The problem is that EU institutions are so far and detached from the member states that most citizens are completely unaware of their doing, at least until said European laws get implemented locally.
That's largely because citizens of several countries accept the narrative of their local governing parties that the EU is some "external force" that is outside of anyone's control.
Reality is that the EU is largely formed by members of local political parties sent to EU-institutions. They just send people there which they deem not useful for local campaigning or prefer to become "invisible" to local politics.
Citizens should not accept this narrative, and instead demand more transparency on the activities of the local politicians sent to EU, holding the party accountable for their actions (or non-action) within the EU.
It's been same before EU or other similar multiple country things.
Back then some politicians were getting "promoted" into ambassadors of some faraway country, or decided to become university professors, if not flat out sent to "Goli Otok", "Siberia" ...etc.
Since that mentality/way-of-doing politics has been around for a while - it will not be easy to get the political establishment to change.
But it's also inherent in running an organisation with 24 official languages.
Let's say you had really strong opinions on this, and you wanted to rally voters for a letter-writing campaign. Good luck coordinating the Spanish-speakers, the German-speakers and the Polish-speakers and so on. All of whom also have different TV networks, different newspapers, different radio, presumably different social media and so on.
And politicians have the same problem - maybe you're an amazing public speaker. Maybe you've got the farming subsidy policy equivalent of the Gettysburg Address. Clear, succinct, witty, persuasive, honest, passionate - everyone who hears it will be fired up to support your vision. But if you can only deliver that speech in Portuguese? Good luck with that.
Hell, look at this very discussion: I know first-hand about the complex relationship between the EU with the British parliament, press and electorate. But I have no idea what the equivalent situation is in the Czech Republic.
But it's also an inherent problem of the EU. In retrospect, they shouldn't have left communication with citizens to the EU-members, expecting that they would communicate based on common interest.
As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
The EU charter should have included the means for the Union to communicate directly with citizens, i.e. the basis to have their own local news-channels.
I can see improvements in communication nowadays, with EU press-releases and announcement carrying over into local (online) news at least. The fact that none of those messages are already carried by the local government speaks volumes...
What I'm saying is that everyone is ill-equipped to communicate, when communications are conducted in 24 languages.
Imagine a Greek newspaper decided to send a team of dedicated EU reporters to Brussels - how are they supposed to talk to the delegates from Sweden and Slovenia and Spain?
(and if you're thinking "they'll just communicate in english" let me remind you that less than 2% of the EU population lives in a country where english is an official language)
> As it turns out, the local governments are much more comfortable to celebrate themselves for everything positive, and blame everything negative on these "EU overlords".
Truth.
But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.
If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person. If a local government sends a politician into the EU who can't communicate in English or French they sent the wrong person. Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels. So far not even THAT is happening in a sufficient manner...
> But IMO pre-Brexit a big reason the British government had a lot of influence over the British press (and vice-versa) while the EU government didn't was the simple issue of speaking the same language and being in the same city.
Every single press-Release of the EU is done in English language. Granted, the EU doesn't invite to press-conferences in London to talk to the local press, that's the job of the local government.
Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European", but as everywhere it is more useful to their narrative to promote "We are Nationalists!"
> If a Greek newspaper is sending a journalist who can't speak English or French they sent the wrong person.
Right - so from the perspective of a Greek person, EU lawmakers are speaking a completely different language. Seems like a pretty big communication problem to me.
> Also, it would already be sufficient for the cause if Greek newspapers would put the spotlight on GREEK politicians in Brussels.
But the Greek politicians in Brussels already agree with the Greek government.
If the German faction in Brussels wants to do something that'll be unpopular with Greece, they've got no way to make their case to the Greek people directly.
> Pre-Brexit it would have been the job of the British government to promote the spirit of "We are European"
Did the British government ever agree that was their job?
I mean, in the United States I don't see Biden expecting the Texan government to convince Texans of anything. Luckily for Biden, he can speak to Texans himself. Because they share a language.
It appears you've never checked the publications of the EU. They are published in ALL OFFICIAL LANGUAGES of the member countries, including Greek! [1]
> But the Greek politicians in Brussels already agree with the Greek government.
Sorry, I'm not following. I am talking about local citizens and media surfacing and challenging the actions/non-actions of the politicians that were sent to the EU, by holding their local government accountable for the performance of their representatives in the EU.
> If the German faction in Brussels wants to do something that'll be unpopular with Greece, they've got no way to make their case to the Greek people directly.
They shouldn't. They should make their case towards the designated representatives of Greece in the EU. It is their job to facilitate communication with the Greek government, whose job it should be to communicate with its citizens. This chain is intentionally broken, for the local party to either claim positive outcomes only on themselves or blame negative outcomes to some overlords outside of their control.
[1] Example: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/d...
Switching language to Greek: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/d...
Not sure what "that" actually refers to.
The common official language of the European Union is ALL official languages of the member-states. Every major publication of the EU is ALREADY made in all languages of its members.
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Example: Electricity market reform, an ongoing topic. What's the status there?
Here it is: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20240304STO...
Ah, you only speak Greek?
No problem. Here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/el/article/20240304STO...
Ah sorry, Polish? Here: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/pl/article/20240304STO...
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> you cannot really build something democratic if a large part of the population has no idea what you are saying
Why? There is a LOCAL government which is in charge of representing the citizens locally and also representing the country in the European union.
If they can't explain to me what they are doing, they are not qualified to represent me.
I can set my language, and separately I can set my regional format which encompasses things like which decimal symbol and which thousands separator to use (both offer the comma, the dot and '), how dates are written, which day is the first of the week, how time is written (12/24h), whether to use Arabian numbers or one of the other digit-based systems, which unit system to use (US or metric) etc.
> it's a shame that this isn't standardised
It kind of is: The International Bureau of Weights and Measures has maintained since 1948 that you shouldn't use dots or commas as thousands separators. ISO 31-0 prescribes the use of small spaces, and so do various other American and international standards organizations. It's just that this is widely ignored.
Let me tell you about the pain of CSV-files that use ; as a delimiter because otherwise you couldn't use decimal numbers.
Or in office documents where MS "translates" commas. That means you also need to replace all , and ; if you translate office scripts from English to a language with other decimal rules.
Nevermind the parsing of numbers in general... That stuff can crashes moon probes.
1'234.56 1'234,56
Either of these can be understood no matter which format you're used to. Although, I don't think it's ever caught on really (or whether it's even advisable/sensible).
Then just figure out which portion of your countries budget comes out of your taxes, and how big the total budget of your country is, and you have your answer. It's not like this is top secret information
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/316691/eu-budget-contrib...
2: https://www.statista.com/chart/18794/net-contributors-to-eu-...
They get 1% of VAT which is mostly spent on poor regions (cohesion funding) and agricultural subsidies (Common Agricultural Policy).
What is the base of this claim? There are EU elections this year FYI.
There is a lot of criticism (warranted, IMO) on this state of affairs.
In EU countries keep having strong sovereignty, it’s not like the USA. EU here acts more like an alignment institution among countries, it doesn’t actually have powers by itself and it appears that Europeans are still not ready to switch to a US-like system.
EDIT: in a typical HN fashion people downvote simple statement of the fact, because they are in denial about the fact.
Because it's easy to blame "Brussel bureaucrat" when it's hardly visible that said bureaucrat is minister and/or represantive from the party that is now campaigning against "brussel's edict".
Can you point me to the parts of the Lisbon treaty that facilitate this please?
Few key countries (Germany, France and Italy) got their voting weights in both the Council of Ministers and the European Council increased at the expense of everyone else (witch Germany's voting power doubling).
European Central Bank got official recognition.
European Court of Justice got its jurisdiction expanded.
But I do agree that Parliament should be given law making powers, and the Commission should just be enforcement and implementation of said laws.
Of course, direct election of the commission would be more democratic formally, but the fact is there's not really a truly European polity in the first place so its not clear the outcome would be much better in regards to the problem of the commission being composed of random politicians you never heard of.
In fact, given that Ireland (a very small country) would have to have a referendum on it, then I can almost guarantee that such a system would over-weight small countries.
Also from my interpretation of TFA, the people that expect intelligence agencies to be exempted are national interior ministers (not named though), there's no such thing as a "European Union minister", which have no influence at the EU level.
This is a convenient fiction that the EU Council (i.e. the national governments) are very keen to retain, as it insulates them from the consequences of their decisions.
If you really wanted to be tactical about it, one should vote for a disjoint set of parties in the EU vs the national elections, as this would be more likely to lead to effective supervision and assessment of decisions.
While for European elections it is usually 40-50% with huge differences by country (https://results.elections.europa.eu/en/turnout/)
It would be better if more people voted though.
>The more local the more people care but half of the population voting is not really drastically different than 2/3 of the population voting.
And I was simply pointing out how the result is different. I thought you were referencing that it was a random sample. Though apparently you just decided it's the same even though you knew it wasn't a random sample.
At least in my country, almost all the debate in news outlets is about national or local issues. EU regulations do come up, but they are always depicted as something that comes "from above" and not tied to specific parties or people. If there is controversy about a national law, the media will blame things on the government or on the opposition (depending on their bias). If there is controversy about an European law, the media will blame an abstract "Brussels"... or directly the government or the opposition anyway, as they're the ones who implement it.
In the EU elections, most (euphemism for all) people I know just vote to the party they prefer in terms of national or regional politics. Almost no one votes because they want a given European directive to be implemented.
Sometimes I have actually made some effort to find out what each of my country's parties voted in some EU decision, and most of the times I failed. It's not clear what decisions come from the Commission or from Parliament (many come from the Commission which is not even directly elected but elected by local governments, by the way). And even for those from Parliament, it's not clear how to find detailed results of Parliament votes. Mind you, I'm not saying there is no way - probably there is one, if you are very well informed or have a lot of time, but there is definitely no way that I could find in 20 minutes of Googling, and most people won't make a greater investment than that.
Not sure if it's the same in all countries, and not sure how to fix it... but yes, I do have the perception that EU institutions are detached from citizens.
That said, this has its pros. If citizens had more of a say, we'd probably have no low-emmission zones, no or almost no pollution regulations, etc. Many environmental policies that are, IMO, unquestionably good, are pushed to reluctant citizens using the "hey, don't blame me, it comes from Brussels" wildcard, and we are better for it (again, IMO). Sad, but true.
This is definitely a feature disguised as a bug.
I agree that it's under reported but I don't think it's because the EU is far away or detached from the people. The media simply don't tell us what's going on. There's no regular programmes in my country covering it. There are shows like that for local politics and for national politics, and I can even keep up with US politics if I like. But to know what's happening in the EU I have to very actively choose to search for it.
The US is surely more removed but everyone seems to know every detail of what's going on over there.
Yes, people should be more focused on what's going on in their back yard, at least on the social level, than another country "half way" around the world.
Except for Britain, European nations simply do not have a strong tradition of news publishing and free debate like the United States. In Europe, news mostly came and still comes in the form of dictates from the rulers. That's why it was so important that people had to go to church each Sunday: not to listen to the word of God, but to be told the latest decisions of the king directly from the preacher's pulpit. Later on, non-government affiliated media has mainly been partisan affairs, directly or indirectly controlled by political parties.
With a weak tradition of free speech and press, it is no wonder that European journalists prefer to sit around all day and read reporting on American politics and summarise for their readers, instead of doing some actual investigating, reporting and interviewing.
European traditions in terms of journalism are as good as any. The problems of modern media are the same everywhere: nobody wants to pay for quality journalism, so only people with deep pockets end up footing the bill and hence setting the agenda.
If there is no coverage of something it generally means people don’t care. That can be a vicious circle, of course. But as soon as people start paying attention to the small outlets that do cover these things, the bigger ones will adapt their coverage.
There are several ones in mine. However, the huge majority of people is not interested in watching them. Unless it is making the headlines/major news programs, most people only hear about it when it is too late to change anything.
I think its good to have that sort of thing though and I don't think we ever had such a thing in the UK. I would have liked to understood how the EU works better and the interaction between the parliament and the commission.
Since we would rightly blame corporations for polluting the Earth and not ourselves, we would absolutely do away with low-emission zones, but we would surely crank up pollution regulations for them.
That's not only sad - it erodes public trust in democracy, and leads to a rise of populist parties.
Political initiative and agenda-setting, in the EU, are firmly in the hands of national governments - they just hide behind "Bruxelles bureaucrats" as a shield.
And EU-Elections have usually a pretty low participation, showing how many people it really concerns.
You mean, the MEPs? There's very little that MEPs can do to hold the executive (the Commission) to account. Commissioners are appointed by national governments; each government gets a quota. The appointees are generally ex-ministers whose careers in national politics are over, due either to failure or disgrace.
Essentially the only power that MEPs have is to vote down legislative proposals from the Commission. They have approximately no power to remedy administrative failures, corruption, and mistakes in implementation.
How exactly is it detached?
The EU parliament is elected.
The EU commission is composed of members appointed by each member state (and every member state is - or should be - a democracy, so the commissioner is s representative of an elected government).
I keep seeing this bullshit being repeated as if it was true, and whenever I ask I never get meaningful answers.
One might argue that even national governments that are directly elected are socially detached from the general population.
That is in my opinion a fault of society rather than fault of governments. If you don't care about politics, you are doomed to be ruled by those that do.
At least this was the case back in 2016 when I was doing as much research as I could before the referendum.