If someone is uncomfortable by "being ruled" by an unelected bureaucracy, then question it and fix it. The very definition of "being ruled" here is open to debate, as well as the role of elected officials both within nations and on supranational bodies.
Orwell was a smart person. He'd see the EU would be problematic and that it probably wouldn't be a perfect government on the first attempt. He would, however, quickly notice how unpractical leaving is and vote against it.
I feel like most people perceive it as a "unelected bureaucracy" because they don't understand it, despite the eu spending a huge amount of resources trying to educate people (there is a huge amount of free Hotlines and information material in all languages of the eu).
The European pairlament is even elected directly with direct appointment of the parliamentarians, which is more direct than in a lot of eu countries where you only elect parties which in turn propose concrete politicians.
While all the other bodies are elected indirectly in the national elections.
The problem is that people neither understand nor care for the elections of the pairlament, and thus they think that "they did not vote for this".
In the UK there is virtually no coverage of the European parliament. It's not televised on any channel, you don't hear coverage on the radio or read it in the papers like the UK parliament. People don't know who their who their elected representative is. It's really no surprise that people think they have no representation, despite the UK having significant influence.
Well, when asked to vote for representation "The People" elect Nigel Farage who campaigns purely on a platform of "I will do nothing except vote against everything", which I believe his record supports.
As Daniel Hannan [1] (Conservative MEP for 17 years) says : "Uniquely, we have managed to create a system that is anti-democratic - you only get to go there when you have lost an election. Only when, like: Chris Patten, Neil Kinnock, and Jean-Claude Junkers, you have been expressly rejected by voters are you invited to sit as an MEP" [2]
Which is because you can always have more power by becoming a leader of a member state than a leader of some part of the EU machine. Becoming a MEP or commissioner/MEP is not exactly a move towards power. Therefore it's usually a path taken by those whose time in the national spotlight have passed or those who have had to adjust their ambitions.
It's not anti-democratic that the players for the lower-rang positions are of lower rang.
Well yes, but I don't think people even realise that there are actually representatives from the UK there who don't do nothing.
There was a Scottish MEP who made an impassioned speech in contrast to Farage's nonsense. a) I only saw it due to it showing up in my relatively pro-EU Facebook echo chamber; b) I'd never heard of him before.
There is plenty of coverage, it's nearly all negative rather than factual though.
My biggest worry now is we are likely to go through a difficult period in the UK and all those politicians and journalists that told us our problems are the fault of those foreigners will continue to do so.
Thank you for this explanation. I'm an Australian in Japan, I had no idea how it all worked in Europe(admittedly I should have looked it up a long time ago)
Exactly - the EU is more complicated than the UK parliament, and I honestly think that most people who call it democratic have no idea how it works (or have thought whether the equivalent institutions in the UK are just as 'undemocratic').
Someone on my facebook feed actually stated, in a patronising tone, that it was clearly undemocratic because the president chose the council directly, and the council then chose the president - so they just all vote for each other - and that the president was the only person on the Ballot when the MEPs were asked (obviously they view the MEPs as an entirely useless institution to make the process 'appear' legitimate to the easily fooled).
I mean clearly a little of the functionality has got through, but in such a garbled way that they really have no idea how it works, but think that they do.
Italian expat here (moderately anti-EU, so you know my bias from the start).
It does not help that (in my country, cannot say about others) parties seems to see a seat in the EU parliament as a place you can give to end-of-career candidates or as a sort of consolatory prize to people that would not get much use in national politics.
Italy currently holds 73 seats on the EU parliament. That puts their vote on the top 5 on influential countries on EU policy ruling (Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain).
If the public was educated enough to know how important their vote is on EU policies maybe the parliament wouldn't be such an elephant's graveyard.
One option would be to follow what the MEPs are up to at http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/map.html , which of course is not perfect, since politics is exactly about the contrary. We vote so we can offload the task of decision making.
The other is to not vote for candidates on parties that select their MEPs from the dead wood pile. The main parties will either be part of EPP or S&D, so it will be a dead vote anyway.
It is as worthless as the candidates one votes for.
More education on the importance of what gets discussed on the EP would make people demand more from the candidates they vote for.
Politics and media have an incredible adaptation to mass-demands, because they either live of their vote or their audience. It is a graveyard because nobody cares about it being a graveyard, and for the same reason it's not on newspapers or the TV, because the majority does not care (or, alternatively, the majority is already busy enough with internal politics).
One of the complains about the EU is that the parliament have not the powers of a real parliament.
Proof of that is how the EU parliament is used to 'park' politicians that are not relevant in their own countries.
When the European Parliament is the place where the politicians want to be, we will know that we have an Europe not controlled by unelected bureaucrats (for better or worse).
The EU is undemocratic. The EU constitution was rejected by national referenda in two countries, France and the Netherlands. A few others had pledged to hold their own, the UK for example. When it was rejected the constitution was renamed into the Lisbon Treaty and then was voted on again. Now most countries decided to not ask the public but just sign it anyway. Ireland managed to hold a referendum, which rejected it. They were then forced to vote again to get the correct answer. Now the constitution is in place despite it being rejected in three national referenda. A giant "fuck you" to democracy.
Democracy means the majority vote wins. Clearly the majority wanted a european constitution.
I live in the Netherlands so I'm sorry to say this, but they hold way to much power in the eu. Their population is ridiculously tiny and they only have so much money because they act as a soft tax haven.
These referendums should be held EU wide and decided upon based on a total count of all votes from all eu members, where each person holds one vote. Not by asking every state individually and then having a all or nothing ruling.
Yes, the referenda should be held EU wide (I doubt the EU would ever allow something as low class as a popular vote) but that is not what the rules said at the time. It needed to be ratified by each country. It wasn't so the bureaucrats decided to ignore their own rules, rename it, and say "this is totally not the constitution". Oh and both remove that pesky need for unanimity agreement among the nations.
Further, having an EU wide referendum would require acknowledging that the EU is the supreme governing body in Europe and that all national parliaments are subservient to it. The nations are not ready for that yet and the EU elite know it.
you may consider the Brexit was democratic. In a sense, it was, but it was also one of the most stupid collective acts I ever witnessed. Most people who voted didn't understand what they were actually voting for or against. Welcome to the rule of the uninformed. We elect people so they can make informed decisions for us. Asking an imbecile about something extremely complicated is not helpful. Asking millions of them is equally useless.
I'm reasonably sure I could use Orwell's history in the civil war and Trotskyists being accused of being leftists in league with the right to argue the exact opposite of the article's headline.
I'm pretty sure Stalinists/other commies would worship Hitler if he didn't betray their beloved Stalin.
Personally I view the political spectrum as a donut rather than straight left-to-right -- there is a point where the two become equal before diverging again.
> Orwell ends the review by stating that the best defence people have in a capitalist world is the democratic form of government.
The EU is part of a "democratic form of government": the Parliament is elected directly by its citizens, while the Commission is nominated by the democratically elected governments of its member countries.
What we miss is more accountability, which we could get if the Commission was expressed directly by the Parliament, or elected directly by EU citizens.
While it's sort of democratic, IMO the EU totally went wrong on separating the powers. The Commission is in many ways a Legislative body [1], without it pretty much nothing happens in EU government. So it's an indirect indirect democracy with screwed up checks and balances. Call that what you want, as a Swiss I don't want anything to do with it.
I never thought I'd find myself quoting Tony Benn, but I think his "five questions" are very much on point:
"If one meets a powerful person--Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, or Joe Stalin or Hitler--one can ask five questions: what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
The head of the Commission is voted in or out ever 4-5 years (previously by representatives of governments, now by the Parliament). The representatives can be removed through national democratic processes, and the Parliament is directly elected.
Moreover, countries can leave at any time, as the UK has just done. All round, seems to exceed your criteria.
Well, ish. AIUI the President of the Commission is still nominated by the European Council; the Parliament can veto that nomination but can't propose their own. (Rather like their role in legislation.)
Your "Moreover, countries can leave at any time, as the UK has just done." sounds a bit odd in the context of this argument. "It's silly for countries to leave the EU on the grounds that it's not democratic, when it's obviously democratic because countries can leave the EU".
>the President of the Commission is still nominated by the European Council
Yes, technically correct. What happened last time however was that the EP said "We want Juncker and we'll veto anyone else". There was a long staring contest and the EP eventually won. A veto isn't a technicality that you can approximate away - it's just as important as being able to propose laws.
The national leaders generally didn't like this, because they prefer the EU being more like a (huge, weird) deal negotiation table than something with direct representation. The national leaders are ultimately in charge, so this whole episode is mostly an unforeseen consequence of past treaties that they're willing to tolerate.
UK with its house of Lords, no constitution, monarch as head of state, and members of parliament who somehow seem to come from same schools/universities is not exactly the best example of Democracy
The U.K. Has a constitution, just not a single written document. It's the oldest extant constitutional government: even at the time of the Magna Carta 800 years ago the English were following constitutional principles.
Well, you could try voting for national politicians and EP fractions that doesn't like the person in question. It's unlikely to succeed, for much the same reason that voting to get rid of national politicians is unlikely to succeed, but that's more of a tyranny of the majority kind of thing.
Really ? There were 5 referenda on the EU's coming into being. The EU lost all but one of them. So it's really more of a tyranny of the minority. Clearly one cannot get rid of the EU by voting against it - as it would be gone already.
6 - sort of) The election on blocking EU policy with regards to debt in Greece under Syriza, which the EU clearly lost
Needless to say, the EU is not a big fan of elections. You see, the big problem with Brexit, according to the highest EU authorities is that David Cameron allowed the vote in the first place [1].
They have since realized just how stupid this attitude is politically, but clearly they were expecting Cameron to do what all other governments have done when EU lost an election or a vote : ignore the vote, and soldier on regardless.
The only thing the EU ever cared about is big business and huge multinationals, a fact that is blatantly obvious from reading articles about the commission. It is not a government of the people, as it rejects the people and is rejected by the people (You should visit even Brussels itself and talk to the locals). And of course it's treatment of Greece showed what the EU will do when people get in trouble. Kick them - hard - when they're down. After your pension retroactively gets downgraded by almost 50%, they'll do that a second time just to improve election prospects for foreign politicians.
By all democratic principles, it should be destroyed. That will be a great day for democracy.
The country whose chambers are called "Right Honourable the Lords Spiritual and Temporal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled" and "Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled" has an issue with the European form of democracy. Not enough inherited power, I guess.
I don't know whether Orwell would have voted to leave the European Union, but I'm sure that the article's last sentence - "I think there is no doubt" that he would - is wildly overconfident.
> the spectacle of a community where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power. In other words, democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area. But the only area in which it could conceivably be made to work, in any near future, is Western Europe. Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the tradition of democratic Socialism can only be said to exist — even there it only exists precariously — in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Spain, and Italy. Only in those countries are there still large numbers of people to whom the word ‘Socialism’ has some appeal, and for whom it is bound up with liberty, equality, and internationalism. [...] Therefore a Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.
I wonder of the author of the posted article read much of Orwell at all, or did much background research (though to be fair, finding this could have been difficult)
The headline is supported by a single claim that Orwell would oppose being ruled by an unelected bureaucracy.
Such a claim is disengenious. Of course nobody likes "being ruled" - so on an emotional level the EU must be a bad thing.
Also, this makes no sense unless supported by a claim that such a condition is unique to living in the EU.
The only way to interpret "being ruled" in the context of the EU is that it means having a hierarchical civil service (the EU commission). So why would having a UK civil servant (instead of an EU one) decide how bananas should be graded be considered a liberation from bureaucracy?
In fact, Orwell hated this kind of weaselly, ambiguous and emotionally manipulatitve statement - particulary when use to advance a political adgenda.
The article offers a secondary argument that Orwell didn't mind disagreeing with other radical leftists, but again that's just as easily read the other way: left-wing cheerleaders for Brexit like George Galloway are the modern embodiment of pretty much everything Orwell hated about radical left wing politics in Britain...
The "[Dead person] would have voted [x] on the EU" is the most facile form of political argumentation we've had the misfortune to experience over the past few month, and this is one of the weakest examples of this kind of argument I've seen. And if you forced me at gunpoint to construct an argument from the authority of a long dead person on Brexit, I'd probably pick someone whose politics were a little more consistent, considerably more pragmatic and a lot less a product of the very specific political climates of the era he found himself in than Orwell.
I haven't read the article and I'm not going to dignify it with my view, but I highly doubt its conclusion. The UK has a deeply undemocratic voting system and one of the leaders in government surveillance. Someone who cares for democracy and privacy can't possibly want Britain's institutions to be unconstrained by the EU, however little the EU may help.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadFrankly, it would be a better piece if they cut that paragraph out and changed the title. It was too brief to be convincing anyways.
Orwell was a smart person. He'd see the EU would be problematic and that it probably wouldn't be a perfect government on the first attempt. He would, however, quickly notice how unpractical leaving is and vote against it.
The European pairlament is even elected directly with direct appointment of the parliamentarians, which is more direct than in a lot of eu countries where you only elect parties which in turn propose concrete politicians. While all the other bodies are elected indirectly in the national elections.
The problem is that people neither understand nor care for the elections of the pairlament, and thus they think that "they did not vote for this".
It's voting for non-representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJcuKfcxo9w#t=6m50s
It's not anti-democratic that the players for the lower-rang positions are of lower rang.
There was a Scottish MEP who made an impassioned speech in contrast to Farage's nonsense. a) I only saw it due to it showing up in my relatively pro-EU Facebook echo chamber; b) I'd never heard of him before.
My biggest worry now is we are likely to go through a difficult period in the UK and all those politicians and journalists that told us our problems are the fault of those foreigners will continue to do so.
Someone on my facebook feed actually stated, in a patronising tone, that it was clearly undemocratic because the president chose the council directly, and the council then chose the president - so they just all vote for each other - and that the president was the only person on the Ballot when the MEPs were asked (obviously they view the MEPs as an entirely useless institution to make the process 'appear' legitimate to the easily fooled).
I mean clearly a little of the functionality has got through, but in such a garbled way that they really have no idea how it works, but think that they do.
It does not help that (in my country, cannot say about others) parties seems to see a seat in the EU parliament as a place you can give to end-of-career candidates or as a sort of consolatory prize to people that would not get much use in national politics.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords
If the public was educated enough to know how important their vote is on EU policies maybe the parliament wouldn't be such an elephant's graveyard.
The other is to not vote for candidates on parties that select their MEPs from the dead wood pile. The main parties will either be part of EPP or S&D, so it will be a dead vote anyway.
This was precisely my point.
More education on the importance of what gets discussed on the EP would make people demand more from the candidates they vote for.
Politics and media have an incredible adaptation to mass-demands, because they either live of their vote or their audience. It is a graveyard because nobody cares about it being a graveyard, and for the same reason it's not on newspapers or the TV, because the majority does not care (or, alternatively, the majority is already busy enough with internal politics).
Proof of that is how the EU parliament is used to 'park' politicians that are not relevant in their own countries.
When the European Parliament is the place where the politicians want to be, we will know that we have an Europe not controlled by unelected bureaucrats (for better or worse).
Those from parties that would have little chance to get elected into a national government because of 1 3-5% hurdle.
The pirate party is a prime example for this, even though they hold no seats in germany they hold 1 seat as a representative from germany.
I live in the Netherlands so I'm sorry to say this, but they hold way to much power in the eu. Their population is ridiculously tiny and they only have so much money because they act as a soft tax haven.
These referendums should be held EU wide and decided upon based on a total count of all votes from all eu members, where each person holds one vote. Not by asking every state individually and then having a all or nothing ruling.
Then it would be truly democratic.
Further, having an EU wide referendum would require acknowledging that the EU is the supreme governing body in Europe and that all national parliaments are subservient to it. The nations are not ready for that yet and the EU elite know it.
you may consider the Brexit was democratic. In a sense, it was, but it was also one of the most stupid collective acts I ever witnessed. Most people who voted didn't understand what they were actually voting for or against. Welcome to the rule of the uninformed. We elect people so they can make informed decisions for us. Asking an imbecile about something extremely complicated is not helpful. Asking millions of them is equally useless.
Personally I view the political spectrum as a donut rather than straight left-to-right -- there is a point where the two become equal before diverging again.
The left/right divide is one of my pet peeves...
The EU is part of a "democratic form of government": the Parliament is elected directly by its citizens, while the Commission is nominated by the democratically elected governments of its member countries.
What we miss is more accountability, which we could get if the Commission was expressed directly by the Parliament, or elected directly by EU citizens.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Commission#Legislativ...
"If one meets a powerful person--Rupert Murdoch, perhaps, or Joe Stalin or Hitler--one can ask five questions: what power do you have; where did you get it; in whose interests do you exercise it; to whom are you accountable; and, how can we get rid of you? Anyone who cannot answer the last of those questions does not live in a democratic system."
Moreover, countries can leave at any time, as the UK has just done. All round, seems to exceed your criteria.
Your "Moreover, countries can leave at any time, as the UK has just done." sounds a bit odd in the context of this argument. "It's silly for countries to leave the EU on the grounds that it's not democratic, when it's obviously democratic because countries can leave the EU".
Yes, technically correct. What happened last time however was that the EP said "We want Juncker and we'll veto anyone else". There was a long staring contest and the EP eventually won. A veto isn't a technicality that you can approximate away - it's just as important as being able to propose laws.
The national leaders generally didn't like this, because they prefer the EU being more like a (huge, weird) deal negotiation table than something with direct representation. The national leaders are ultimately in charge, so this whole episode is mostly an unforeseen consequence of past treaties that they're willing to tolerate.
But hey look at EU over there
Well, you could try voting for national politicians and EP fractions that doesn't like the person in question. It's unlikely to succeed, for much the same reason that voting to get rid of national politicians is unlikely to succeed, but that's more of a tyranny of the majority kind of thing.
The referenda:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_European_Constitution_r...
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_European_Constitution_re...
3) Same referendum in Spain (technically also in Luxemburg)
4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Ukraine%E2%80%93European...
5) Brexit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_withdrawal_from...
6 - sort of) The election on blocking EU policy with regards to debt in Greece under Syriza, which the EU clearly lost
Needless to say, the EU is not a big fan of elections. You see, the big problem with Brexit, according to the highest EU authorities is that David Cameron allowed the vote in the first place [1].
[1] (for example) http://www.smh.com.au/world/brexit-results-spurned-europe-wa...
They have since realized just how stupid this attitude is politically, but clearly they were expecting Cameron to do what all other governments have done when EU lost an election or a vote : ignore the vote, and soldier on regardless.
The only thing the EU ever cared about is big business and huge multinationals, a fact that is blatantly obvious from reading articles about the commission. It is not a government of the people, as it rejects the people and is rejected by the people (You should visit even Brussels itself and talk to the locals). And of course it's treatment of Greece showed what the EU will do when people get in trouble. Kick them - hard - when they're down. After your pension retroactively gets downgraded by almost 50%, they'll do that a second time just to improve election prospects for foreign politicians.
By all democratic principles, it should be destroyed. That will be a great day for democracy.
> the spectacle of a community where people are relatively free and happy and where the main motive in life is not the pursuit of money or power. In other words, democratic Socialism must be made to work throughout some large area. But the only area in which it could conceivably be made to work, in any near future, is Western Europe. Apart from Australia and New Zealand, the tradition of democratic Socialism can only be said to exist — even there it only exists precariously — in Scandinavia, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, the Low Countries, France, Britain, Spain, and Italy. Only in those countries are there still large numbers of people to whom the word ‘Socialism’ has some appeal, and for whom it is bound up with liberty, equality, and internationalism. [...] Therefore a Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.
When you do a Google search on "Orwell European Union", the article is the 3rd result.
Looks like the writer couldn't be bothered to JFGI.
Such a claim is disengenious. Of course nobody likes "being ruled" - so on an emotional level the EU must be a bad thing.
Also, this makes no sense unless supported by a claim that such a condition is unique to living in the EU.
The only way to interpret "being ruled" in the context of the EU is that it means having a hierarchical civil service (the EU commission). So why would having a UK civil servant (instead of an EU one) decide how bananas should be graded be considered a liberation from bureaucracy?
In fact, Orwell hated this kind of weaselly, ambiguous and emotionally manipulatitve statement - particulary when use to advance a political adgenda.
The "[Dead person] would have voted [x] on the EU" is the most facile form of political argumentation we've had the misfortune to experience over the past few month, and this is one of the weakest examples of this kind of argument I've seen. And if you forced me at gunpoint to construct an argument from the authority of a long dead person on Brexit, I'd probably pick someone whose politics were a little more consistent, considerably more pragmatic and a lot less a product of the very specific political climates of the era he found himself in than Orwell.