Part-Time Pundit: The Death of Democracy in the EU

« Traffic Generation for Your Blog - Get Traffic NOW! | Main | Lashing Out »

May 25, 2005

The Death of Democracy in the EU

"The countries which have said No will have to ask themselves the question again. And if we don't manage to find the right answer, the treaty will not enter into force," he said in an interview with the Belgian Le Soir newspaper.

The EU Treaty is not going to pass the referenda in France on the 29th. (It will also probably fail in the Netherlands and later in the UK). There is a large amount of public apathy and disdain for the EU and the response is hardly enthusiastic in any country when it comes to the UN. Every poll has shown that the public doesn't feel any connection to the EU and that the EU is not concerned for them, so in France they are going to reject it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who wrote the EU Constitution has said there can be no renegotiation of this treaty.

In a democracy, usually the government molds to the will of the people. If the EU were democractic it would mold to the will of the people. Instead the current President says that the poll should be re-run until the people answer correctly. It isn't the EU that needs to change, it's the people that need to change. That is no democracy.

The European Union Constitution is over 300 pages long, as opposed to the US Constitution which can fit in your pocket. People have no idea and no desire to read this entire document, they'll reject it because it takes a lawyer to decipher. The EU could have drafted a small document and passed laws instead, which is what the people wanted, but instead the EU went their own way and blame the people for voting against it. The EU is dying and the project is on life-support. It may come back later, but that depends on whether the bureaucrats listen and recognize that they need to be the Union the people wants them to be, not that the citizens need to be the citizens the bureaucrats want them to be. Time will tell whether they embrace democracy, try to impose the EU despite the objections, or abandon it all together.

Posted by John Bambenek at May 25, 2005 10:49 PM