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Comment by epscylonb | Hacker News Reader

I live in the UK as well.

Clearly there is a "democratic deficit" in the current structure of the EU. This is a problem that will have to be righted one way or another.

In the long run I am optimistic and pro Europe, I don't have a problem with a certain level of federalisation and a supreme court in the style of America.

Of course I also completely agree with this judgement, but my views on Europe have not changed in the last few years. Despite what you may think at the moment, the things that unite European countries (compared to the rest of the world) far outweigh the things that divide us.

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I strongly disagree that there's a "democratic deficit".

1. The EU court of justice's judges are appointed by the national governments (one judge per country). Each country has its say on who the court's judges are.

2. The EU court of justice's rulings are about EU law, but EU law is not national law. The highest court remains the national court, although typically national courts defer to the judgement of the EU court.

3. The EU court of justice only rules on EU directives, which are international treaties. In that sense it's similar to WTO rulings, except broader in scope.

4. The EU directives that it rules on are approved by the EU parliament, a body that is directly elected by EU citizens.

5. Directives themselves are not laws but treaties, they have to be turned into law by the national governments. While the EU can impose fines for not doing this in a timely matter, national governments can just choose to leave the EU treaty if they don't like it (participation in the EU is always voluntary).

Where in that whole chain of events is there supposed to be this "democratic deficit"?

national governments can just choose to leave the EU treaty if they don't like it

That's like saying living in a dictatorship is not a "democratic deficit" as long as you are free to emigrate.

Which individual issue can you say a national government would choose to rather leave the EU than acquiesce on? just because the system is not entirely undemocratic does not mean it is perfect. While directives originally had to be agreed upon unanimously by all member countries, this is no longer the case. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon: "Prominent changes included the move from required unanimity to double majority voting in several policy areas in the Council of Ministers."

No, it's rather like you are free to emigrate from a democracy if you aren't happy with the decisions reached by majority vote.

The problem that we have is that the EU has a culture that is not at all federalistic or democratic. France is the main influence of the EU and the are very into centraliced bureaucracy. I don't see away out of this culture without rebuilding the EU from ground up.

I think the EU was "forced" on everybody its not at all a natural grown thing. If we want to walk towards one europe we should open the borders and just let it happen. Why put all the countries in one big systems. A stable System needs to grow and iterate. The countries with diffrent cultures should start by working closer together (for example all german speaking countries). This way we can build a stable europe in the long run. A one size fits all solution will always break down because its imo impossible to let people vote on it (they would recect it).

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