This EU Won't Work

Working together across nations is a virtue that will ultimately lead to good outcomes. The EU’s principal strategy for ensuring peace in Europe has been to unite all its people into one ‘nation’, under one government. They will then understand each other, mix together, share the same benefits and adopt the same values.

One of the many self-justifying claims that EU leaders and other supporters make is that the European Parliament (EP) demonstrates that the EU is democratic. In practice the Parliament demonstrates the weakness of this claim. The Parliament appears to exist as an attempt to cover the absence of any real democracy in the EU. In its activities it absorbs and neutralises the inconsequential ramblings of a disdained citizenry.

Representative democracy is a sound ideal, though not one respected or implemented by the EU, which is designed to keep its citizens’ representatives (members of the European Parliament) in their place, which is not to interfere in the governance of the project.

Article 10 of the TEU states that the EU “is founded in representative democracy and that decisions must be taken as closely as possible to citizens.” This is known as the ‘principle of subsidiarity’.

Article 13 obliges the EU’s institutions to act within the limits of their competences under the treaties.

In March 2017 the European Commission (EC) set up a Task Force on Subsidiarity, Proportionality and ‘Doing Less More Efficiently’. Its report concluded that there is EU value added in all existing areas of activity and the authors did not identify any Treaty competences or policy areas that should be re-delegated to the Member States. EU competences are relentlessly expanding with every decision of the Commission and every judgement of the ECJ. There is no possibility of reversing course. The EU has ensured that few areas remain in which the EU does not have exclusive competence. Powers to act, once passed up from the member states, are never returned.

The principle of subsidiarity is largely ignored, since the goal of Ever Closer Union is to be achieved by sucking upwards ever more powers. This goal, the main ideology of the EU, requires authority to be centralised; it is steady and subtle in its implementation and takes precedence over other declared principles, which are used to disguise this ideological foundation.

The EU Project is not sustainable, given its citizens annoying preference for the mess and muddle of their own democracies, economies and politics over the threat of the imposition of a grey uniformity.

EU mandarins argue that diversity is dangerous and a threat to the success of their mission. Hence all the emphasis on eliminating divergence and reducing historically diverse nations to a stale uniformity.

“The EU remains focused on making its governing institutions more transparent and democratic. Decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen. … European citizens are encouraged to contribute to the democratic life of the Union by giving their views on EU policies during their development or suggest improvements to existing laws and policies.”

The EU has a top-down approach to government, its leaders cannot be dismissed by voters and its Parliament has few powers. European parliamentary elections are not a democratic exercise in any true sense. It doesn’t occur to its supporters that there is danger in this echoed contempt of its citizens; the EU denies the electorate true democracy and in return the electorate denies the EU any true legitimacy. National elections matter because national governments can be dismissed, something that is not true for EU government.

The EU’s founders and current leaders hold the citizens of Europe in disdain and their elected, national governments in contempt for being elected, and therefore impermanent. They argue that what is needed is a unified, supra-national entity, or federal government, which has the power to override the decisions of the governments of its member states.

This obsession is based on several assumptions, one is that a self-selected and immovable group of ex-politicians and professional bureaucrats has the ability to achieve what individual nations cannot. The EU is an imposition over which the people have no say. We are not just citizens of the EU, we are subjects of a regime that we cannot change, either alone or in the company of a majority of our fellow citizens. The EU has decided against democracy, mainly because of the continuing fixation on progress towards ruling its member states as a supra-national government.

There is not enough to recommend the EU to its citizens, from which it follows that they must be persuaded to accept it by propaganda, threats or coercion. If EU leaders and supporters were confident that their project would retain members because of its obvious benefits, they could afford to be honest about its aims.

There is an EU regulation covering public access to “European Parliament, Council and Commission documents”. Point (11): “In principle, all documents of the institutions should be accessible to the public. However, certain public and private interests should be protected by way of exceptions.”

The inclusion of “public…interests” gives a clue to the deceit. The EU has no concern, other than in its propaganda, for the public or their interests. The purpose of this regulation is to protect the EU from intrusive interest by the public, and their press representatives, which put at risk the true agenda.

The principle of open access to information is applicable only if the Commission decides that the information is in the “overriding public interest” and not harmful to its own interest. There exists no independent authority that can decide what may damage the EU’s decision-making processes or what may be considered to be in the overriding public interest; all such decisions are made by the Commission itself.

The EU declares that it is an enthusiastic proponent of freedom of information and transparency, because of the benefits these bring to its citizens. If the EU practised what it preaches this and other claims would indeed bring benefits. But the lack of transparency is amply illustrated in its practices. Concerns about transparency in EU administration accounted for nearly a quarter of the EU Ombudsman’s cases in 2018. The Ombudsman found that the Council’s current practices constitute “maladministration”. Unfortunately this had zero effect as the Ombudsman’s recommendations carry no legal weight and EU leaders and bureaucrats seem not to care about the credibility gap between theory and practice.

The EU often expounds, for our benefit, its principles and rules. We are expected to believe that the EU adopts practices that are consistent with its own principles and rules, but it doesn’t. Such things are for others to follow and when it feels it is necessary the EU ignores them. Many promises have been made, and quickly broken, about transparency but it seems that such promises are just for show while the practice remains to keep citizens in the dark, in case we spot what is going on and try to resist.

The title chosen by Ursula von der Leyen for a new vice-president of the European Commission was “Protecting the European way of life”. After protests as this seemed to be about protecting EU borders from migrants, the title was changed to “Promoting the European way of life”.

The issue of democracy highlights the gap between the values that the EU declares it holds and the absence of such values in its practices. It also shows up how the EU contrives to cover the gap with dishonest words, repeating without shame that the Union is a democracy while demonstrating, also without shame, that it is not.

“Together, we will be determined and focused, building on our values and the strengths of our model. This is the only effective way to…promote the interests of our citizens, businesses and societies, and safeguard our way of life.” “This requires achieving the upward convergence of our economies…”.

Without unification the EU has no rationale, but unification implies uniformity, perhaps because that would make ‘Europe’ easier to govern. The EU’s attempt to unify and pacify a fractious Europe can only succeed through suffocating uniformity, and that denies its claim to respect diversity.

European citizens are not consulted on moving forward with unification; we don’t desire more union, so it’s safer not to ask our opinion. The EU needs to continue to demand unity—and to declare that it exists. EU actions, as opposed to their words, show that uniformity across the whole continent is exactly what they want; it is so much more manageable than divergence.

The explanation for the EU’s self-imposed problem is the ideology of uniformity that underlies the superficially attractive term ‘Union’.