Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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The issue here is that the EU currently is a de facto confederation.

The EU parliament can not be, and is not, the supreme legislative body for the simple reason that the member states are still sovereign, with the ability to withdraw (though there are some legal questions in some member countries about how that would be possible).

It is the same issue facing the US under the Articles of Confederation, where Congress was effectively powerless to do anything without full agreement of the states.

However the EU "worked around" this in part with the Council and Commission functioning as a sort of an "office of the president" (consisting of heads of the member states and the head of the Commission and a separate Council president) and cabinet respectively, with power delegated from the respective governments of the member states rather than from the parliament.

It is a "workaround" for the fact that a federal EU is currently entirely unpalatable to the electorate in most European countries to make the EU governable - ironically because people are worried about giving the EU more power, while the current arrangement is worse in that regard.

> It is a "workaround" for the fact that a federal EU is currently entirely unpalatable to the electorate in most European countries

I'm sure in every EU country, most voters would prefer it if the unelected commission couldn't overrule the elected parliament.

Unfortunately what most voters would prefer is largely irrelevant due to the current structure.

Probably. But the point is you can't do that in a binding way without having the national governments cede sovereignty through constitutional amendments, which instantly causes public uproar.

E.g. under the UK constitution (yes, the UK has a constitution, it is just not codified in a single act) the UK Parliament is sovereign, to the extent that it can not even bind future parliaments.

So without tricky constitutional changes (particularly tricky because parliament has pretty much "bootstrapped" its own constitutional powers in the UK into a position were giving them away again will need to be very carefully structured to stand up in court) it is pretty much impossible to grant the EU parliament any real power.

This is part of why the current structure of the EU uses a web of treaties to bind the executives of the member states in various to seek the passage of local laws to implement EU directives, with convoluted measures to cajole the national legislatives to follow through. It's still not ironclad - plenty of directives languish in national parliaments for years before being implemented (or get implemented with inconsistent differences in different member countries) exactly because the EU has very few means to push it through - but it's a far stronger method than trying to tie the national parliaments with no constitutional support.

My country, and I'm sure most of the EU, isn't sovereign anymore when it comes to transposing EU laws^W directives (assuming they regard a domain where the EU is allowed to legislate, I suppose). The constitutional amendment was done a little before the constitutional treaty tried for ratification.

Don't you mean a ->federation<- ?

Switzerland is a confederation. Its 26 states have a lot of power, through the senate, state majority on national votes as well as sovereign areas like state taxes, education, state traffic. However, within boundaries, the Swiss national parliament can overrule state parliaments any day (and national people votes can overrule pretty much anything anyway).

No, I mean confederation.

Switzerland is a confederation in name and by tradition only, but has had all the features of a federation since 1848.

After civil war in 1847, the new constitution was drawn up expressly to create a federal central government to replace the weak old con-federate governments, and to have the cantons cede some of their sovereignty to it, in the same was the US Constitution had the states cede sovereignty in certain areas - the Swiss constitution of 1848 was to a large extent influenced by the US Constitution.

The current constitutions official name even translates to the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation.

My bad, I always thought the definition of Confederation to be a more closer coupled federation, but it's the other way round. I think we were being taught the wrong way.

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