> Legislative processes in the EU are woefully under-covered by the press. That's because newspapers have offices full of reporters to work on national political stories, yet send only one person to Brussels to cover all issues there.
Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?
I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.
If you’re in the US: do you want legislation to happen federally, or at the state level?
It all depends on the scope of the legislation. I have a small business that sells food EU-wide, and that’s only possible because the law is aligned. It’s enough work to get certified as organic once. To do it 18 times over would be prohibitive. Same with packaging and labeling, T&Cs, payment systems, etc.
Other whole areas have stayed national, such as criminal law or most social issues (gay marriage, abortion, unemployment benefits, defense, pensions).
I can’t see a discernible difference in how much of the legislation I like that correlates with where they originate. Or, if anything, it seems like EU stuff tends to be more pro-consumers. C. f. free roaming, passengers’ rights in air travel, car emission standards.
The EU is actually somewhat more responsive if you want to talk them, if only they constantly feel threatened in their very existence.
>I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.
That’s IMO the fundamental flaw of the EU — they want to be the “United States of Europe” but unlike the USA, there’s far too much history and non-shared heritage between the countries for them all to effectively shed their heritage and reshape into a cohesive whole.
> Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?
Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...
We are in the middle of a transition. Consider the history of the European nation-state: it took about three centuries for France, Germany, Italy and Spain to solidify into what we now regard as nations. Still today, we have significant problems with regionalist movements almost everywhere. One could even argue the UK, that shaped the structure of relations between nation-states so much in centuries past, never even reached the full ethnically-defined description of nation-statehood...
We are now trying to further aggregate and streamline these already-shaky constructs, something we have to do if we want to have any hope of resisting demands by global superpowers. It will be a long process and it's clearly not finished yet. It might even entail the deconstruction of the ethno-state as commonly conceived, like the move to statehood did away with things like city-states and regional dialects. Instead of 28 countries, maybe we should have 100 regions. We don't really know yet.
But it's a path we just have to walk, unless we want to be a satellite territory where bigger powers come to clash - which is basically what we had become in the '60s and '70s, when the Cold War happened. We had state-sponsored terrorism across all of Europe; half the continent was literally enslaved and the other half was doomed to nuclear holocaust. Nobody who really remembers how it was, can possibly want that again.
> Well, when an EU directive agrees with you and overrules your national elites, of course you are all for it; and when it's the opposite, it's "them shady eurocrats"...
Some people just want these important decisions done at the national level, hence Brexit.
Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU. They were really complaining about the under-representation of English grievances in British politics, about the distance between London and the rest of England & Wales.
Unless, of course, you mean corrupt oligarchs like Rupert Murdoch and Arron Banks, who simply want to cut any political power to size to protect their own interests. They indeed want decisions to be taken at the lowest possible level.
> Please. Brexit is due to a number of factors, most of them fairly irrational and built over decades of lies from the British press and British politicians. The people shouting to “take back control” don’t know what that “control” even means, and most of them are completely ignorant of how their own government operates, let alone the EU.
Quite the assertion, and ironic with Project Fear in full swing. There is of course the question of how much understanding is needed of how the EU works to want to take back control. 'Can national laws override an EU law? No? We need control!'
Is it so hard to acknowledge that people you politically disagree with might actually have valid reasons and not be the vegetative idiots you assume them to be?
As usual, one wants all the benefits without its disadvantages, no matter how impossible that is.
I'd like for the EU to transform more into a state, but that will be hard unless the local powerful are willing to give up their power. The concessions that had to be made to get as far as the EU is today are also part of what is holding it back. Thankfully a significant veto power will remove itself from the EU in the coming months.
A huge reorganization such as setting up a proper new state seems easier with help of some disruptive event like e.g. a war or imminent war, something I hope the EU won't have any opportunity to take advantage of.
> I'd like for the EU to transform more into a state, but that will be hard unless the local powerful are willing to give up their power. The concessions that had to be made to get as far as the EU is today are also part of what is holding it back. Thankfully a significant veto power will remove itself from the EU in the coming months.
Okay...I'm assuming you're based somewhere in the EU. As far as you can tell does the average German want to be i the same state as the average Greek? Do Germans want to be in the same state with the French. I'm not so sure...I can imagine Germany, Austria and Switzerland working reasonably well as a single state. The same could be said about Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg.
I'm sympathetic to your overall reasoning. When I look at the US it feels like a minor miracle that it has held together for as long as it has. I'm rather skeptic about the possibility of the EU ever approaching anything like that kind of union.
US speaks a common language and has common culture and well-working federal level public oversight. Federal-level elections are prestigious, the best policians are not local, but federal, and can talk to voters in all of US.
Literally none of that is true in EU. It’s not that miraculous that US holds together; it would be if EU could function the same way as a democracy.
Note that several polls over the last view years have found a large minority of people in the US (between 25-40%) view secession favorably, with higher support among millennials.
It’s a bit like with casual racism or sexism: there is a disconnect between the younger generations’ outlook and the older ones’. Stereotypes are hard to die.
If you're unhappier with the national decisions (e.g. Trump) than regional ones, regionalism starts looking better and better... I'd bet that's almost all the reason behind it, not some kind of deep ideological stance on governance.
I’d say it’s essential for a functioning democracy to have all decisions made under scrutiny. Whether that’s local or not doesn’t matter, scrutiny matters. And for better or worse, we only have somewhat functioning local scrutiny.
These days anyone who criticizes EU is labeled Putinist, “populist” (case in point: comments around here), far-right etc., but there are legitimate concerns with how EU works:
- There’s precious little public oversight, as parent post described.
- Fixing that is hard. This isn’t US, but a mishmash of countries that don’t have all that much in common: not language, not culture, not shared historical experience (e.g. “eastern” countries are bitching about EU’s heavy-left leaning because they lived through socialist experiments that young Westerners are enamored with, and are vary of repeating them; southern states don’t see economy performance the way Germany does; Poles know Russian aggression all too well and value US military presence way more than most of EU, and so on and so on).
- Cyclical course corrections, so typical for functioning democracies, are non-existent, because voting can influence precious little: voters only have direct control over EP, which is mostly a rubber-stamping body. You can observe it with this directive: wasn’t EP initiative (because at the EU level, legislative/law-making and executive branches are merged). EP still voted for, despite massive opposition, but with caveats. Didn’t matter: backdoor discussions ended the way they ended - including EP position being... not entirely compatible with plenary vote. This is typical, the EP representatives in the trialogues aren’t bound by previous EP vote and see making a deal, no matter how bad, as necessary. Next step is EP approving the result. It is extremely rare for a plenary to reject trialogue output. It probably won’t happen even with this mess, but there’s a chance it might, this time. If it does, it will be championed as the process working (people on HN said that last month when the news hit that talks broke down... not so much). For things that are not this important to this many people on the right side of the political spectrum, it just doesn’t happen.
Do actual EU citizens want the important legislation to happen at the national or EU level?
I'm not from Europe, but one of the weird things about the EU is that sometimes it seems to be trying to be a state and a not-state at the same time.