Comment by uyzstvqs

Democratic or undemocratic are always subjective terms. For me personally, the level of indirection is a problem. This problem was known since the inception and the reason why the subsidiarity principle was underlined. Sadly, that doesn't seem to apply for important issues like chat control. Imagine accountability on a communal level. We wouldn't even see this crap.

You cannot just add 100 layers of indirection and call it as democratic as direct representatives of your smallest communal voting unit. Any mandate in more indirect position should become weaker if the only metric is indeed democracy.

The EU isn't undemocratic, but it feels undemocratic to many, and that's a legitimacy issue worth taking seriously

> What you are proposing would amount replacing the current bicameral legislature with a unicameral legislature.

Note they wrote "Start by removing...", not "Finish with". You could remove Council of the EU and then create another "upper house". But its personnel would have to be nominated differently. Perhaps directly elected? But that would be tough.

Re the direct vs indirect election, note that in some countries governments do not have to consist of MPs. Like currently in France, you have a directly elected president who then nominates whoever to be his head of government and ignore the parliament for a while. And that government has a say in the Council. And at that point it's good to answer the question, at which level of indirection can we say there is a deficit of democracy?

Also note that it's quite unusual for a democracy that the 'lower house' (EP) does not have legislative initiative, can't propose laws. Is that a deficit of democracy yet?

Of course I understand it's all because national governments do not want create another centre of power, but the issues are very real.

You are not only being far too generous in your rationalization for how the EU is democratic and representative but are making category mistakes.

The founders of America were very much not fans of democracy beyond a loose similarity through representation of the will of the people, which is precisely why they had indirect elections of the US Senate and President that actually gave rural areas more power to balance and prevent power concentration in urban areas and the federal government. The federal government, what you think of as the USA, was never supposed to be this powerful.

It always baffles me that even in this programming, systems, networks, etc. focused community it seems that the majority of people have approaching zero ability to think through systems’ effects in a systematic manner.

Sure, call the EU democratic if you want to bend every characteristic, squint, ignore, stretch, and rationalize to the point of exhaustion; but no matter what, representative of the will let alone the interest of the people, the EU is not in any way. It is actually obviously and clearly a hostile and even an existential enemy of the various peoples and cultures of Europe.

Your category mistakes are made in things like calling the council the upper chamber. If you can ascribe that role to anything at all in the EU, you can squint hard and say that would be the Commission, but I even loathe saying that because it is also just so wrong because the EU is such a perversion of all systems associated with democracy. It’s basically all just a kabuki theater to give the illusion of authority through process. That is quite literally what it was designed for to defraud the people of control over their own government, as in the self-governance.

The council is a political body of coordination, it quite literally has no direct role on the legislative process and it also is largely comprised of people who are elected by several layers of abstraction and also basically just rubber stamp “laws” that went through the kabuki theater of fake democratic process.

It varies, but just take Germany as an example since there seem to beer many Germans here; Merz is the representative from Germany, he was not elected by the people, he was elected by representatives in the German lower chamber, which is comprised of people who are also not directly elected as Germany is a system of party politics where the best brown-nosers are elected among the party apparatchiks to represents the party in order of brown-nosing based on party election results. The people did not elect those representatives in the lower chamber.

For any Americans reading this, it would be like when you vote for your House Representative, you don’t actually vote for anyone who Is directly accountable to you as a person in the district, you vote either Democrat, Republican, {fill in the party} and then the party decides who it wants to send to the House after the election.

But it gets worse. That “election” of Merz was accomplished by an “alliance” of parties that include major losers of the last election and also excludes the major winners of that election in direct opposition of the will of the people, regardless of what you personally think of the parties or the electorate. So imagine if your party made major electoral advances, but it was still excluded from the government. And that’s just not even EU fake democracy, that’s just lower level German representative democracy veneer.

What you are trying to sell as democracy here, let alone representation of the will of the people, is basically nothing but the EU being democratic homeopathy, only it’s actually lethal and existential poison wrapped in delicious food… if I can extend and mix metaphors here.

America has its own problems and the current perversion of the government is a direct antithesis to what the founders created or at least tried to create; but at least for the time being in America, regardless of how perverted and polluted this subsystem has also become, Americans still can elect their representatives directly in the form of US House members that are directly accountable to the electorate.

The American system is many levels flatter than basically everything in the EU, not even to mention the several layers of abstraction from democracy on the country level, and ignoring the state level.

In effect, even though my EU friends seem to not want to believe their lying eyes because then it would make it true to them, the EU is an elaborate bait and switch to deliberately, methodically, and systematically disposed and depose the people of self-governance. It is why and how Europe is being at the same time dismantled and destroyed at its core, while at the same time being all polished and nice looking wrapped in all kinds of marketing propaganda/PR. It’s basically like a garbage construction mega-McMansion built on destroying several pristine, unique ecosystems that cause the extinction of thousands of species, but the conical owners who built it through loan fraud are extremely proud of their gaudy palace of decadence and self-destruction.

As an Australian normally subject to two upper houses (the current state I happen to live in is the only unicameral state) that seems very counter intuitive

The way it seems to work in practice (here at least) is most partisan/normative legislation goes through the lower house upwards

And bipartisan (or broadly unpopular or highly technical) legislation goes from the upper house down

It’s more complicated than that, but a one way flow committee sounds extremely restrictive for meaningful reform

A small number of pathways is a good thing, one lone process is probably not (you risk over fitting on both sides)

Edit: Australian legislation has a lot of flaws, but this multimodal setup from my experience is not one of them

I think there’s a naming difficulty : the council of the European Union is the upper chamber, while the European council is not !

Do any member states follow the model of only the non directly elected upper house can propose legislation?

Wow, Apple paid 7M for 9 people to have 144 meetings with the EC. I'm in the wrong line of business.

On the other hand, I'm thinking can we find 9 unpaid volunteers on HN to do the same?

This site even has a disclaimer on the front page that its information is not necessarily accurate. Take it all with a grain of salt.

How does Swiss politics work? They also have multiple languages.

>WHY EU is undemocratic

The answer is simple. The EU institutions cannot be both directly elected and have executive authority over member states.

The reason is that by doing so one would create a conflict between the "democratic legitimacy" of the EU executive and the "democratic legitimacy" of national parliaments.

In the current model, the member states retain ultimate authority and democratic legitimacy through their delegates to the Council of Ministers.

No, for a time any criticism about EU democracy was brushed away. Especially at the time around Brexit. For obvious reasons. But they are undeniable in theoretical and practical terms. This is why the competence of the EU was restricted at first. Problem is that this restriction did get too loose.

Chat control should even be an EU issue. And few national states would be courageous enough to propose such legislation because the democratic accountability would be much stronger.

> and for almost all issues a veto

Notably ChatControl is not one of them.

Except the Commission and Von Der Leyen keep pushing to assert themselves as an executive branch.

Democracy is where people, or at least those given full citizenship, have a duty to debate and decide the rules they will be agreeing to follow, directly.

Anything else is green washing.

Sure we can always still keep nuances in the many actual regimes which pretend to be democratic. But still the baseline is to sell bullshit democracy.

Democracy require well educated citizen which are given the relevant resources and were raised with will to take the burden of civil service for life and dedication to thrive the whole society.

> candidates can only gather votes outside of their own country

Few people would do the homework of researching hundreds of candidates from other countries.

I don't think much abstraction or design is needed. We are looking at the output here and that is chat control. The EU will have to be measured against this output.

The unpopular legislative processes are pushed through via the EU isn't something new. And it is a very serious flaw that needs to be fixed.

> The EU does not so as time passes the EU's power keeps creeping up.

Actually, the EU has the same concept of enumerated powers (called "competences" in the case of the EU). They are listed in articles 2-6 TFEU [1]. You may argue over whether the EU has too many competences or (in some areas) too little, but it's the same principle. The EU cannot legislate outside areas where power has been expressly conferred to it by the treaties.

This is in fact one point of contention over the "chat control" legislation. It is supposed to be enacted under the "internal market" competence, but similar to the US commerce clause, there is a legal debate over whether that competence is actually sufficient to enable such legislation or whether it is legal cover for encroachment on competences reserved to the member states.

This would of course be up to the ECJ to decide, just as the US Suprement Court would have to decide if any given US federal legislation is covered by the commerce clause.

In addition, there is the Charter of Fundamental Rights, and the ECJ could also strike down EU legislation (as it has done before) if it violates the rights protected by the Charter.

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Consolidated_version_of_the_T...

The US has that in theory, just like the limits on the president. But in practice the US has been centralizing power since the start, and the EU has a looooong way to go to come even close.

The EU is not sovereign. Member countries can just outright ignore EU law (see: Hungary or the former UK) and the only recourses are civil things like issuing declarations, withholding payments, crossing them off treaties, or kicking them out of the EU. There are no EU police that can be involuntarily forced on a country the same way the USA can send armed federal police or military into its states. Doing anything like that would be a declaration of war.

A state is a monopoly on violence and EU member states overwhelmingly control their own.

This feels like a recipe for dysfunction and more paralysis.

The reason nothing gets done in the EU is because the power is too decentralized and we're not all pulling in the same direction. We're getting stuck in petty national interests instead of the European cause.

The fix is the exact opposite - take power from the nation states and centralize it in the EU. There's a reason the US became a single country and not loosely associated states.