate has normally.)
Now, with what I think of as probably the ideal manageable district sizes for voters (5-7 members) that is fairly chunky proportionality, so you might still want to do MMP to reduce underrepresentation of geographically diffuse minority positions.
OTOH, there are places which have STV (usually for a whole body elected at large, but you could do the same thing in districts for a larger body) with 20+ seats in a single constituency, and if you go that big per district, MMP is less necessary.
Eventually it gets on your nerves how much worse the city has to be to cater to the Institutions.
There's something about non-taxed coddled elites eating oysters and drinking champagne at 9AM on a Sunday that makes you a bit of a cynic.
And then, of course, all your friends works for the research companies that get paid a fortune to provide advice to the Eurocrats. But well, your friend has a Bachelor's in Marketing and she's being considered an expert on Soil Research because… eh, the agency is getting paid.
The Bubble is there and you'll be exposed to it. It's not a good Bubble. It's mostly young MBAs and Political Science majors that think they know how to fix everything.
(And some very talented people, of course. It's not all bad.)
In Poland for example you can't get to EU parliament if you are not chosen by centralized party committee to run. You can't get in as an independent because your party needs to get 5% of the votes in the whole country. This means we not only can't vote on issues but we can't even choose people to represent us unless they get a nod from the party. Guess whose interests they are going to defend once in power.
This makes power completely detached from the voters. The only politics is inside the party. This is not democracy by any reasonable measure.
The EU is a large market but it is shrinking as a share of the global economy (despite expansion) so how long does that lower last.
On the other hand the big EU economies are big enough to make pulling out of them a significant loss.I do not think any global business would be happy to just give up doing business with Germany.
Come again? MT and RI have the same approximate population (1.1M) and the same number of representatives (2). I’m talking about the state level here.
> all Congressional powers either require both houses in concert
Right, they act as checks and balances upon one another. Equal-sized representation to give smaller states a way to avoid being steamrolled by the will of the largest states — why would states want to stay in a union where they have no hope of representation? Methinks if Alabama and Mississippi kept everything about themselves politically the same yet were both the size of California and New York you’d probably be of a different mind about the importance of the senate.
EU is setup like it is on purpose. Parliament represents the people, council the member countries and commission EU itself.
The one with most power is the council as nothing really goes though without their (heads of state of the member countries) approval as EU has no legislative powers of its own but instead member countries have to implement the directives.
Also EU can't actually make any laws it makes directives that are then up to each member state to implement on their own. It also has no police/military/force to actually enforce that the member states implement the directives. Basically everything is very much about cooperation or finding a compromise everyone can agree on as there is no way to force anyone to do anything really (outside of cutting away EU funding but then the member state can also stop paying their dues which does not work for most of the big states as they pay more then they get back)
The thing where EU has power and actual means to enforce things is the reason it was originally created for. Trade.
You have a very valid point in that if you narrow it enough the argument loses weight.
And as shown in the last two terms of Von der Leyen, saying no doesn't actually do anything, because the same candidate can be proposed again.
But yes, the whole thing is of course based on cooperation between states. EU law applies in EU member states (whether directly or indirectly) because those member states say so.