As a Swede this is exactly why I'm against the EU.
Free trade is great, I get that, but I really don't like the centralization and getting less and less influence. I don't want Germany and France to shove idiotic internet laws down my throat.
In some way it's also why I'm rooting for U.K. to leave the EU and for it to work out.
That's basically UK propaganda (though they like to focus on Germany).
Granted, the workings of the EU are complicated, but they are not opaque, or particularly unfair towards smaller countries. Downthread you mention connecting to politicians, and it being easier with local politicians. Try e-mailing your MEP once.
As far as things being shoved down one's throat: as far as I know, Sweden is still not using the Euro.
Also, being pro-EU (or at least not anti-EU) is not the same as being pro-federalisation. As you say, "free trade is great", and I think you'll agree that clean beaches aren't too bad either. EU directives and regulations in general are really just the largest common denominator opinions that most countries agree on, and as such get out-sourced to the EU. Our "president" is a moderator of a panel of elected heads of state. There is no reason the EU has to turn out like the US, and not really a lot of appetite for that in various member states.
But regardless, as unbelievable as it sounds for an institution covering 100s of millions of people, the EU is what you make of it. You're a citizen.
Just wondering, what exactly makes you think the laws shoved to your throat by Sweden would on average be any less idiotic? And why would just Sweden be the right size of entity that optimizes the idiocy of the laws, why independent Skåne would not be shoving less idiotic laws to your throat?
I'm under the illusion it's easier to influence a Swedish politician than it is to influence an order of magnitude more foreign politicians, to get the same proportion of influence.
The problem will always be there of course. I'm not saying Sweden is the optimal size, I just find it better than the EU alternative.
If you go to the extreme you can get too small as well. For example a society with a couple of thousand people is too small to form what's essentially a country. There is no clear cut answer.
I think that's brexit all over, illusion rather than substance.
> it's easier to influence a Swedish politician than it is to influence an order of magnitude more foreign politicians, to get the same proportion of influence.
Yes, and that's bad.
A big benefit of the EU is it's harder to manipulate -- there's a lot more people to control -- at least 16 independent heads of governments and nearly 400 MEPs. Far easier to lean on a single struggling PM and promise your endorsement in return for dinner.
And the EU's power is limited, by national vetos, and national laws, and the fundamental material scope of eu law. How broad or narrow that scope is of course something to be debated, but the limits are there.
Copyright is clearly is one of those things that needs to be tackled at a level of government higher than the local town council, especially if you have an open market. Imagine a world where a movie made in LA wasn't protected by copyright in New York, let alone Toronto, Paris, or Singapore.
The EU is far more democratic than say the ISDS treaties, WTO and the web of complex interlocking treaties between countries.
> If you go to the extreme you can get too small as well. For example a society with a couple of thousand people is too small to form what's essentially a country. There is no clear cut answer.
Decisions should be taken at as low a level as makes sense. Defense can't be done at a city level, or even a national level for most countries, so these decisions make sense to move to larger areas. How far we're willing to move is an ever changing view, but the principal stands.
How is that bad? It's possible to change the law afterwards. With the EU it's basically impossible. Swedes would have to lobby politicians from a foreign country that they can't vote for nor can they speak the same language. That's terrible.
>Copyright is clearly is one of those things that needs to be tackled at a level of government higher than the local town council, especially if you have an open market. Imagine a world where a movie made in LA wasn't protected by copyright in New York, let alone Toronto, Paris, or Singapore.
But it has been protected on a higher level since the 19th century. Almost every country in the world is a signatory to the Berne convention.
Because when it's easier for you as an individual to change things, it's easier for Rupert Murdoch or Mark Zuckerberg to do it.
I assume Swedish MEPs speak Swedish, lobby them. I assume that the Swedish governemnt do to.
If the european population does not like a specific rule, then they lobby their MEPs and the Council members. You don't need to lobby Greek MEPs, Greeks do.
In the UK I can lobby my own local MP on Westminster matters, I can't lobby an MP in Cornwall though, I don't live there. People with the same views as me in Cornwall lobby their MPs, and those voices are therefore heard in parliament. I don't get to vote for 649 of the 650 MPs in Westminster.
The main "democratic deficit" in the EU is mainly as a result of neither the media nor the people taking it seriously. The information is there, but media outlets tend to have more people covering tiddlywinks than what happens in Brussels. This leads to apathy at best from the people, which leads to less coverage. It's an self-fueling antagonistic feedback loop.
The UK media loves to paint it as "unelected bureaucrats forcing the UK to do things". They don't paint Westminster as unelected bureaucrats forcing cornwall to do things. The problem there is that only 30% of us bothered to vote in 2014, and of those about 30% voted for people who simply claim the paycheck but refuse to actually do any work.
> But it has been protected on a higher level since the 19th century.
And the EU is a more democratic way of having these pan-national agreements set, discussed and changed. Some rules must apply at a global level, some can be set at a local level, some fall between - Trade, air travel, MRAs, Environmental issues, movement of goods, services, people and capital. The EU isn't unique in concept, NAFTA, EU, ASEAN, are all regional agreements covering various rules and laws.
To drive home just how bad this is in the EU, a few days ago the European Commission posted this astounding blog post on Article 13: http://archive.is/snRgE
They pretend that they're helping ordinary citizens fight back against the big internet platforms by creating this law that only big platforms stand a chance of complying with. That they're helping tip the balance in favour of creators by forcing platforms to kill their livelihoods through false positives and outright extortion attempts. That anyone who sees this as it actually is has been brainwashed by the evil, foreign Californian big tech.
They're also the only institution with the power to propose new EU laws - and there's essentially nothing we, as ordinary citizens, can do to replace the current members with people who might actually care about our interests. They're appointed through a process so indirect that any vestige of democracy is practically homeopathic, and they're not even meant to represent us in the first place.
> They're also the only institution with the power to propose new EU laws
Same as the UK. While in theory backbenchers can propose new laws, in reality Christopher Chope exists.
> and there's essentially nothing we, as ordinary citizens, can do to replace the current members with people who might actually care about our interests
The commission president stood as the candidate for the largest grouping in 2014. Personally I'd have preferred it if ALDE and Guy Verhofstadt had received the most support, but EPP did, and our MEPs duely voted Juncker in. Just like the UK MPs voted in May as PM, or the U.S. electoral college voted in Trump. That's pretty transparent.
The rest of the commissioners are appointed in the exact same way that the U.S. executive is appointed - on the whim of the President. The difference is that the U.S. president gets to choose from an unlimited pool, but the EU president has to choose from a pool appointed by national PMs.
MEPs can block those appointments, just like the U.S. senate can block appointments.
Parliament can also kick out the commission, that's no more or less democratic than the UK system where MPs can kick out the government.
If we don't like the commission, then we as ordinary citizens, need to vote for someone other than the EPP, or persuade our MEPs to censure them.
Even Nigel Farage said "One of the few things the European Parliament can do is to hold the European Commission to account for its actions".
No, it really isn't the same as the UK. For a start, the ability for backbenchers to propose laws isn't merely theoretical - they actually do it, and occasionally some of them become laws. This isn't possible even in theory in the EU. Also, our ministers are all elected politicians who can be voted out, and they have to defend their proposed laws on the record in the Commons just like the lowliest backbencher.
> The commission president stood as the candidate for the largest grouping in 2014. Personally I'd have preferred it if ALDE and Guy Verhofstadt had received the most support, but EPP did, and our MEPs duely voted Juncker in. Just like the UK MPs voted in May as PM, or the U.S. electoral college voted in Trump. That's pretty transparent.
The largest grouping in 2014, the EPP, had a mere 29% of the seats. The US electoral college can only select a president if a majority of the electors support him, and the same is more or less true of UK prime ministers. Also, MEPs aren't elected based on which candidate they support or even which political grouping they're a member of: they're elected based on which local political party they're part of. This all makes the selection process pretty arbitrary in practice, with the main thing influencing it being how exactly the actual political parties have allied themselves into factions this time around.
> No, it really isn't the same as the UK. For a start, the ability for backbenchers to propose laws isn't merely theoretical - they actually do it, and occasionally some of them become laws.
In practice backbenchers can't get laws past because of MPs like Chope.
> Also, our ministers are all elected politicians who can be voted out
Not by me, my MP is a backbench tory who's never been in government. Other people can vote ministers out - which has pros and cons. The U.S., which tends to be accepted as a "democracy", does not have the ability for the general population to boot out "ministers".
In 2017, 25 out of the total 118 (21%) ministers in the UK government were in the House of Lords in any case.
> The US electoral college can only select a president if a majority of the electors support him
And the EU MEPs can only select an EU commission president if a majority of the electors support him. And that's exactly what happened in 2014, when about 56% of MEPs backed him. This is similar to the UK in 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2017 when the Queen's Speech was passed by MPs of more than one party. In fact in the last 10 years it's only been 2009 and 2016 where the speech was passed by a single party.
You know why 56% of MEPs voted for him, right? It wasn't because they necessarily supported him - before the elections, the major parties entered into an agreement where they'd vote for the candidate backed by whichever party got the most seats from now on and only that person, essentially meaning that party's candidate was guaranteed the job despite having a minority of less than 30%.
Again, this is nothing like how coalitions work in the UK and other democratic countries. The Prime Minister has to convince her coalition partners that her government is worth their support, generally by bringing its policies more in line with what their voters care about and giving them roles in government. As far as I know, we've never had a deal like this where two minority parties each agree to help the other gain power just for the reward of getting the same help themselves next time, wiping out the influence of all the smaller parties in the process.
The closest I've seen to this is the (failed) attempts to turn the US presidency into a popular vote by committing a majority of electors into choosing whoever wins the popular vote, though the EU shenanigans are even more of a shady end-run around the intended process than that.
> the major parties entered into an agreement where they'd vote for the candidate backed by whichever party got the most seats
That's wrong. The only pre-election statement was that the president should be someone who had campaigned for it. It wasn't until after the election that the parties agreed that EPP should have first shot as the largest party.
The S&D for example demanded budget changes for their backing of Juncker, and I believe Parliament presidency, the negotiations continued for some time before they agreed to back him.
If you want to talk about democratic deficit, In the UK in 2005 the Labour and Cooperative parties got a combined 35% of the vote - barely more than the EPP in 2014 - but they got 100% of the power.
That's interesting, I've found it much easier to get in touch with MEP representatives than it is to get in touch with national politicians, and MEPs have been much more responsive as well. Have you tried contacting any MPs, and/or MEPs, and what was your experience?
Okay, but let's say you convince all the MEPs in your small country. Now what? Are you going to start sending letters to MEPs from foreign countries? Why would they care about what you have to say?
They probably wouldn't, I'm not part of their constituency. But that's just how representative democracies work, MPs (or in the EU case MEPs) argue and vote on behalf of their constituency. I can of course try to sway MEPs of other countries, but they're far more likely to listen to "my" MEPs as it were – it's part of their job after all.
> I'm under the illusion it's easier to influence a Swedish politician than it is to influence an order of magnitude more foreign politicians
Yes. And that includes the fact that the dumbfucks who think pi should equal three because bible says so also have more influence to the politicians at the level of Sweden than EU. I asked a question, why you think Sweden would be more optimal than EU and you basically replied "because I think so". Count me unconvinced by your arguments.
(Personally, I think that instead of discussing what is the right geographical scope of independent country, we should discuss which are issues that need to be decided on city level, which on state level, which on country level, which on EU-like entity level and which are issues that would actually need global democratic process to back them up. But unfortunately this discussion is way too complicated to the people that like to discuss with arguments like "Let's fund NHS with the EU membership fee instead")
> Yes. And that includes the fact that the dumbfucks who think pi should equal three because bible says so also have more influence to the politicians at the level of Sweden than EU.
With that line of thinking democracy is a failed concept and we should just abolish voting anyway. Because then dumbfucks don't get any influence.
> I asked a question, why you think Sweden would be more optimal than EU and you basically replied "because I think so".
No, I said it's because it's easier to influence Swedish politicians to which you cite religious dumbfucks as a counter-argument.
Even if I convince all Swedish politicians that won't do. Now I need to convince many politicians of other countries, many who don't speak my language and none who care about my vote.
> But unfortunately this discussion is way too complicated to the people that like to discuss with arguments like "Let's fund NHS with the EU membership fee instead"
Yes that would be a nice discussion to have. None of this should be decided by the European Commission because we as ordinary citizens are powerless to replace or influence them in any way.
As far as I know they're chosen from current parties by proportional representation. With a few exceptions. (Country dependent.)
You (as Swedes, for instance) voted for those people. They are local national level politicians in an international setting, no different from any minister except for the stakes and reach.
That other countries can exert some influence on yours? That is a fact of life and nothing will change it. Everything is an agreement, including EU, with relatively specific scope, agreed to because it is beneficial (or politically convenient) even if limiting at times.
They're about as easy to influence as any minister, but more numerous and more diverse most of the time.
Essentially just think you're writing to a minister of european affairs in your country. Minister of foreign affairs.
It is a better model than everyone keeping laws dictated by the US, Russia, Germany or France, or WIPO, Google or MPAA lobbyists, which it was before. (National standards get copied or are intentionally very similar.)
You get to vote at least on the common choice, instead of the strongest one winning.
> That other countries can exert some influence on yours? That is a fact of life and nothing will change it.
So we'll just accept anything? It's about limiting outside influence as much as possible. Not throwing your hands in the air and give up.
> Everything is an agreement, including EU, with relatively specific scope, agreed to because it is beneficial (or politically convenient) even if limiting at times.
It's always a trade-off. There are good parts and there are bad parts.
EU has morphed into something entirely different than what it was at the start.
> It is a better model than everyone keeping laws dictated by the US, Russia, Germany or France, or WIPO, Google or MPAA lobbyists, which it was before. (National standards get copied or are intentionally very similar.) You get to vote at least on the common choice, instead of the strongest one winning.
You don't solve the issue that laws are influenced by other forces by eroding your voting power. Then you only worsen the problem.
Because when Swedish politicians push for stupid laws they can be revoked while campaigning for it. The politicians will care, because the politicians are the ones who risk not getting elected if they ignore the issue. If the EU decides on a directive that people don't like, then the only way to get it revoked would be for Swedish people to start campaigning foreign politicians, who they cannot vote for.
It's even worse than that, because laws like this are created and pushed for by the European Commission which isn't elected and doesn't really represent the countries or the people of the EU.
The actual mechanics are complicated, a mess, and (in the case of the current President of the European Commission) made up out of whole cloth with no legal basis and used exactly once so far, but a rough summary is: through shady backroom deals we have no visibility into.
I assume these deals are ultimately made by elected heads of state though? Not that it makes this a good system of course, it’s clearly a mixed bag at best, but if the EC is ultimately appointed by individual elected governments rather than by EU fiat then the problem is thornier than just unelected representatives. Then again it’s understandable that voters probably don’t place EC appointments as a major factor in their domestic elections.
It sounds like a system ripe for cronyism and abuse, opacity, and in need of reform.
Free trade is great, I get that, but I really don't like the centralization and getting less and less influence. I don't want Germany and France to shove idiotic internet laws down my throat.
In some way it's also why I'm rooting for U.K. to leave the EU and for it to work out.