I find it quite obnoxious how people keep on muttering about the terrible Brussels Bureaucracy, and how “unelected” bureaucrats are going to ruin their lives, and then vote agains the very things that try to alleviate the problems – the French and the Dutch first with the constitution, the Irish with the Lisbon treaty.

When people don’t understand things, they tend to fear change – even chang for the better. The least they could do is to try to inform themselves – either that or don’t vote.

The ones I blame most however are the media in general. Important political debate on a European level very rarely gets properly covered. Come election time, there’s hardly any coverage of the accomplishments (or failures) of our euro MPs; hardly any talk about the party’s program; and if there is any, the discussion most often centers around national/local politics, not euro policies.

No wonder people feel disconnected from what’s happening in Brussels.

for my humble opinion, you go too much into detail. My thought is basically that it just can’t be good to let decisions been made by people who doesn’t spend much time thinking about the right solution.

I know that this is a kind of radical opinion and I don’t think that it is something which will change in the near future.

But I strongly feel that we do not good in letting the masses decide where to go. No big company is beeing run that way. It doesn’t work. Don’t get me wrong..I’m not asking for monarchy or dictatorship and I’m not the one who comes with a solution. But I say, we have a bug in our current approach. The successful, intelligent people have too less power. Because the masses decide.

There is only one US-wide campaign: the President. That’s the only nationally elected position we have.

Re. “If they had understood…” – this has got to be the least effective argument you could possibly use to convince someone of something. “Trust me, I know about these things” will never get you a yes vote. You would have more chance of getting Crotty overturned in the Supreme Court. At least that way you will never have to ask.

What would be better as an argument is to talk about the benefits and argue against the “No” campaign. Sinn Fein and Libertas quote lines of the treaty (out of context, perhaps?) in support of their arguments, quote them back. If you can’t argue on the merits of the treaty, then maybe there are side-effects which some people would find undesirable. The Lisbon Treaty does not only concern a foreign minister and changes in the decisioon making structure of Europe, there are a lot of changes sneaking in with the rest which are progressively defining Europe as a liberal free market++ entity.

In Ireland, part of the problem is also the Irish government’s application of EU directives by high-level civil servants. The Irish government is so willing to please that Irish farmers find themselves facing regulations which their French counterparts don’t have – where the French defend their wine industry, their cheese makers and their fresh fruit and vegetable producers, Ireland have put a heavy regulatory burden on farming and food production which has turned the Irish agricultural industry into a small number of dangerous monocultures, and turned the west of Ireland into an underexploited wasteland with welfare and grant dependent populations. Schemes like REPS and National Development Plans for conservation areas have turned formerly pro-European rural areas to fervently anti-European – witness Mayo’s vote in Lisbon 1 as evidence.

Im not talking about the Irish folk in general. Those people can be found in any country including mine (Germany). I doubt that our folks would vote ‘yes’ if they were asked. But I also doubt that asking them is a good thing.

If they would understand what it means (One EU foreign minister, a voting system that unlocks from the current paralyzation etc.) they surely would have voted with ‘yes’.

But why do we ask people about something they don’t have a clue of? It makes no sense, I don’t ask my lawyer about medicine stuff neither…

Almost every piece of legislative work does that, that’s why there’s a consolidated version:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/JOHtml.do?uri=OJ:C:2008:115:SOM:en:HTML

The Socialists did too, but it got no press & no-one in the socialist parties really talked about it

@Christoph: when you say “We give too much power to people who simply don’t care about politics at all. People who have never read one line of the EU contract proposal vote against it but don’t have a clue what this means to the other 500 million people affected.” I get the impression you’re talking about the Irish electorate.

It is next to impossible to understand the Lisbon treaty as it stands. It is a treaty which modifies all of the existing EU treaties, some of which modified previous EU treaties. So understanding what Lisbon means is like trying to understand how the behaviour of a program will change given the last changeset. You’re missing a bunch of important information (how it worked before).

I’m a firm believer that Europe can be a positive force, as a loose federation. Social harmonisation in Europe is politically impossible – you would be increasing government spending on social welfare in some countries (unacceptable) and decreasing social protection in others (unacceptable) by edict. Tax harmonisation would cause issues for some exchequers because of lost tax revenue, for others because of increased tax rates.

The nation state is a fundamental building block of Europe, and any move to further erode the ability of nation states to govern themselves would surely meet with fierce resistance in countries like Ireland and France (the two that I know best) and traditionally “euroskeptic” countries like Great Britain, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. One man one vote is another fundamental building block of modern democracies. Attempts to have people who are “worth” more have a greater say has resulted in civil unrest in the not so distant past: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland_Civil_Rights_Association – any attempt to devise a scheme based on increasing the vote of those with more civic tendencies would be a very bad idea indeed.

Dave.

I agree with you on this. However I think our current voting system sucks in some way. We give too much power to people who simply don’t care about politics at all. People who have never read one line of the EU contract proposal vote against it but don’t have a clue what this means to the other 500 million people affected.

So my solution is more radical. Build up a voting system that is somehow related to the value of a person. Im not talking about who has the biggest income. Im talking about social engagement, level of education, career…a mixture of different positive attributes. The voices should have a different count related to those skills. Thats what every company does, thats how every priority scheduler in a software works. Think about it!