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Comment by p_l | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately every attempt at reforming it is blocked with "but my sovereignty!" - as EC and Council of Ministers are very much controlled and steered by member nations' governments.

Not to mention it makes for perfect scapegoat

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because it is a perfect tool for all governments to 'wash' unpopular political bills that would be a political suicide in local politics.

You're asking the group profiting from current arrangement to change it.

This is true. However there's a potential way to fix it, and it would only take one member state, no matter how small to start the landslide. And it's basically the same thing that happened to the US Senate.

The Senate, like the Council of Ministers, was intended to represent the member states. Originally, Senators were appointed by state legislatures. A few states started to have direct primaries, with the legislative appointment amounting to ratification of the popular choice. Then this was made the way for every senator by the 17th amendment. (It took until 1913!)

The same thing could happen to the EU council of ministers. It's a little more obfuscated because the representative to the council of ministers is formally a delegate of the government of the EU member state. But, since the process is under the control of the member state, there's nothing stopping them being directly elected by the public of that EU country. They can simply decide that that's who they want to send. Unlike any other democratic reform of the EU, this doesn't require consensus among all member states (which in practice, means the political elites).

There would have to be some kind of groundswell of support for it in several nations, as otherwise the government of bigger nations would do everything to make an individual small nation regret it; unless they would pay some political cost. But if there is a movement to democratise the EU, this is the one move that doesn't need the permission of the incumbents.

The more democratic the EU the less sovereign legitimacy countries have. That's the tension that makes Euroskeptic parties oppose reforms.

There is a dilemma, but I don't think it's loss of legitimacy so much as authority. They are quite similar but not the same; an institution that loses authority but is still legitimate, and there is potential for it to regain authority (like the strategic concept of a "fleet in being").

But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.

>But for many states, they have significantly greater power by virtue of being in the EU than they would without. Arguably, even the UK lost power by leaving.

What kind of loss of power are you referring to?

The UK was one of the largest members of the EU, and as such had a substantial say over it's direction and policies; and as the EU is a major economic power, consequently that is power in the world as well.

That is, it's government had this, as an "inside the room" participant. Power is often exercised by that means; in fact one definition of power is your having the means to sway others. For example, in the 90s the EU was debating whether to "deepen or widen", i e. to become more like a single state, or to admit more members. Germany and France led the faction that wanted to deepen, the UK, along with smaller allies, preferred to widen and admit more members from Eastern Europe. The UK's preference prevailed.

Because this mostly happened in diplomatic negotiations, it's not so well known, the press thought that EU bureurocracy was a better story.

Thanks. Interesting points. Not sure I quite understand it, but I will think it over.

Look to the Westminster system for the true solution to the Commission’s lack of accountability.

Let the MEPs of each country vote on who amongst them will sit on the Commission.

Member states will veto it because it will shift power from national governments directly into a separately voted parliament, changing the current approach of "EP is where we can drop someone if they lose national election as a reward for being good little soldier or to make them pay half the money to party coffers"

That is also true - national countries sabotage any reform.

Basically the EU would have to be designed anew from the get go, but lobbyists will prevent this from ever happening.

I have many concerns about the rise of populism in Europe but the (few/very few) good things that might come out of this is that there will finally be (enough?) pressure on the EU to reform.

Despite all their talk about being pro human-rights and pro democracy in practice the voter turnout percentages for the EU elections are extremely low. As an EU citizen I almost never meet someone who's interested or who feel represented by the EU. There's, no doubt, several reasons for it but the biggest one might be that an additional abstraction layer that's cultural too far away from the average voter.

EU and EC have been made as a resistant to populism by design, the end result is that we citizens can't change anything, and decisions are arbitrarily made behind closed doors.

The amount of layers between your vote, and the elected official that matters is just too big to have any form of accountability, especially when you couple it with national issues.

I'm frankly less concerned about populism, but more concerned about sheer disregard of opinions of citizens.

Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.

The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.

Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.

Or maybe it's impossible to satisfy desires of such culturally diverse populace as EU citizens.

Which makes current model, and federated model impossible and/or prone to crumbling. Problems of Germany are different than one Spain faces, and France, and Poland etc.

Which why originally much more was decided by consensus and if there is no consensus then simply every country can do their own way. I feel like a lot of things actually reached a local optimum in the 90s in our approach to improve things, we left that.

It’s more likely that the rise of the populist right (or left, like Melenchon) will lead to the destruction of the EU. They do not want reform, they want to go back to the fifties.

This is a real risk but from the embers of the (current) systems a better one could still rise.

Despite all the big talk from the likes of Wilders and Meloni, the moment that they're in government they do seem to be very willing to cooperate with their European peers.

The last concrete attempt was blocked at Dutch and French referenda, not the lobbyists.

That was in 2004. Since then, basically any referendum about anything related to the EU anywhere returns a negative result, with a couple of small exceptions like a Danish defense opt-out.

So the money doesn't really go to the lobbying, more to the population-wide propaganda.

And the money is available, as it's in the interest of both the major state actors as the major corporations for the EU to weaken and dissolve.

This is not exactly, both french and dutch referenda were

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