Comment by krick
2 days ago
It's "not on the way", really. It is explicitly designed not to be democratic in any meaningful sense from the very beginning. It is not even a secret: the council work is intentionally opaque so that the actual people responsible for all this horrible stuff cannot be held accountable by the public. This is explicitly stated to be a feature, justified that it helps it all be more technocratic and less populist.
Seriously, the only reason why it takes place IMO is just that nobody ever cares to think for a moment how decisions are made in the EU, so everyone is somewhat indifferent and there's no mass attention to the fact, that the general public ability to affect EU decision is near zero, far, far less than USA or Russia and probably even China.
Which would be fine, if it was just a trade union like originally designed. I really love the original idea of EU. I could even get behind more federation style, although trade union is vastly preferable for me - but I do understand people pushing for it.
Yet EU has overstepped that ages ago, and you can see that with SKG recently. The only tool we, as citizens, have to actually try to affect EC is effectively useless. EC can be wined and dined by lobbyists, including outside of official recorded proceedings(!) and can just ignore you.
Not to mention a lot of other systems in EU were made with idea that countries would operate for their own best interest, and that interest was aligned for every member state:
- Shared energy market, which was crashed by Germany ideologically decommissioning nuclear power plants in middle of energy crisis.
- Free movement of people within Schengen area - which is crashed by countries taking mass of immigrants which they think they need(i don't live there so i won't judge), but then they can move around whole of the area - including the countries with vastly stricter regulations for migration.
- Digital euro as a backdoor to enforce transition to euro across the whole area, limiting the ways in which member states can dictate their own monetary policy. Digital euro must be accepted by all vendors across EU - even in the countries not using euro at all.
And that's ignoring slippery slope towards CDBC with expiration date.
- erosion of free speech and constant doublethink language, and noticing flaws in EU is undemocratic/euroskeptical(biggest sin possible) - even if it comes from "how to improve EU" point of view. or even if one points out that EU itself isn't democratic.
- double loyalty in case of politicians where there's a conflict between national and European interest. Do you pursue national benefit, or do you go against it in such cases and hop onto EU track - where there are plenty of unelected positions?
and also double loyalty in case of EC members - they should pursue good of all EU by their own charter, but there's no punishment nor anything systemic to discourage them from abusing their power and pursuing national interests.
All of those are minor or major flaws that slowly fracture EU. And by this point I don't think the system can be reformed.