I'm all for European unity, but if a country is only half-committed to joining the EU, it probably should not be allowed to join under the assumption that EU support will continue to grow.
I am still stunned that Brexit was left to a 50% + epsilon referendum.
It's likely that majority support would have evaporated as soon as any leave deal was reached. No deal would have satisfied all the different reasons people voted leave.
Only Johnson was able to cut that Gordion Knot, albeit by lying to people to their face.
To be fair, Parliament forced a delay from Oct 2019 to Jan 2020, to ensure that there was some sort of agreement in place. And then it passed because there was a one-year transitionary period until Jan 2021 during which the UK stayed in the single market.
And now we've voted in a PM who promises building closer ties with the EU. And eventually the generation that rabidly voted to leave will disappear. Progress marches on slowly.
In the end we had an opportunity to reverse it, in 2017 and 2019, but said “no”
In Australia, a constitutional referendum requires a double majority to pass: both a majority nationally, and a state-wide majority in a majority of states (so at least 4 out of 6).
Unlike Australia, the UK has no written constitution, and is a unitary state with devolution instead of a federation. Still, Brexit was undeniably a constitutional-level issue, and taking the constituent countries as the analog to states, they could have adopted the same "double majority" rule in the UK for the Brexit referendum. And if they had, the referendum would have failed: it got a majority nationwide, but in only two out of four constituent countries (England and Wales but not Scotland and Northern Ireland).
A big problem the UK has – which Brexit has arguably only worsened – is its extreme lopsidedness – one of the constituent countries (England) is over 80% of the population, so a big enough English majority on any issue can override the will of the other three constituent countries. And yet there are essentially no constitutional provisions to protect against this. Adopting a "double majority" for the Brexit referendum would have been a small step in the direction of doing so, at least by establishing a precedent.
[0] The fact that it was legally non-binding is not an issue: the legislation could have simply specified the conditions under which the referendum would be "deemed to pass", and require some appropriate government official to make a formal declaration as to whether those conditions had been met or not.
requiring a double majority to leave would the definition of stacking the deck in your favour
In 1973, the UK was much closer to a pure unitary state – there was no Scottish Parliament, no Welsh Parliament; the existing devolution in Northern Ireland (the Parliament of Northern Ireland) had just been abolished the previous year and the attempts to reinstate it in 1974 and 1982 proved to be short-lived failures. By 2016 there was a devolved Scottish Parliament, a devolved Welsh Assembly (designated a Parliament in 2020), and a devolved Northern Ireland assembly.
I think the evolution of devolution (pardon the pun) is a recognition that the UK needed stronger protections for Scottish/Welsh/Northern Irish rights against the English supermajority, and a "double majority" for constitutional-level national referendums would be a step further in that direction.
The UK joined the EEC, a very different institution
It seems like democracy really is an experiment representative of our hope of human cooperation, and yet I'm constantly reminded that the way we actually implement and enact is very far from that ideal.
> Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
There was nothing about what should happen if "leave" won.
The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
A simple question for a massively complex problem.
An "advisory" referendum that was guaranteed to be treated as legally binding (will of the people and all that).
Being advisory meant that it avoided what laws there were on referendum, like being able to disenfranchise UK expats of which there were a lot in the EU. Maybe this also allowed it to be a simple 50.1% majority as well, I forget.
Dominic Cummings and Vote Leave rang rings around everyone and got the result they wanted.
Politics is the art of the possible. The referendum was a once-in-a-generation chance to leave, voting for it was smart. If remain had won there's no way we would have left on any terms, nor reformed our relationship with the EU at all; quite the contrary.
https://policyexchange.org.uk/blogs/brics-and-the-commonweal...
It was in the question: leaving the EU. Leaving was what happened, and it wasn't particularly mysterious or complex.
> The referendum should have been for the UK to prepare a detailed plan for leaving the Union and then have a referendum on whether or not to implement that plan.
So they could rig the second? No, the EU wouldn't have agreed to any negotiations of the form "we might do it or we might not", and it would simply have pushed them to play even more hardball than they did (which in the end turned out to involve a lot of bluffing, many of their supposed red lines were crossed after the UK actually left).
Which would annoy the Brexitters that would like to defend vague remain instead of getting into the weeds, or just try to sell their own version of Brexit when it may end up being another version in the end. And the people who oppose voting reform. And I get the feeling the result would be remain wins by being the compromise second preference of a lot of voters.
You can play games with re-running things forever to try and get a Remain win, but the entire reason the referendum was run that way was an attempt to get a Remain win. That's why it was presented as an all-or-nothing vote when basically all the Eurosceptics who had been pushing for a referendum wanted something less than fully leaving to be on the menu (mostly a pile of reforms and much less distance/opting out of any future treaty changes/the ECJ/etc). Cameron specifically set it up as Leave/Remain because he thought nobody could countenance fully leaving and it would force a Remain (unreformed) victory. Obviously he was wrong.
Those opt ours were enshrined in the treaties. There was no way to rescind them without the consent of the UK. You’re constructing a straw man.
People were pretty ill informed and voted leave for reasons like they were pissed off with the present situation, or they didn't like foreigners.
Which they were entitled to do but have ended up with a worse situation and worse foreigners.
The problem with not proceeding following a "50% + epsilon" is you're then suddenly ignoring the majority of the electorate which has its own political backlash.
The trick is to not have a referendum unless the outcome likely to be definitive. This is actually codified in the Good Friday agreement as a condition for the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland to call an Irish unification referendum.
The referendum should have been two part. 1 want to leave or not? 2 how about this specific option (channel) or shall we forget the it all?
Why single out Hungary and Poland specifically? Is it worse than when Austria, Netherlands, France, etc. have a different opinion to the rest of the union and torpedo progress just to pander to the right wingers in their country?
Democracies in Europe. Hungary is at the lower end of the spectrum.
The removal of the former Polish government was largely driven by public disapproval of state fund mismanagement. In Hungary, a key element of the current government's platform appears to be the promotion of national identity, including ties with diaspora communities formed after WWI (The Treaty of Trianon), potentially with implications for future "geopolitical alignments" (the likelihood of which is debatable).
These results, while influenced by the d'Hondt system, reflect the sentiment of the voting population, which is a democratic process, in principle. The ruling methods are not 100% democratic though (rule of majority with respect for minority rights)
However, the opinions of my "more Western friends" on those topics "diverge from on-the-ground realities".
"Public" TV had literal North Korea level of propaganda too.
Even the (useless and bad) SMS service used to warn about bad weather... send out texts to remind old people to vote.
That's hilarious (not), given that so much discourse is about just how much democracy should be shaved off to get the desirable Democratic(tm) results (Supermajority for Brexit! Ban AFD! et al.).
We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.
The Qualified Majority Vote has been being used in increasing scope of policy areas for many years.
QMV was part of stuff from the 1986 SEA, and got a major boost in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, since it was recognised as practically being necessary to make any progress towards (and within) the Single Market.
In practice most decisions are still technically unanimous, because it looks better politically and it doesn't cost anything more (since a majority can simply pass whatever they want, they are not forced to concede anything to the obstructionists; with the newer rules, it's smarter for any isolated bloc to immediately trade any publicly-stated opposition for any minor favour they can get).
This is the reason why Orban, despite all his bombast, has no influence whatsoever on the actual decisions; but also why German resistance against overdue fiscal reforms has basically melted.
Here are 2 recent reports
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/10/24/people-br...
https://encompass-europe.com/comment/clear-support-for-eu-me...
Also, as an European I know virtually no people opposing EU membership, when there are, it's generally less educated people thinking that the economy or whatever would be better.
It appears that opposing EU membership is kind of a taboo, and many educated people are afraid to express their opinion on the subject. Which tells you all you need to know about the legitimacy of EU.
To prevent that from happening there needs to be a resistance to EU expanding its power, and the most effective way countries can do that is to threaten to leave.
One is simple. EU does not have a single language. There is are shared values, shared vision, shared culture, or shared identity among regular people.
The cards are stacked against EU being succesful.
Both the far right and far left opposes the EU openly in France. Even amongst EU supporters there is a fair deal of criticisms levelled at the organisation.
I think your alleged taboo is very much self imposed.
You should be very careful with these kinds of sentiments. Openly contemptuous elitism is how we ended up with Trump in US.
In addition to contemptuous elitism and Trump, there is also agreement that the US is very divided.
Also, as the posts above suggest, people who oppose people who oppose the EU, do not meet these people with the same proportion they appear to exist according to polls. Which matches my experience that educated people are afraid to express their opposition to the EU.
Still does not prove causality, because causality on such an issue cannot be proven.
You need to look into second-order effects in order to get a clue what is happening. First second-order clue is that people are afraid to express their opinion. The second one is that opinion is very polarized and people are divided on the issue into "us" and "them", i.e. divided.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2016-eu-refere...
And statistical correlation based on census data?
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/educational-attain...
I remember the spikes in these kinds of editorials starting somewhere in early 10s.
It also happened with the Brexit, where it was mostly less educated workers and farmers supporting Brexit, exactly the demographic that got hurt the most by it.
The single clearest indicator was age. Old people - million who have died since 2016 - voted out, young people who have to live with the devious voted remain.
> University graduates and those with higher qualifications predominantly voted to remain. Blue-collar workers, particularly in traditional industrial areas and manual labor jobs, overwhelmingly supported Brexit. Reasons included economic discontent, perceived competition from EU migrants, and a desire for national sovereignty.
As usual, it's only people that have very low capacity to understand a complex world, those that are easier to sell dreams about "sovereignity" that end up screwing their own lives.
Somehow the same happens in the US where conservatives can win even while openly promoting policies against workers (but it's always easy to promise more manufacturing jobs and america first).
Being a farmer didn’t seem to make much difference one you remove other factors like age and education.
One of their manipulations is to promote the dismissal of expert opinion as "elitism" and that the "elites" are contemptuous of "the ordinary American".
It's bullshit and always has been factually incorrect.
Any funny enough, they still want to keep the parts that the Eurosceptics are fighting tooth and nail from being enacted :)
IMO the EU regulation doesn't go far enough as it excludes banning AI for "military use".
Had russia attacked a NATO country of the EU directly, said country would have been at a disadvantage.
There have been reports of experiments with autonomous drones in the russia-Ukraine war.
If the EU bans AI for military uses and our adversaries do not, I am afraid someday we will regret our mistake. But it will be too late.
None of what I mentioned necessarily implies a war crime, as far as I know.
The reason why Russia doesn't do this to Ukraine as a whole is because it is fighting this war with the ultimate goal of occupying and annexing Ukraine, so why would it destroy valuable resources like infrastructure and people needed to maintain it unless it serves some other goal? OTOH when it does serve some other goal (e.g. actually advancing the frontline), they have zero qualms about doing the same exact thing Israel does. I mean, Russia doesn't care all that much about lives of its own soldiers, given the kinds of tactics routinely used.
How Europe would be treated would similarly depend on what the goals of the war from Russian perspective would be.
Carpet bombing is tricky when your planes get blown out of the sky on a regular basis and your industry can't replace them as easily as it can replace artillery shells. That's the main reason why they're using glide bombs and missiles instead.
Oh, and you don't need to look at Mosul or Raqqa to see other examples, either. Grozny, in either the first or the second Chechen war, is a nice illustration of how Russia fight wars.
What is your basis for this belief?
This is an unprecedentely low civilian casualty count for a conflict of this intensity and duration. Such high ratio of military to civilian casualties has not been observed since WW1.
A quote: "The latest available assessment by the World Bank, European Commission, United Nations and Ukrainian government found that direct war damage in Ukraine had reached $152 billion as of December, 2023, with housing, transport, commerce and industry, energy and agriculture the worst-affected sectors." [1] By now, it should be over 200 billion.
The reasons why Russia failed to cause more damage have nothing to do with demoraphics, good will, or anything like that. After all, Russia sent to death hundreds of thousands of ITS OWN citizens. Had it cared about russian lives as much as you are trying to whitewash here, it would not have been fighting this war to begin with.
The real reasons why Russia has not caused more damage or killed more civilians, are, first, it has failed to achieve air superiority. Second, Ukraine, with the help of its allies, was able to set up more less effective air defense against missiles and drones.
"Nearly 12,000 missiles have been launched against Ukraine by Russia since this full-scale conflict started.
Some 80% of those have been intercepted by Ukraine." [2]
The number of drones must be comparable or higher.
The limited number of civilian casualties is easily explained by the number of refugees from Ukraine which is in the millions. Its definity not because Russia did not try too hard.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/what-russias-invasion-h...
Neither does the Ukraine or the US.
In one word: Good.
I hope to see even more "stupid AI regulation" in the future, fingers crossed.
Recently I benefited from a "stupid regulation" mandating minimum Internet speeds carriers need to provide. How dare the policy makers interfere with the extortionate prices every single ISP in the market colluded to impose on the population. Muh liberty!
Care to explain how any of that is undemocratic?
Even an extremely unpopular commissioner is at no risk of being voted out. For many years the UK's representative was disgraced former disgraced former MP Peter *Mandelson, one of the most hated people in the country, who could never have won any remotely democratic contest.
I think it’s a stretch to call Mandelson “one of the most hated people in the country”. What did he do exactly? By this point I’m sure the average person has mostly forgotten that he exists.
You are right, however, about the lack of real democratic accountability in the EU. The EU commission is the place to “fail up” - it’s where politicians go after their democratic viability has run out at home and the voters boot them out.
He had at least the image of a slimeball "spin doctor", seen as having control over the media and using it to control the narrative and cover up government wrongdoing. He was definitely publicly hated even before it emerged that he'd taken a bribe^Wundeclared interest-free loan from a person he was responsible for investigating. You're right that he's mostly forgotten nowadays.
Commissioners are proposed by their country and discussed with the head of the commission (which was selected by the whole European council) before being validated by the parliamentary committee in charge of its portfolio (composed of MEPs which are elected using direct universal suffrage and proportional representation (you can hardly be more democratic than that).
I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.
Well, no, they're proposed by the government of their country. Which generally means they're selected by the ruling party in that country.
> I understand that you have had issue in the past with the UK pick as commissioner. Sadly the UK uses first past the post election and has a party-chosen prime minister. I would thank you for not projecting the results of the poor democratic system used by your country on the Union in the future.
Huh? Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to) redouble the problem - you lose democratic accountability even at that lower level.
Yes, that’s how democracy works. Countries have elected governments.
> Party list systems (which is what alternatives to FPTP tend to boil down to)
Huh? It’s a proportional system and everyone is free to present their own list if they disagree with the existing organisation presenting lists. The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country is not magically a loss of democratic accountability.
This is one of those "the law in its majestic equality" things. It's not practically possible to compete with the full-time political parties without being a full-time political party. And a society that separates its politicians from its people is as bad as that quote about separating its scholars from its warriors.
> The fact that you can’t be bothered to take part in the political life of your country
I get involved, more at a local level, but at a national level I vote, and occasionally I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable. Piss off your constituents enough and it doesn't matter how much the party likes you. Which is a system I'm very happy with, and something that's deeply missing from the EU.
So you hate all modern democracies actually and it has nothing to do with the EU. Thank you that makes things a lot more clear.
> I write to my MP - who is a named individual representing a fairly small number of people who can therefore actually hold him accountable
It can be exactly the same for MEP. Countries are free to use a per region vote if they want. Turn out the UK chose to have national lists but France had 8 regional zones until 2018. It was entirely a UK decision.
Plus all MEP’s votes are public and easy to consult and they all have an address you can write to. The fact that people don’t even bother remembering how they are called is not per se a deficit of democracy in the EU.
The European Parliament is elected every few years by citizens in all member states.
The European Commission is nominated by the European Council and and confirmed by the European Parliament.
The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
It may be a little complicated, but it's all rooted in democratic processes. Please stick to the facts and keep the populistic anti-EU nationalistic propaganda to yourself.
(Every kid in the EU has been learning those basic facts in school for decades, making it surprising that this populist nonsense still catches on with so many people. I have an easier time forgivin non-EU folks, but even those should check the facts before claiming things.)
> The European Council consists of government officials from the member states where they have been chosen by national democratic processes.
I disagree. Successful elected government officials from member states aren't governing the EU Commission and Council. They're governing their own member states, where they are elected by the public.
Unpopular, unsuccessful ex-government officials from member states are governing the EU, where they are appointed by bureaucrats.
Just look at the uninspiring Commissioners we've suffered over the last few years.
It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
https://facts4eu.org/news/2024_dec_unpopular_eu_I
In her home country Germany, only 33% said she'd make a good Commission president.
https://www.politico.eu/article/most-germans-skeptical-of-ur...
Von der Leyen was not appointed by bureaucrats.
> It's telling that the Von Der Leyen Commission scraped in with just 51.4% of MEP votes.
That's nothing special in European voting systems. Various governments (regional or country wide) in Germany have small, but relatively stable majorities provided by coalitions. That's very different to the mostly two-party systems in the US or the UK.
It's not clear who specifically did the ceremonial nomination, but it was probably the CDU bureaucracy that made the decision.
Generally about the appointment of the commission:
https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/how-commissi...
Right, and like most large organisations it has a bureaucracy.
> Generally about the appointment of the commission
Right, note the vague "suggestions from member states". (Also note that the claimed accountability points have never been activated in practice)
Ursula on der Leyen was 2019 supported by Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) as the future president of the EU commission. That's no secret. Macron also supported her. The European Council then nominated Ursula on der Leyen and she was accepted by the European Parliament. The Parliament is directly elected the citizens of the European Union.
The election of her was kind of unfortunate, since it was signalled by parties that the election to the parliament will also find the proposed EU commission president. But that was not the case. Since a candidate was not found (various parties and governments were not happy with the proposed candidates), the European Council finally proposed Ursula von der Leyen, which then also got a majority in the parliament.
Look, I don't like lots of things about the EU either. But the first step to being able to change sth is to acknowledge the facts. Claiming that von der Leyen wasn't democratically appointed is similar to Trump claiming the 2020 election was stolen. Not a great start.
Now there's an oxymoron if ever I saw one!
Where democracy is involved, we use the word "elected" -- not "appointed"
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/crisis-behind-the-euroc...
From Chapter 6: 'The Inherently Undemocratic EU Democracy'
'A number of prominent public intellectuals put pen to paper to warn not only of a crisis of European democracy, but of a crisis of the very ‘political institution’ of democracy, and particularly its representative and liberal variants. Contemporary manifestations of the ‘hollowing out’ of democracy following the Eurocrisis have taken many forms and several contributions in this volume have dealt with various aspects of the phenomenon.'
' .... a crisis of the EU’s own democratic credentials. Even as they insisted on its purely economic character, commentators were quick to criticise the undemocratic form that the emergency EMU-related responses to the Eurocrisis came to assume, particularly at the European level, where not only parliamentary processes, but also the Treaties’ legal prescriptions, were systematically circumvented'.
But the flat out denial that EU is in principle a democratic system is just a too simplistic view. It tends to be mostly touted by those populists who ultimately would like to see an authocratic state with themselves in charge.
Those will craft narratives that are patently untrue to drive their agenda.
Most folks still had the view that UK Parliament was in charge, not really appreciating the change. That also applied to our MPs, hence the Factomane cases.
Now if there had bee proper education in the UK as to the impact of EEC and EU membership, possibly Brexit would not have happened.