Comment by ktosobcy
2 days ago
Erm... it's as democratic as it possibly can be when it comes to a union of independend, sovereign states...
We do have EP with directly elected MEPs; we have CoE which is indirectly elected but still represents the "will of the people" but on the state level; then we have the European Council which is also in a way representative of state interest and then we have indirectly elected by the aformentioned European Comission.
The concept of indirectly elected representatives is not new - in most democracies you vote for MPs and they then form the government and choose prime minister.
Given that the EU is "one level up" it complicates stuff. We could argue that we could make it completely democratic and only have the parliment but this would completely sidetrack any influence of the state.
So if we want to maintain the balance we have this convoluted system.
Ideally EP should have legislative initiative rights and the president of the EC should be elected more transparently (for example the vote in EP should be public).
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.
By your definition there is virtually no democratic entity in this world :)
> Anything else is green washing.
you mean "democracy-washing"? ;)
The world is not perfect. Striving for perfection is futile...
That's what I said yes, by it's very definition, no current contemporary government is a democracy.
I'm not necessarily picky with every word we use informaly. As you noticed with green washing, which here was colloquially used as "bullshit to pretend to be virtuous because manipulating public opinion open some hope to control its behavior".
But when it comes to the official fundamental statement of what the government ruling people is pretending to be, I do expect something more aligned with the first degree interpretation of the words.
Republic means there is no State secret.
Democracy means that citizen rules and decides the laws.
I have the firm conviction that asking better than newspeak level nomenclature is not asking for perfection. That just mere basic honesty.
Consenting that utter lies to serve as base political denomination with the excuse that nothing is perfect is just lazily opening doors to broader harsher lies for those willing to gain carte blanche on exercising political power with a flow of void sentences.