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Comment by theaeolist | Hacker News Reader

This is not by some accident of history. It is a deliberate decision of euro-skeptic countries to avoid turning the EU into a superstate. It is usually the same countries who then go to complain about the "democratic deficit" of the EU institutions. I went through the Brexit referendum debates and the hypocrisy was rank.

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Exactly. This is one the first things we have to fix. The relationship between the nations government and the EU is in parts absurd.

What’s absurd about it?

I.e. national governments using EU to pass legislation, which they then oppose locally, claiming the evil EU is forcing it upon them against their will.

Generally, blaming all bad things on the EU and acting like it's a foreign power whenever it servers their needs, obfuscating the the national governments are the ones with most power over EU decisions.

The trouble is that none of the parties involved have any incentive to fix this. The national governments certainly don't, because it gives them a convenient way to pass laws they don't like, and the EU doesn't either because it both gives the EU more power and makes national governments beholden to them. For all the talk some populist politicians make about leaving the EU, it's not like they actually would because that would mean giving up their power to pass laws without that inconvenient democratic accountability.

I reckon this was a major reason Brexit went the way it did. Supporters of the EU liked to point to the fact that actually, our government was behind a lot of the unpopular EU actions to argue that Brexit supporters had been tricked into wanting to leave the EU. What they didn't get was how completely unconvincing an argument that is. The politicians who were busy undermining and blocking any attempt to leave the EU also used it as a way to pass laws that the people they represent didn't want, shielding themselves from any kind of accountability to the general populace, and that was meant to make everyone fall in line behind them and want to remain in the EU? Ridiculous.

Could you clarify what you mean, please? Surely the argument is that some politicians busy undermining the EU and promoting leaving it, or other manoeuvres born out of Eurosceptic populism, also used the EU as a way to shield themselves from responsibility for unpopular laws via passing them "abroad", which they could use to then rally their domestic basic on Eurosceptic grounds, isn't it? You seem to be saying the opposite.

It is possible for the EU to both have a democratic deficit, and for the completely opaque and unaccountable process for choosing the head of the Commission to be a part of that. Bear in mind, the EU Parliament is not a real parliament, so it does not improve things much when the 'spitzenkandidaten' is selected. That's how Juncker happened, a literal alcoholic. EU always ends up with failures at the top, it seems to be an unwritten law.

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