Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ralfp | Hacker News Reader

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I'm from Poland.

We are seeing failure of trust in to EU because its terrible at PR. Its successes are taken as local governments successes ("our govt is awesome, it snatched the money from those bureaucrats for new architecture!") which failures are easily blamed on Brussels ("We wanted to rescure our failing Shipyards and coal mining, but Brussels tells us we can't because its unfair competition! In meantime French and Germans have no issues like that! This is unfair competition and favorism of west-dominated Union!").

Then you have usual of their weird decisions that are brought as example of overgrown bureaucracy without attempt to understand the reasoning behind it. "Hey, did you hear? Idiots in Brussels decided that snails are fish, what an idiots" the popular saying goes, meantime nobody cares that such decision saved EU from making up separate legislature for seafood farming and trade.

Then we have refugee crisis which is generally something considered result of poor decisions beind done in western EU side that it is trying shift the blame on across all of the union. The situation where in Poland is explictly named amongst the countries that show no solidarity while at same time we've accepted one million people from UA doesn't help neither.

With all of this going on, its easy for populist guys to gain widespread support. However situation in Poland where traditionalistic-populistic gov gained enough of majority to rule on its own is (IMHO) primarily the result of weak opposition, whose entire idea and programme was "we are saner than those other folk" but instead we've got liberal party apparently become traditionalist one with leaks after leaks of them doing disappointing deals with each other or private business. This effectively sank primary opposition party in polls.

They've also made some harsh steps to improve the grim future of our social security system via bumping retirement age as well as forcefully relocating bulk of private savings to the public fund.

http://www.reuters.com/article/poland-pensions-idUSL6N0H02UV...

Apparently there's trend in the polls going on for few weeks now giving them growing support, but its most likely the wave of popular disgust for current gov, which would be story from 2006 repeating itself. I'm unsure if they are capable of fixing things.

I think the problem is much deeper than that. There is not enough of a democratic process in the EU. It would have benefitted from an approach with much more direct democracy. Because then there is no favoritism, and people realize that they have it in their own hands.

But the quandry is that a more democratic EU requires constitutional change in most member states to cede sovereignty. The EU largely is the way it is as a result of a bunch of hacks making use of legislatures or even executives power to bind delegates of the executive under treaty to act in certain ways, or basically bind the legislatures to act in support of their executives.

The problem with this is that these hacks will continue to be used against the EU even when trying to reform them: It's easy to argue against handing sovereignty to an organisation with such a baroque decision-making process.

A lot of effort has gone into transitioning more powers to the EU parliament, but ultimately, it will be impossible to get where the EU ought to be in terms of which organs have which powers without very difficult processes in most of the member states.

I agree such a change is difficult, but I believe it's difficult precisely because it's currently not very democratic.

Deeply direct democracy is self-sustaining - people would agree to move over to a new system because it would give them more power than they have in the current parliamentary systems.

The problem as far as I see is the current political class (parliamentarians and people in the executive branch), which would lose power. And since this is who currently has the power, and it's always nearly impossible to make somebody give up power, that's the reason why this won't happen.

But Europe is in a state of crisis now, and maybe this crisis is great enough to motivate this class to move to a more open system.

If you think about it, the current indirect democracy (with parliaments and the electoral college etc) is a remnant of a time when a decision took days to travel through the whole land, and to be reasonably fast and decisive, you had to have them. Thanks to the internet, we could even go past such direct democracies like Switzerland and allow each citizen to vote at each bill, or if she didn't want to spend the time, leave that decision to a parliamentarian of her choosing, but with the option to take power again or give it to a different parliamentarian at any moment. Now that is true democracy. No back-hand deals, and no favoritisms anymore.

It's not impossible to make those in power give it up, but it requires a revolution and revolutions sadly imply violence most of the time.

Switzerland was always an okay model of how to run a federation.

> a more democratic EU requires constitutional change in most member states to cede sovereignty

Ceding sovereignity always leads to less democracy and more central control, not the other way around.

The EU is starting to look a lot like a modern day Austria-Hungary, only bigger. We all know what happened to Austria-Hungary: WWI.

That's simply not true. The EU has over time handed more and more power away from the council and commission and to the parliament. There is a demonstrated will to hand more power to parliament at the cost of the council and commission and any treaty changes to do so (accompanied by according constitutional changes) would reduce sovereignty while reducing central control.

As it stands, the Treaty of Lisbon went about as far as it could in handing additional powers to the EU Parliament while triggering the minimal number of constitutional changes for member parliaments, and look at the circus that turned into. And that was first after the attempt at a constitution failed.

The centralisation you worry about already happened many years ago, and the sovereignty issue is now largely the blocker to devolving more that power to the EU parliament, and after the trouble getting the Treaty of Lisbon through there's little appetite to take another round anytime soon.

That Lisbon has given substantially sharpened teeth to Parliament has been demonstrated repeatedly, with both the Commission and Council of Ministers having been forced to backtrack or compromise in areas where they previously would have been able to do what they wanted.

This article chronicles the move of a factory from Britain to Poland and is a great intro to current Polish politics with regard to the EU: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n08/james-meek/somerdale-to-skarbi...

The refugee crisis and the sovereign debt crisis combined could ultimately dismantle the EU.

I think Poland's decision to stick with the zlot is a good one on the long term. Once you switch to the Euro you've surrendered control of your currency to Bruxelles and there is no going back.

Why is it unfair competition when you produce ships? That sounds absurd, is there a more detailed explanation?

Hold on.

Poland is post-communist country. During previous system it maintained many companies that weren't economically viable. Shipyards weren't build because it was economically viable to have shipyard there or there. They were build because Communists knew it was easy to guarantee mass employment by expanding heavy industry. This means that any polish city on our coastline with population required to staff shipyard got one. This shipyard would then employ between 20 to 50 thousand people on its own, as well as give employment for countless other people working in the region in shops supplying those shipyards or their workers. People from nearby smaller towns would then flock to larger towns to work here.

When system changed, so did the need for our fleets (in old system we've even maintained the Pacific Trade fleet and Pacific Shrimpfishing Fleets!) and in result the shipbuilding and maintenance services plummeted. It was same all across the board. Coal mining, steel mills, farming, weaving. Millions of people had to find their place in new reality. It wasn't surprise that people elected those promising heavy donations for what was left from first democratic's governments mass privatization, closures and sales. This meant polish taxpayers were keeping nonprofitable remnants of heavy industry in meantime being fed promises next governments about reforms coming in that will reduce the burden and sitting down by TV after work to watch in the news how our coal miners or shipbuilders strikes made current govt cave in, postpone cuts and offer another "mobilisation package" of millions of taxpayer money for keeping those industries alive.

This was business as usual until the year 2004 happened and Poland entered EU, which has changed the rules of the game and started hammering our govts for dishing so much taxpayers money at non-profitable private companies, that thus don't have to really care about being competitive with others.

How is this judged? Depends on region you are from. Some areas judge this in plus for EU because "apparently EU respects our money more than our own government".

But for other this is proof that EU wants to kill our heavy industry. Occasional news of EU letting same slip for some company in Germany or France is then blown out of proportion by the media to whole shipbulding in the west being taxpayer funded being allright while suspiciously its wrong when its polish govt helping polish companies.

So, I take that they say it's unfair because the government needs to help the shipyards to make them economically viable. Thank you for the detailed answer.

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