The European Union is celebrating its 50th anniversary, but citizens in most nation are understandably underwhelmed. As an article at Foreignpolicy.com explains, the European Union is a remarkably anti-democratic institution.
Today’s EU resembles a sort of undemocratic Habsburg Empire. Its legislation is proposed by a Commission of unelected bureaucrats who have now apparently lost control of their own staffs and who themselves are usually political outcasts from their national political systems. Decisions on whether to adopt their often bizarre initiatives are then taken in total secrecy by the Council of Ministers or the European Council, before being rubber-stamped by the federalist parliament and imposed on the citizens of member states, whose national legislatures can do absolutely nothing to alter their directives or regulations. Indeed, 84 percent of all legislation before national parliaments, according to the German Ministry of Justice, now simply involves implementing Brussels diktats. All this makes European politics undemocratic at all levels, and opinion polls reflect the public’s growing disillusionment.
Daniel Schwammentahl of the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, notes that politicians who favor more European centralization treat voters as obstacles to be overcome in their drive for a more powerful bureaucracy in Brussels:
…as Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the former French President and main drafter of the constitution, said last year, rejecting his chef d’oeuvre “was a mistake which will have to be corrected.” In other words, Europeans are given a free vote as long as they vote for what the Brussels mandarins think is best for them. In a newspaper interview last week, Ms. Merkel diagnosed a certain alienation between the EU and its citizens, the root cause of which she located in the people’s alleged impatience with the slow pace of decision making in Brussels. “To change that we need an EU constitutional treaty,” she said. Come again? The chancellor wants to fight the citizens’ alienation by ignoring democratic votes that expressed that very alienation?
