innonimatu
the resident Cassandra
- Joined
- Dec 4, 2006
- Messages
- 15,068
"EU can do NOTHING": if that were true why the worry about the UK leaving without an agreement? Because it is not true. Of course the EU can do, and does, many things! Most of them extremely noxious for democracy and for the population of all EU countries. The EU's bureaucracy (The EC, the whole civil service, the ECB, etc) has acquired a lot of power, even if the UK can evade some of that power. It also dictates trade for the "continental system", Napoleon would be envious.
Have you ever heard about the principal-agent problem? It is a concept that was developed early in the 20th century mostly to explain why corporate administrators did not act on the best interest of the owners who theoretically appoint them and oversee them through a board. Turns out, agents/representatives have a lot of latitude to act before they can be removed, benefit from having more information than those who appoint them, and are hard to dislodge once installed. Governments and political representatives are the same. You know this. Representative democracy is imperfect, a hack. The larger the polity, the more layers of representation, or the more people each agent represents, the less control the voters have over what the agents do. The EU is a layer above governments. The elected european parliament spends more time hearing professional lobbyists that any citizen, indeed granting them official status. There were examples such as CETA where despite widespread popular opposition none of the 28 governments, and only one of the dozens of regions, acted to delay the thing, not even block it. The agents knew this was unpopular, contrary to the will of a majority of the people in several countries. They avoided putting it to any vote, suppressed discussion as much as possible, and passed it anyway. This is no longer democracy, it is imperial politics. Only what happens in the imperial court, among the actors who are in the know, counts.
The national governments are hard enough to keep accountable to voters as is. The EU bureaucracy that actually writes the laws, regulations and treaties is out of democratic control, insulated by not being directly responsible towards citizens, only towards some representatives, often themselves indirectly chosen (prime-ministers are chosen by parliaments, governments chosen by the prime-ministers, and then these appoint the members of the European Commission). This is by design. It is always a matter of degree, how much the agents escape accountability, and the EU's institutional architecture was designed to let them escape as much as possible while maintaining the facade of democracy (the european parliament....).
The EU now has a bad government, one that has shown itself dysfunctional. But governments come and go, this one will be replaced someday. Opportunities to leave the constrains of imperial polities are rarer.
Have you ever heard about the principal-agent problem? It is a concept that was developed early in the 20th century mostly to explain why corporate administrators did not act on the best interest of the owners who theoretically appoint them and oversee them through a board. Turns out, agents/representatives have a lot of latitude to act before they can be removed, benefit from having more information than those who appoint them, and are hard to dislodge once installed. Governments and political representatives are the same. You know this. Representative democracy is imperfect, a hack. The larger the polity, the more layers of representation, or the more people each agent represents, the less control the voters have over what the agents do. The EU is a layer above governments. The elected european parliament spends more time hearing professional lobbyists that any citizen, indeed granting them official status. There were examples such as CETA where despite widespread popular opposition none of the 28 governments, and only one of the dozens of regions, acted to delay the thing, not even block it. The agents knew this was unpopular, contrary to the will of a majority of the people in several countries. They avoided putting it to any vote, suppressed discussion as much as possible, and passed it anyway. This is no longer democracy, it is imperial politics. Only what happens in the imperial court, among the actors who are in the know, counts.
The national governments are hard enough to keep accountable to voters as is. The EU bureaucracy that actually writes the laws, regulations and treaties is out of democratic control, insulated by not being directly responsible towards citizens, only towards some representatives, often themselves indirectly chosen (prime-ministers are chosen by parliaments, governments chosen by the prime-ministers, and then these appoint the members of the European Commission). This is by design. It is always a matter of degree, how much the agents escape accountability, and the EU's institutional architecture was designed to let them escape as much as possible while maintaining the facade of democracy (the european parliament....).
The EU now has a bad government, one that has shown itself dysfunctional. But governments come and go, this one will be replaced someday. Opportunities to leave the constrains of imperial polities are rarer.
