I used to be quite against Brexit but after seeing on of the videos on the EU I am now skeptical. There are 3 big voting bodies: EU Council, EU Parliament, and EU comission. The majority of people don't know the difference and nobody knows the people in there. In the last decade they started micro-managing everything in the EU. Think of gdpr and the new copyright rules. It's starting to resemble a big authoritarian state.
Also they apply uniformly the same strategy for countries like Germany/Austria/Netherlands and Greece/Portugal/Italy when they are in very different situations. The former are quite happy with the arrangement, the latter are trapped in a death spiral.
The EU is almost desperately transparent: http://europa.eu/
> There are 3 big voting bodies: EU Council, EU Parliament, and EU comission.
The Council are the elected heads of state of EU members. They decide on the course.
The EU commission is tasked with implementing that course, and producing legislation.
The EU parliament is tasked with correcting that legislation. Although they have little legislative power, they can dissolve the commission. In the grand scheme of things, the buck stops with them. They are elected directly by EU citizens.
> they started micro-managing everything in the EU.
The EU takes care of the things almost all members agree on (remember, the Council sets the course). They don't get to be involved in high-coverage contentious politics.
> Think of gdpr
Yes, a highly popular measure inside Europe, even by tech people who are affected by it.
> It's starting to resemble a big authoritarian state.
Yes, they will force members to do their bidding with fish-quota, clean beaches, and humane labour conditions.
The EU structure is a little complicated, but it's 400 million citizens we're talking about. Its powers are very limited and is derived from 27 countries wanting to interact to try and set a course that benefits everyone, instead of individual countries racing each other to the bottom with disastrous results.
> Yes, a highly popular measure inside Europe, even by tech people who are affected by it.
I beg to differ. 'Controversial' is more like it. There are some who are in favour of GDPR but there are also those - myself included - who consider it well-intentioned but badly executed.
You conveniently kept out the copyright one.
No, but big lobbyists do, so there we go.
As a pro-Brexit argument, this seems weak. I think most people can’t explain the difference between the House of Commons, the House of Lords and the Cabinet either.
The EU structure really isn’t that complex when you remember that its power is granted by the member states, so the highest authority is an oversight body consisting of each country’s elected governments — that’s the EU council. The Commission is the executive branch and the Parliament is legislative. That’s it.
Er, no. Commission and Council are both legislative and executive at the same time. The oversight organ is Parliament.
A lot of the of the ill-will against the EU setup comes from this non-traditional arrangement that betrays Montesquieu for the good of efficiency at scale: it's so hard and slow to write laws in national parliaments, that EU governments decided the model wouldn't work at continental level. You can look at the (in)efficiency of comparable bodies (US Congress and Indian parliament) to see the problem in action every day.
So multiple generations of EU politicians decided it would be easier to take hard decisions in a small room (Council), then leave it to the bureaucrats (Commission) to implement them. When the model was criticized for being undemocratic, they begrudgingly agreed to have a Parliament with veto powers. But democracy, once started, is a rolling boulder; so the role of EUParliament has grown with every election. The Commission cannot steamroll measures anymore, so EUP assumed a de-facto legislative role too. This is Good in historical terms and can only get better with time. Already the composition of the Commission has moved from a compromise brokered on purely-ethnic lines by national governments, to a body that also has to reflect the political inclinations of the sitting Parliament, lest they get rejected. Parliament will not rubber-stamp anymore.
The problem is that some elements of EU politics continue to be insulated from Parliament. Fiscal matters in particular, where states are completely unchecked, must be tied to Parliament in some way. Until that happens, demagogues will have an easy way to misdirect, talking of "Council" and "Troikas" as some unelected bodies when they are simple smokescreens for national governments to hide behind. It has to be corrected.
From a history-buff perspective, the current era is an exciting time: the continent is basically rewriting its constitutional asset in real-time. It's the sort of sea-change that happens once every 200 years; like a Vienna Congress or US Constitutional Convention, but spread over decades.
In the future, when we're setting up even larger multinational organisations (even a world government), EU will be a good example of what not to do.
People should stop comparing the EU to any other national system, because it is inherently an supranational and intergovermental system.
MPs in the house of commons elect the Prime Minister (typically this means the leader of the largest party). Technically it's the Queen appointing them, I believe on advice of the civil service on the basis that they will be able to command a vote of confidence, but in practice it's the MPs themselves.
The Prime Minister then appoints the cabinet, most of whom will be elected MPs by their local constituents (in practice at least half of the seats in the UK are "safe seats", meaning the MP is appointed by local party memebrs)
The Prime Minister also appoints one of the EU commissioners (and the PM's counterparts in the other EU states also appoint one).
The EU parliament elects the president of the commission from a pool suggested by the heads of government. That president then allocates each of the commissioners they've been sent by governments to various roles.
In the EU, voters elect national governments who each appoint a member to the EU Commission. The EU Parliament also gets a say in the election of the Commission President.
Obviously it's a compromise because national governments don't want to give up their power. But it's not as undemocratic as is often claimed.
This is a chicken and egg problem, national politicians can always blame the EU for their problems, and the European political parties are not able to prove their worth because they are being held down by national politics of member states.
One solutions would be a completely seperate system, but that would require some form of federalisation, which is politically and culturally not feasable at the moment.
Furthermore if people wouldn‘t know that explains very little about the EU.
I'm not an US citizen. But one of things that Donald Trump said repeatedly during his campaign speeches, was that globalization largely looked like a unelected bureaucracy running the world economic affairs at their whim without accountability.
Transfer of jobs, factories and even small business based on economic centers en-masse across countries.
That’s not to say that people who vote populist don’t have a point. It’s hard to understand why companies are making billions in profits, while people are scrambling to make ends meet.
Unless you are stuck on some axiom that what's good for the companies is good for… humans.
I think it's fairly self evident at this point that you've got people, you've got companies, you've got capitalism as a whole. It's a pecking order and they are somewhat to extremely antagonistic. People, as the most powerless entities in the equation, are very much on the way out.
Humans are to these large collective entities or even larger self-organizing entities like political systems, as cells are to humans. There is no reason to assume a humanocentric viewpoint here, and if assuming one leads to continuous dismay and surprise, you've got to widen your perspective and acknowledge higher-order organisms when they're this obvious.
It's like a sort of Singularity. Why would it be surprising if we fail to immediately recognize it for what it is?
There was a reason those countries had bad rates before joining. And most of the causes of those issues were swept under the rug. Now who is going to pay for the consequences?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_Monetary_Union
But the levers of political power were, then as now, in hands guided not by stale history, but by fresh opportunity for self-advancement.
Everyone involved.
But we can't so have to deal with what is in front of us right now.
I assume you mean the Euro here (not the EU)
What are those countries?
Not currency union can work properly without a fiscal union.
The Euro is a disaster - swivel-eyed lunatic neoliberal orthodoxy enforced by a common currency.
The irony is that the so-called single market is a mess too. While it's possible to sell across country borders in the EU, the bureaucratic necessities - especially VAT accounting - make it a horror show. Eliminating customs bureaucracy is a good thing, but that's still a long way short of true friction-free trade.
EU VAT accounting is actually fabulous for real goods: intra-union transactions are VAT-free, so each state can levy whichever rate they prefer on the final sale. Everyone is happy and there is less red tape.
They fucked up for digital goods and services because the model simply does not map well to that domain - the internet has no border. Politicians felt they had to make a choice between losing VAT income altogether (which is what was happening before, with companies tactically exploiting low-VAT countries) or creating some friction for digital businesses. They picked the most rational option.
In reality, it's a false dichotomy, and everyone knows it. The real way out is a simplification where that tax is centralized at federal level; but it requires a huge amount of political capital, that the current generation of European politicians is completely incapable of generating on their own. At some point, someone will run in France or Germany on this platform of simple, flat VAT rates on digital income across the EU, accumulating to an unified EU treasury that can then be used to further generate income; they will win, and it will come to pass.