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This is a very interesting article in this week’s Charlemagne column in the Economist.
The article concludes:
Citizens are thus left feeling impotent. Their governments are eviscerated at home, yet voters lack the means to throw the bums out of Brussels. This is dangerous. Bringing debt under control and, more importantly, promoting reforms to boost growth, will take years of sacrifice and suffering. It can be sustained only with a strong national mandate. Without that, both governments and the EU will eventually be discredited.
It really saddens me to see European democracy increasingly subordinated, for example, in Greece and Italy. For me personally, giving greater powers to unelected EU instituations seems fundamentally flawed, especially when they behave like Angela’s flunkies.
What do you think?
I wouldn’t excatly call the other European politicians “Angela’s flunkies”, but I readily admit that for a long time and not only in the present crisis, I have been worried that too much power is left to bureaucrats and politicians that have not been elected for their European “jobs” but for their national ones, and that far too little power is in the hands of the elected body, the European Parliament. To my mind the European Union is not democratic enough.
As to the new fiscal law: I think it’s not worth the paper it has been written on as it is a watered down version, with so many loopholes that it will be ineffective.
Hi Pit,
By flunkies, I’m referring to the EU bureaurcrats, not politicians elected by citizens in each country. So I think that we are in agreement here?
Hi Alf,
I think we agree, yes. But unfortunately so: I wish we had something positive to agree on, and not the (present) European mess.
Hi Pit, I’m an optimist by nature, so there’s hopefully good news around the corner.:) I was really encouraged to see the US jobs data – it’s an important step in the right direction.