Comment by arlort
6 hours ago
Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works so when a vote to give first approval to a text is cancelled before it takes place journalists and reddit all over pull out the mission accomplished banners and when a negotiating position is approved everyone has a surprised pikachu face
The "proposal" was made something like 3 years ago, the killing never happened and the passing, if it passes, will happen in at least one year from now because this will definitely take a long time to get through parliament and even longer to get through the trilogue.
The process is many things but quick it is not
This is of course a process, that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span. People don't manage to remember things that happened in politics 4 years ago in their own country. Now they are required to follow up on dozens of shitty proposals, all probably illegal in their own country, and those don't even happen in their own country? That divides the number of people, who even start looking into this stuff by a factor of 1000 or so.
what do you mean, a slow bureaucracy is a democratic bureaucracy. the last thing you want is a highly efficient bureaucracy enacting change quickly.
This message brought to you by the Bureau of Sabotage
There is nothing democratic about the process. It's all unelected politicians ruling for you
4 replies →
Is there a website that tracks these? That would be a nice divulgation process.
There is the Parliament's legislative train website [1]. However, it only tracks actual legislative steps, not the intra-Council negotiations, so the proposal's page appears to be have been largely inactive since 2024 [2].
[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/
[2] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-a-new...
People’s attention span has decreased to a matter of days now, if not hours. Have you seen how quickly front page news in the US is forgotten?
The democratic process needs a revamp but it shouldn’t be driven by the general populations attention span.
I wouldn't be so sure of that assertion regarding attention span. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance granted, it's about opinion rather than capability but the same bias would explain such a reflexive judgment, and such a judgment will have negative consequences if it is false. (Consensus can be shaped, as can the perception of consensus be.)
People on average are really not that stupid and are absolutely capable of looking back a few years for context.
Tell me more about that, while here in Germany people again and again vote against their own interest (AfD, CDU, SPD, and all the other corrupt and inept politicians and parties) and the mainstream parties have not managed to improve our situation for some 4-5 election cycles. Tell me more about that, while looking at the US. I am quite sure many other countries can be added to this list.
We clearly live in different worlds.
1 reply →
>> that does not lend itself to be democratic, because it is way longer than most people's attention span
The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
That could still be democratic in principle if it weren’t for lobbyists
If legislative processes are so drawn out and complex that no more than a handful of ordinary citizens could keep track of them, the advantage that paid lobbyists have over the public is enormous
1 reply →
Is the process democratic if citizen's opinions are irrelevant?
No matter who's in charge, no matter the election results, no matter the protests - the same style of legislation is pushed.
and once something's in it is almost impossible to remove.
1 reply →
> The attention span of the general public _shouldn't_ matter. That's why we elect politicians.
It would work if we could elect politicians who were both competent and trustworthy.
Of course that would require successfully electing people who are competent about a broad range of issues, able to see through well funded and clever lobbying, unblinded by ideology, and able to resist pressure.
The issue is not with the lack of understanding of "process". But sheer frustration because there's nothing you can do as just a citizen. An unelected council of !notAyatollah has decided, and this thing is being pushed at glacier slow pace.
If EU is a trade union this is a severe overreach, if EU wants to be a federation, there's not enough checks and balances. This is the crux of the problem.
The issue is that this is a legislation that only ones in power want(censorship on communications channel where they themselves are exempt from it), that has been pushed over and over again under different names(it goes so far back - it started with ACTA talks and extreme surveillance proposals to fight copyright violations) and details in implementation and/or excuse(this time we get classic "think of the children")
The Council is a meeting of the heads of state, all of which are elected in their respective countries.
Your problem is with the leadership of countries, not with the EU as an institution. I agree that it is a problem btw, but I think you got the wrong culprit. This isn't pushed on the states by the EU, this is the states using the EU to push it and launder the bad publicity.
My problem is that i as a citizen can vote for my heads of state, but if other parts of EU decided something my vote is null and void, EVEN if majority of EU citizens are against such issue.
Imagine is those issues were campaign promises and part of internal(country's) elections - they aren't in reality but we can set that aside for now. as it was extremely well said by sibling post.
My country is 80% against 20% in favor(in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control!), other EU countries are 51% for, 49% against.
Yet such 'vote' by heads of state counts whole countries in,if you were to count individual votes majority of EU citizens would be against it.
This allows you to pass undesirable or extremely contentious legislation, that would most likely prevent you from being elected in the future in your local elections but you can easily shift the blame too!
This is as far form democracy as possible, it is pure bureaucracy that serves it's own goals.
3 replies →
The culprit is correct. If the EU exists for political laundering, then it is the organisation which is harmful to the people's interests. Nobody voted for any of these heads of states on a platform of enacting Chat Control. That was not on the ballot or the platform of any party in any individual EU country. If it was, they would not have voted for it. If an individual party tried to initiate a chat control bill in its own country, it would surely face a massive reckoning at the next election[1]. Therefore, an individual party would likely not undertake to enact chat control. It is the existence of the EU which is enabling politicians to force undesirable legislation on their populace. In that environment, it is entirely correct to call the EU an un-democratic process. If it exists to pass legislation nobody would vote for and take the blame, then it will in fact be rightfully at blame and provide a strong motivation for people to exit the EU.
[1] In fact, we have helpfully seen this play out with our friendly early exiter. The remarkably self-destructive Labour party has passed their own absolute nonsense "online safety" bill, and are likely to be utterly destroyed in the next election with repealing the bill being part of the platform of the party that is polling at ~twice the share of the next largest party. With the EU providing blame-as-a-service, though, it is unlikely that anybody will be able to repeal Chat Control once rammed through, without exiting the EU entirely.
3 replies →
> Because it doesn't, people are just embarrassingly ignorant of how the EU legislative process works
Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
Complicated, sure, but opaque? EU is incredibly transparent – the amount of information on the European Council website [1] is daunting. There are vote results, meeting schedules, agendas, background briefs, lists of participants, reports, recordings of public council sessions, and so on and so on. All publicly available in each of the 24 EU official languages for whoever cares enough to look. And it's not just the council! The EU Treaties and Charter of Fundamental Rights of the EU gives any EU citizen the right to access documents possessed by EU institutions, bodies, offices and agencies (with a few exceptions for eg. public security and military matters) [2].
The problem is mostly the sheer amount of things going on, you couldn't possibly keep up with it all.
[1] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/
[2] https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/document/en/163352
They're not complicated for anyone with above room temperature IQ. And they're almost identical to how it works in the member countries anyway
And in a democracy if you don't know how your own laws are made the fault is always yours as a voter
Identical in every respect other than those with the power to initiate legislation are completely immune to voter displeasure. The Commission have no direct link to the electorate and the your country's (sorry, “state”) Council representatives can hide behind collective consensus.
7 replies →
Why do people get so defensive about obviously flawed processes? This reply reads like a 4chan comment written by a frustrated teenager
1 reply →
"The plans for scanning your chats were on display for fifty Earth years at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri"?
Nobody's attention span is infinite. I don't doubt I could understand all details of the EU legislative process and keep track of what sort of terrible proposals are underway if I put in the time, but I have a day job, hobbies that are frankly more interesting, and enough national legislation to keep track of.
If you then also say that the outcome is still my responsibility as a voter, then it seems like the logical solution is that I should vote for whatever leave/obstruct-the-EU option is on the menu. I don't understand why I am obliged to surrender either a large and ever-growing slice of my attention or my one-over-400something-million share of sovereignty.
5 replies →
[flagged]
> Hmm, now whose fault is it that the EU institutions are so complicated and opaque? The citizens? The journalists? Or maybe...?
They are not. People just don't bother themselves to spend half a calory in brain power to read even the Wikipedia page about it, and just repeat shit they read in forum posts.
I mean, here on HN, a website where people are supposedly slightly above average in terms of being able to read shit, the amount of times I read how EU is "bureacrats in Brussels" "pushing hard for changes" is weird.