--- Wendy Lyon <wendy.lyon at gmail.com> wrote:
> And you didn't actually answer Doug's questions:
>
> > What democratic control is there over the
> Eurocrats
> > in Brussels? What
> > real power does the European Parliament have? What
> > share of the
> > European pop thinks of itself as European before
> > they think of
> > themselves as French or Polish?
>
> (The answer to all the above, incidentally, is "not
> much").
[WS:] Two point. First, national identity and it politics is NOT a democracy - in fact one is often the opposite of the other. So the fact that, say, eel mainly British, insular, and highly skeptical of Brussels does not mean that EU is undemocratic. While we are at that, any criticism of EUand its institutions aka "Eurocracy" that comes from the left side of the La Manche has as much credibility in my book and any criticism of the UN voiced by the Repug party & its mignons on this side of the pond.
The second point is that EU is not an autocratic entity like the USG that can dispatch troops if its underling states defy its will. It is more like the UN - or ironically the Confederacy - a voluntary union of member states. The EU (or UN) influence is exereted as a condition of membereship and consent to collective will rather than eforced by the federal troops.
>From that point of view, EU (or UN) has a tremendous
influence without having "power" in the sense of
forcing its decision down the throats of unccoperative
subjects. As I already pointed out, member states of
the EU are the main gurantors of democratic
privileges, but they could not be EU members if their
governments chose to discard those privileges. What
is more, EU arbitrates legal disputes between national
states and their citizens, and those decisions are
legally binding.
An finally, I would gladly trade the "protections" of labor rights provided by the USG for the imperfect representation of labor interests provided by EU labor parties, even that provided by the British Labour Party.
Wojtek
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