Comment by Xelbair
10 hours ago
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.
This brings up a structural issue with the EU as it is designed right now - trying to give maximum power to nation states.
A unitary state would solve that problem by allowing us to have simple, Union-wide elections instead.
The irony is that this is all because the EU was specifically designed to not supercede its member states. In other words, they repeated the same mistake[0] the US did. Fixing it - i.e. ditching all the appointed positions that are responsive to nation states only - would amount to federalizing the EU.
"But why can't we just leave the EU to stop this" - too late. Most EU countries have enough intra-EU migration and trade to make leaving unthinkable. The UK was a special case - and, ironically enough, actually responsible for some of the EU's worst decisions.
Furthermore, this isn't exactly an EU exclusive problem. Every supranational organization that is responsive to member states and not individual voters is a policy laundering mechanism. Ask yourself: where's your representation in the WTO, and when did you vote for them? The sum of democracy and democracy is dictatorship. Any governing body that does not respect all of its voters equally is ripe for subsumption by people who do not respect them at all.
[0] Originally, US senators were appointed by state governors. This eventually resulted in everyone voting for whatever governor promised to appoint the senator the voter wanted. Which is sort of like throwing away your gubernatorial vote for a senatorial one. This is why we amended the constitution to allow direct election of senators, and I hold that any sovereign nation that makes the mistake of appointed politicians will inevitably have to either abandon it or fail.
In the UK all I can do is vote for my member of parliament. The victorious member may or may not get in with a majority of votes (about half get under 50%)
They then in effect elect a Prime Minister, who appoints an executive, who create laws and then put them to parliament
In the US you can vote for the leader of the executive directly. 64% of Vermont voted for Harris, yet they still got Trump.
> in practice it is even more skewed towards 'no' for chat control
My understanding is that the public as a whole do not want chat control, yet the democratically elected heads of each member government do want it. The problem here is the democratically elected heads of each member government.
Doesn't take many council members to be against it to stop it in its tracks.